HP Photosmart C5180 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier (#Q8220A)

I absolutely LOVE this printer! The pictures that come out of this are amazing! It looks so professional when you use HP's premium plus soft gloss paper. . . The only problem that I've had so far is with the original Vista. I first installed this printer by hooking it up to my laptop which has Microsoft Vista (which I'm starting to hate more and more every day) and after the fuss with installing it on that computer using the Vista installation CD, the max I could get it to print was 600 dpi x 600 dpi. I am pretty good with computers and I played with it for over an hour trying to get it to print at a better quality but I was never successful. I finally gave up and installed it on my desktop which has XP and I love this printer. I believe they have worked the vista issues out with the newer versions.When you use HP Premium Plus paper, the prints comes out so crisp with amazing color! I took my cousins senior pictures and printed them all out for him and I've had several calls to take more people's pictures. They couldn't believe that those prints came out of an injet! I could not be happier! The printer is pretty fast with full color prints and I really like the seperate paper tray for 4 x 6 prints. . . That feature makes it so easy to print pictures off your digital camera. I used to let all of them on my camera because it was such a pain to print them or to print them on a full page and have to cut them all, but now, it doesn't take any extra effort to print them right away.As far as the scanner on this all-in-one goes, I like my old Epson scanner better. The default scan is 200 dpi x 200 dpi which makes the pictures you scan in look like they have little white spots all over it. If you change it to a higher dpi, it's not bad but still not as good as my separate epson scanner.Despite the average quality scanner, the printing aspects are unbelieveable!

This morning I placed my C5180 into the trash, and smiled as it was thrown into the garbage truck. This is the worst product I have ever purchased. After 1.5 years, the printer became completely inoperable - it constantly claimed that perfectly brand new, HP-branded ink cartridges were empty ... after sinking $50 into new cartridges, and replacing them, the messages remained, and I was unable to print anything. Multiple system resets and countless hours on the phone with customer service did not remedy the problem. Furthermore, I'm not the only one with these problems - some simple Google searches will reveal multiple people with "empty ink cartridge" issues. Throw in a completely over-engineered software bundle that slows down your PC and doesn't work under Vista (constant "HP Cue Service has stopped working" popups), unreliable scanning capabilities and the fact that this printer does not function as a network printer (under Vista) and you've got a massive waste of money. The customer service is terrible - the only solution they will offer you after 3+ hours on the phone is to purchase a new HP printer. I recently bought a Canon printer, as I have vowed to never purchase another HP product again. - the Canon works great. I recommend you stay away from HP products. Far, far away.

I was looking for a printer/copier/scanner for my parents and this one seemd to be perfect for them. It was not expensive, easy to use and did not have a lot of buttons to confuse them.The printer is excellent. The photo quality is incredible. I had gone to a number of local stores and printed sample photos from many different printer models and manufactures. The quality of this printer stacked up well against everything else out there. Photos look very smooth and have excellent color saturation. The text/graphics print quality and speed is very good. I have it set up in draft mode for "everyday" printing and it gets about 18 ppm and very legible print quality.The copier is also very good. I have a very hard time distinguishing the original from the copy. It prints the copies very fast.The only thing about the unit that is disappointing is the scanner. First of all, let me say that the scanner is not terrible, I was just a little disappointed with it compare to the rest of the machine. While it can scan text/graphics documents well, it does not do so good with photos. It tends to lose detail and alter the colors of the photo. This unfortunately makes the unit less than ideal for reprinting photos. Also, the scanner software for the PC is not user friendly and is kind of slow. (And I have a extremely fast computer.) It is just unfortunate that the scanner, in my opinion, falls show of the quality of my 5-year old Epson scanner I have.If you want a printer with incredible photo quality output and the convenience of a copier without the need of a computer, then this is a good choice. As for the scanner, perhaps buying a dedicated scanner would be a prudent move to compensate for this unit's shortcomings.