Hewlett Packard Photosmart C3180 AIO All-in-One Printer Review

Install:  Everything was fine until after the program asked to connect to the USB cable.  It detected the device, but after 15 minutes of waiting for the install to finish, I decided to start over because it was apparent that the install was frozen up, even though task manager said it was running.  The install also gave me some memory error message, so what I decided to do was try and reinstall by turning off Windows Defender, as well as my anti-virus (I use AVG), and firewall (Windows XP).  It reinstalled smoothly. 

This is my first color inkjet, leave alone photo printer, so I have no other printer with which to compare it.  I printed one photo with the HP 92 black cartridge and HP 93 Tri-color cartridge, then printed it again with the HP 99 Photo cartridge and HP 93 Tri-color cartridge- I could not discern a difference in the quality of both prints, so I wonder if perhaps there is any point to buying the special “photo” ink.  I printed photos both on Office Depot inkjet paper and HP 4x6 photo Advanced photo paper.  Part of the quality of the print comes from the quality of the photo.  Professionally taken pictures will print out professional looking prints, but photos which have been scanned at less than optimal resolution, photos which have been cropped (which in my observation tends to diminish resolution), photos scanned in from books, and webcam photos will not turn out as well.

The inkjet cartridges included with the printer, were, typically, half-full.  The half-full color cartridge, in conjunction with the photo cartridge, yielded about 20 4x6 glossy photos, and 20 8.5 x 11 prints on inkjet paper. If the average color cartridge is about $20, and the sample cartridge was half-full…you figure out the math. 

The software HP provides, Photosmart Essential, is easy to use, but a bit goofy. HP puts the photos you scan in a temp file.  If you right-click on the photo, and click “show properties”, it will give you the location of the temp file, but I cannot seem to access it through Windows Explorer (I am using XP Home Edition).  For some reason, the address bar in Windows Explorer is not there for me, so maybe I could have found it that way.  I found it using the address bar in the Netscape browser.  I also found it by right-clicking on the photo, and clicking where it says “locate on disk”. This will give you the photo’s exact location, and from there you can use “send to” to send it to your My Pictures.  All of this seems unnecessary.  If you use Adobe Photosmart or Windows scanning wizard, it will put your scanned photos right into your My Pictures photo.