HP Photosmart C5180 Review

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HP Photosmart C5180
1.3 stars
Average rating for this product is: 1.3 out of 5

From 1 rating and 2 reviews

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spikester's Review of HP Photosmart C5180

11th Mar 2007

Overall Rating

2 stars
  • Value for money
    2 stars
  • Ink Consumption
    Average
  • Scan Quality
    4.5 stars
  • Ease of Use
    4 stars
  • Time Multifunction Printer Owned
    1 - 6 Months
  • Print Quality
    2 stars
  • Ease of Set Up
    5 stars
Good Points

Excellent scanning and good photocopying


Bad Points

Poor printing quality - and incredibly slow


General Comments

My Epson CX5400 finally gave up the ghost after 3 years of exemplary service and after extensive research I settled on the HP C5180 to fill the void. We have a suite of HP printers at work and I've always been amazed at their speed and quality. With the added feature of built-in print heads (so our technician tells me) I felt sure an HP multi-function would be a great choice.

Setting up with my G5 Mac was simple - compatible driver discs included - although as usual they come with a slew of extras that are fairly pointless if you run Photoshop and they take an age to install.

I ran through a few tests, scanning quality was excellent and made quick work of an old photo at 600 dpi. Photocopying in colour was also efficient and at respectable speed.

Then I tried printing from a series of files that make up 90% of my usage.
Basically it bleeds all over the page! Luckily the software allows you to manage the amount of ink used, but even on the lowest setting, documents that have two colours overlaid seem to bleed together like watercolour paint. I print a lot of MS Word documents - often with some colour involved, but not documents that warrant inkjet quality paper. I'm using the same paper stock that gives great results at work, but the quality is just not there on the C5180.

Greyscales are ok, and weirdly enough, photos printed using the photocard tray show no blurring or poor rendering.

Coupled with extremely slow spooling of .pdfs from Acrobat, this makes the C5180 a poor purchase in my eyes. You expect to lose some quality in each aspect of a multifunction machine, but you should expect it to excel in its primary function - which is as a printer. The C5180 simply fails to do this.

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