HP Photosmart C4180

Quick presentation and ergonomics

The C4180 isn’t meant to revolutionize its class. HP simply offers a product that was a former mid-level for a very attractive price. In terms of performances and rendering, it’s classic. HP has stagnated for a while now and we are starting to ask when the next evolution will take place?

The C4180 has two advantages over the C3180. It has a color screen, which considerably simplifies autonomous use, and it comes with higher capacity cartridges. In terms of cartridge autonomy, this difference alone can equal around 15 euros.

Quality of printing and scanning

HP still offers the choice between two cartridge configurations: color + black or color + photo cartridge. The C4180 comes with a black + color set, which is ideal for office use. There is more contrasts, details are sharper, and black is deeper. This isn’t necessarily the absolute best quality, as the competition has caught up, but it is nevertheless very good and perfect even for professional use. Moreover, once the black ink dries (by the way, don’t touch prints right after they come out!), it’s difficult to know if they are from a high quality ink jet or laser printer.

In photo mode, however, this configuration gives colors that aren’t as true, details aren’t as precise and drops are visible (for those with good eyesight). You can acquire the optional 348 cartridge, but avoid using it for office prints as colors lose their intensity and black in text starts to lean towards gray. For photos though, the difference is striking and you do indeed get nice photos. The other side of the coin is that it’s more expensive.

Speed

We said that it was good in the for office print quality, it’s the same for print speeds, noticeably more so than the C3180. In color, it is at 5.6 pages per minute and the same in black and white. Activating the monochrome option reduces the cost of prints, but it does not increase speed. If you are really in a hurry, go into draft mode, and you get an amazing 23 pages per minute with our test document. The quality of black is still very good.

The photo mode is also fast at 1 minute 10 seconds for a 4x6 inch (10x15cm) and 4 minutes for an A4.

Ink costs

Here it gets complicated. HP sells its C4180 with a 343/337 cartridge kit, but as we said above it can also take the less expensive but shorter lasting 342 and 336. Should we make things even more confusing? We can add another optional photo cartridge for better image quality.

342 cartridge (color) + 336 (black) : 200 pages of office autonomy or 55 4x6 inch (10x15 cm) photos. Office print/photo cost : 19 cents/36 cents.

343 cartridge (color) + 337 (black) : 350 pages of office autonomy or 85 4x6 inch (10x15 cm) photos. Office print/photo cost: 13 cents/29 cents.

343 cartridge (color) + 348 (photo) : 110 4x6 inch (10x15 cm) photos. Photo cost: 49 cents.

For photos, there is actually another interesting option, a kit composed of a 343 color cartridge + 60 sheets, for about 17.50 euros. This turns out to be 29 cents per print, ink + paper, and at the same time after the 60 photos you will still have some ink left (because the autonomy of this cartridge is around 85 photos).

A serious defect?

A serious defect?The HP tool suite! HP has you install a bunch of extremely heavy tools, which load with Windows and can even affect your PC’s performances. For this reason installation is long and uninstalling is even worse.

Another classic HP defect is that the scanner is of poor quality. In addition, its automatic processing of images is heavy and degrading. It’s suited for an occasional use to photocopy a document, but for fine editing forget it.