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April 21, 2008

HP Photosmart C7280 review

If you're looking for a multifunction printer that's loaded with features but still does a good job printing text and graphics-filled documents, HP's Photosmart C7280 is worth a look. This multifunction device includes print, scan, copy, and fax capabilities, with just about every connectivity option you could want.

The basics|

The C7280 is a six-colour (in six separate ink tanks) inkjet printer with a 100-sheet, letter-size primary paper tray and a secondary tray that holds up to 20 sheets of 4x6in or 5x7in photo paper (4x6in is the traditional 'photo size' you used to get from Boots).

The HP Photosmart C7280 also has slots for all standard memory cards, a PictBrige USB port for connecting a camera or flash storage device directly to the printer, and a built-in duplexing unit for two-sided printing.

But it's the networking capabilities that distinguish the HP Photosmart C7280 from other multifunction printers in its class: it comes with three ways for you to connect it to your PC or to a network.

You can use the USB 2.0 port for direct connections to your PC, or you can hook it up to either a wired ethernet network or a wireless 802.11g network, depending upon your office setup. And, if that's not enough, you can print using Bluetooth if you add the optional HP bt500 Bluetooth adaptor (available online for around £25 inc VAT).

Setting up the HP Photosmart C7280 is a breeze: step-by-step help on the unit's 2.4in LCD is supplemented with the well-written manual and quick-setup sheet.

There's also plenty of onscreen help for connecting the HP Photosmart C7280 to a standard or DSL phone line to use the fax capabilities, and the CD that comes with the printer installs the print and fax driver and all the appropriate scanning software.

Scanning smart

The HP Photosmart C7280 replaces the HP Photosmart C7180 at the high end of HP's all-in-one inkjet line.

The C7280 drops the HP Photosmart C7180's film-scanning capabilities for an automatic document feeder for the scanner and copier, which is a much smarter choice overall. Scanning 35mm film sounds good in theory, but it's rarely possible to get usable scans from an inexpensive flatbed scanner.

The ability to copy multiple sheets from a document is much more useful, and HP does an excellent job of integrating the feeder into the scanning software. Whether you're scanning 20 pages to your PC or making direct copies, the feeder will prove to be very handy.

HP's Scan Pro scanning software is quite basic, but includes such features as built-in optical character recognition (OCR) support and dust-removal and colour-correction tools for scanning photographs. You can scan files as TIFFs, JPEGs, and PDFs, and the Scan menu offers a variety of options, such as emailing scans.

Scanning documents was quite easy and produced good results overall. We had a few issues when scanning photos, however. Our first attempts produced lacklustre images with middling colour fidelity, and we had to tweak the driver settings to get better photo scans. In the end, though, the HP Photosmart C7280 is more about giving you some photo-scanning capabilities than being the best at it.

As a standalone copier, the HP Photosmart C7280 is a joy to use. You can make up to 99 copies of a document, and can scan them directly to a connected memory card or flash drive; if your PC is in another part of the building, you can also scan images directly to it over your network, which is a nice touch.

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Independent customer reviews from

HP Photosmart C7280 scored:
8.6 out of 10 100% real reviews

The 2 most helpful reviews based on 112 reviews:

05 Apr 2008 Anonymous verified purchaser

7

Good Points

Its compact and doesn't take up so much desk space as the HP it replaced, and being wireless can be put anywhere. The features are good - the small screen, the card readers etc etc... Its also fast!

Bad Points

The software is poor - loading it onto my laptop caused it to hang, and when I reloaded it there's something in the start-up trying to connect which can't and doesn't. Consequently the CPU goes into overdrive and slows down and overheats the whole laptop. So far, I'm only able to resolve this by closing down one of the start-up programmes using Task Manager everytime I start-up, which is an aggravation everytime I turn on the laptop. Also, even though I asked it NOT to instal auto-update, it still did so. I've now learned how to turn it off, but so many software programmes automatically load unnecessary auto updates that run on start-up that it just slows down your PC. I didn't expect this from HP. Its noisy - don't think about putting this anywhere where you want quiet! It clunks and it swishes, and it has a lovely feature that sounds a chime whenever its finished something - great if you like background music, but if you're trying to get on with something else its simply distracting. I haven't yet found out how to turn it off. The print quality is great on photos, but on standard text document printing the print quality is poor - I've now hooked my old HP G85 back up to the PC so that I can just print any old stuff without additional lines...

03 Dec 2008 Steve, Derby

9

Good Points

Not the quickest to set up but none the less very straight forward. Very handy having the separate tray for the standard photo size. Separate ink cartridges give better prints and are straight forward to install. The wireless set up was a breeze and is now connected so to speak to all my pc's and laptops. The ADF makes document scanning easy and quicker. The built in media slots and little viewer are handy when your friends and relatives call.

Bad Points

The ink cartridge are on the small side but this can be worked round. Not as fast as you would expect but for the home use fast enough. Quite large and a little noisy. Beware of the transit ink it makes the first few pictures poor but they do improve. A lot of icons generated requiring a folder on your desktop.

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HP Photosmart C7280

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