Just don't ask it to do a decent photo. (HP Photosmart C4280 All-in-One)

Member Name: buzzard_cad

Product:	HP Photosmart C4280 All-in-One
Date:	03/02/08 (2455 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good graphic text printer, okay scanner.

Disadvantages: Installation problems, photo quality poor. No USB if your expecting one.

This HP Photosmart C4280 is a Multifunction device (MFD) which can print, scan and copy documents. In the past MFDs were a compromise unit designed for users who want several functions from one unit. The only downside of these combined units is the poor quality of one aspect of the unit and the bulky size. With progress in technology you would hope the later MFDs would come down in price and size, whilst improving quality. The question is this, does the C4280 produce good quality prints, scans and copies for a small size and smaller price?

I found this MFD on offer in November 2007 for £53.99. This was not bad as the pre-sale price was £78.99, it was reduced by £19 and then an additional 10% saving was thrown in when I bought it in a store after reserving it online. This was an even bigger bargain when I saw it in a High Street store a week later for a shade under a crisp one hundred pound notes and even now in February 2008 it is still sitting around the £50 to £60 mark.

In the box there was lots of stuff, but I'll skip to the interesting items such as the sample of HP photo paper with the small print warning, 'May contain products from Switzerland'! Also there was a HP installation CD for Windoze 2000, XP and Vista or Mac OS, a HP black cartridge HP350, a HP Colour cartridge HP351, a manual and some easy set up information. The power cable & AC adapter were included and at the bottom was the printer. One thing to note from the items above is NO USB CABLE! This could be a bit of a pain if this was for a new system set up, but as I was replacing a printer and a scanner I had the choice of two existing USB cables so it was not a problem for me.

Once on the desk the MFD took up a space larger than my old printer and smaller than the old flatbed scanner. Its dimensions are approximately: 43cm(17") wide, 17cm(6 1/2") high or 41cm(16") with the lid open, 27cm(11") deep, and it weighs in at around 5kg (11 lb). Start up instructions are in English, French, Portuguese and Arabic, but the manual user guide is in English only. Set up was really easy and the start up guide has pretty pictures for anyone to follow. In all it took me less than ten minutes to get it on the desk and powered up.

For installation on my PC I selected the EASY install, but instantly ran into difficulties. The problem I had here was on my main PC was the installation failed due to the printer spooler programme not running on my OS. I'm not sure if the installation kicked it offline or the problem was already there, but suddenly I had no printer spooler even for my old printer. I fiddled with the OS for a while trying to 'restore' my settings, but nothing would work. So whilst the MicroSerf website suggested a complete Windoze XP reinstallation I switched off the home PC and turned to my work laptop. Could I bugger this up as well?

Yes!
On the laptop things were progressing well, the installation software was at step 4 of 9 and asked me to plug in the C4280 then turn it on. Here the installation went and hung itself as the installation programme could not find the set-up information on it's own HP supplied CD disc. Thinking that the unit had come with the wrong installation drivers I went and searched on the HP website. Here I was able to find the most recent drivers, which were exactly the same as the ones on the CD supplied. Also at 150Mb the download would have taken a long time even with my 1Mb Broadband connection. For the second time I cancelled an installation and went for expert help.

My work's IT department is filled with the usual computer-know-it-all's, but they have given me some useful pointers in the past. The suggestion here was that instead of the easy installation I should go 'CUSTOM' and cut out the chaff. I was advised not to install the 'HP Update' programme as it is normally slow and not very good, then deselect anything that I thought was of little use. So I deselected the following programmes 'HP Customer Participation', 'Shop for HP Supplies', 'HP Solution Center' and 'HP Smart Web Printing'. This left me with the standard drivers and the HP Photosmart Essential 2.01 editing suite. So when I started again on the laptop again I managed to do a complete installation by using the CUSTOM install function and installing as detailed above. The installation when it did fire up took around ten minutes to a quarter of an hour to complete. Finally I could print something.

The test page came out bright and clear with good black lettering and clear colour graphics, which was a better quality than my now redundant printer. As this MFD has some memory card slots for XD, SD, MMC, MS/Duo and CF cards on the front I was able to place in my camera's XD card to the relevant slot. The colour LCD screen at the front in not adjustable so you have to move your head around to see which photo you are selecting, it isn't bad, but any light at the wrong angle will distract your vision of this small colour LCD. Using the buttons on the top to control quality and quantity, I was able to print a 6x5 photo without referring to the manual once. Unfortunately the photo quality was quite poor and I was disappointed with this aspect of the printer initially. Although I had not bought it as a photo printer it does have the word 'photo' in the title leading me to believe that this would be it's strong point. It wasn't even close, however there is a small trick here that I hadn't seen yet.

The printer side of the unit has space for two cartridges, Black and Coloured, however there are five cartridges that you can purchase for the unit. Two are black and two are coloured. The fifth cartridge is called the 'Photo' cartridge, this replaces the black cartridge in the black ink slot, but this special photo cartridge has three colours, Black, Light Blue and Light Red. Apparently this is for more realistic skin tones when printing photos. I only recently purchased this cartridge and tried it out and the results are better for photos. The only problem I have here is why is the hell is this cartridge not supplied as the standard cartridge? The answer can be found when printing graphic documents as the black text is very dark grey and looks smudged. In short an average photo printer although it is better for text and graphics.

Moving on to the scanning and copying function of the MFD, I found that to do the scanning I had to use the buttons on the unit itself rather than placing an item on the unit and clicking the mouse. This was the opposite of what I used to do on my old scanner, but I soon got the hang of it and preferred this way more. The initial image scanned by the MFD came out with very good quality as it was a photograph, another image scanned in on card was not so good, but looking at the original it was not a great print, however the scanner made it worse. Photocopies from the unit are of a good quality, depending on the original image and this is the crunch point. The scanner is okay, it will not reproduce fully faithful copies, but then what scanner/copier does?

In conclusion if we go back to the question I asked at the beginning. This Multifunction device is still a compromise unit with a below average quality photo printer, however with the purchase of the special 'photo' cartridge the quality improves marginally to an average quality. So don't buy this if you want a printer that does excellent photos, it won't happen. The other item that really pulls the unit down is the troubles I had installing the damn thing. I can't remember how long it took overall, but the unit was not fully up and running on my home PC until late December 2007, over a month after I bought. Even on my more modern laptop the installation failed on easy installation and only worked when I went into advanced mode and deselected many of the optional (buggy?) programmes. In short I cannot recommend this unit to anyone who is inexperienced in the PC field and even if you're an expert the installation is a hassle you won't want. On the plus side once installed it is a competent printer for text or graphics and as a scanner it does reasonable copies. Overall I'm satisfied, not overjoyed with my purchase, as I've replaced two older peripherals with a single multifunction device. Throw into the equation the space I freed up on my desk and I'm pretty content with my purchase.

c2008 buzzard_cad
This review may be found on other review sites under the same username and is also written by me.

I dunno how this is down in the fax machine section. It wern't me guv'. I will talk with higher Dooyoo people.

Summary: Not a truly terrible machine, but I did have thoughts about returning it.