HP - Photosmart C4180 (ITreviews)

The HP Photosmart C4180 is exactly the sort of multi-function device that you might consider for the home or small office. It's a twin-cartridge inkjet printer with a scanner on top that also gives copy features.

In addition it has four card reader slots which support Compact Flash, Memory Stick, MMC and SD cards. That should suit the owners of most digital cameras and mobile phones, although you're left high and dry if you use xD media. Once you've inserted a memory card you flip up the colour LCD display, which turns the backlight on, and then use HP Photosmart Express to print off your photos.

The ink is supplied by a tri-colour CMY cartridge in conjunction with either a black cartridge or a photo cartridge containing light CMY tones. When the photo cartridge is installed you are unable to print black and instead get grey tones, so you are likely to find yourself switching between cartridges when you want to print photos and text.

All of which brings us to a subject that is dear to HP's heart; printer ink. A pair of cartridges isn't especially expensive at £12 or £14 each or £22 for a twin pack, however the printer drivers report that the ink levels drop at an alarming rate. You can't avoid this information as the drivers pop up during every print job to report ink levels, yet they don't inform you about print progress.

The focus of this MFD is clearly on photos and the software package includes HP Photosmart Premier software as well as IRIS OCR, but while we found that the HP Photosmart C4180 had decent print speeds we were unimpressed by its print quality. For starters the HP photo printing utility is unnecessarily complicated compared to Canon and Epson software where you simply select a photo, select the paper, select the layout and print your photos.

A borderless A4 photo took just over four minutes to print and was generally high quality, although yellow tones looked rather orange. Printing a borderless 6 x 4-inch photo was trickier, as you have to insert the paper a long way into the printer, and the quality of the output was quite streaky. This problem would seem to be linked to the paper path which feeds in from the tray at the front and is then fed back out to land on top of the tray. That's a classic HP design, so we're surprised that it's causing problems here.

Text printing on A4 copy paper is reasonably fast, although the HP unit never approaches its claimed figures of 30ppm monochrome and 24ppm for colour, but in that respect HP's optimism is entirely in line with the rest of the printer industry. However, the quality of the output wasn't as crisp and clear as we expect from an HP printer.

HP - Photosmart C4180 features - Verdict

Although the Photosmart C4180 is a smart and stylish printer with a decent list of features, we were unimpressed by the quality of its printed output. That criticism is a real surprise for an HP printer and it surpasses any considerations about the cost per page or whether HP should have included a PictBridge connector for digital cameras.