Pros & Cons
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- Faxes and scans over network.
- Scans film.
- Standalone copier, fax, and photo lab.
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- Relatively slow for business applications.
- Uneven photo quality for black-and-white photos.
HP Photosmart C7180 All-in-One Specs
| Color or Monochrome | 1-pass color |
| Connection Type | Ethernet |
| Connection Type | USB |
| Connection Type | Wireless |
| Cost Per Page (Color) | 7.1 cents |
| LCD Preview Screen | |
| Maximum Scan Area | 8.5" x 11.7" |
| Maximum Standard Paper Size | Legal |
| Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) | 3000 pages per month |
| Number of Ink Colors | 6 |
| Scanner Optical Resolution | 4800 pixels per inch |
| Scanner Type | Flatbed |
| Standalone Copier and Fax | Copier |
| Standalone Copier and Fax | Fax |
| Type | All-in-one |
One way to describe all-in-ones (AIOs) is by the number of functions they offer. Three—printing, scanning, and copying—is the absolute minimum. Five to six is enough to qualify as a full-function AIO. The HP Photosmart C7180 All-In-One ($399.99 direct) offers as many as eight, depending on how you count. Analogies to the venerable Swiss Army knife are overused, but if you can tolerate one more, the C7180 would be one of the thick ones, with almost all the blades you can think of.
In addition to printing, document and photo scanning, and standalone copying, the C7180 can fax files from your PC's hard drive, scan 35mm film (including slides), and scan to e-mail by attaching the scan as a message file. It can also work as a standalone fax machine and a standalone photo lab, printing photos from PictBridge cameras, memory cards, and 35mm film. Even better, it includes both wired and 802.11g wireless network connections, and its fax and scan features work over a network as well as a USB port.
The only important feature missing is an automatic document feeder (ADF), which isn't surprising, since hardly any AIOs shoehorn both a transparency adapter for film and an ADF into the cover. But the lack of an ADF limits the C7180's usefulness in an office, and by default makes it a photo-centric AIO primarily for the home or potentially shared between home and home office. Its emphasis on photos also shows in the six-color ink system—with cyan, yellow, magenta, black, light cyan, and light magenta—an approach that makes it easier to print photos with shading that changes in small, subtle steps.
Setup is easy. Find a spot for the AIO (it's 8.5 by 18.3 by 15.4 inches and 25.9 pounds), load paper, connect the cables, and snap in the six ink cartridges. Then run the fully automated setup program and you're good to go.
The C7180's output quality counts mostly as a strong point, but it falls short on black-and-white photos. Every color photo in our test suite, as well as photos printed directly from slides, qualified as true photo quality. Even color photos copied from color photos were impressive.
Black-and-white photos, however, tended to lose detail in light areas, and in one case showed tints—with different colors at different gray levels—and posterization, with shading changing suddenly where it should have changed gradually. This obviously won't be a problem if you print only color photos.
Text quality is among the best I've seen from an ink jet. Edges weren't quite as crisp as you'll get from a laser, but they were much better than with most ink jets. Two heavily stylized fonts, both with thick strokes, needed 20 points to qualify as easily readable, but that's a reasonable size for one of the fonts, and only a little larger than I'd ideally like to see for the other. More important, all of our test fonts that are appropriate for business use were easily readable, with well-formed characters, at 4 points. Unless you demand laser-crisp text, the C7180 should be able to handle anything short of desktop-publishing output.
Graphics are easily good enough for any internal business need, and even good enough to hand out to an important client or customer. The only problem worth mention is a tendency for full-page graphics to make our standard test paper curl just a bit. If you find the slight curl annoying, you may need to pay a little extra for heavier paper.
Unfortunately, the C7180 loses points for speed. Its total time on our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software www.qualitylogic.com), was a lackluster 16 minutes 36 seconds, compared with 14:26 for the similarly priced Editors' Choice
If you're interested in photos primarily, the C7180 loses out by a hair to the Canon Pixma MP960. In addition to its speed advantage, the MP960 has a slight edge on output quality, thanks to doing a better job with black-and-white prints. It also offers better paper handling, with duplexing and two full-size paper trays, compared with the one regular tray and one for 4-by-6 photo paper plus an optional duplexer ($79.99 direct) in the C7180. That's enough to let the MP960 hold on to its Editors' Choice slot. But the MP960 won't connect to your network, and it offers no fax support. If you need either or both of these features, you'll want the C7180 instead.
See how the HP Photosmart C7180 AIO measures up to similar systems in our side-by-side
Benchmark Test Results
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Final Thoughts
HP Photosmart C7180 All-in-One
The HP Photosmart C7180 All-In-One (AIO) delivers more functions than most AIOs—including film scanning and faxing—and does most of them well.