HP C6280 Photosmart All-in-One Printer (CC988A#ABA)
See it at Amazon.com for $104.99Average Customer Rating
(4.0 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
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(5 out of 5)Photos Better Than Lab Quality
I have gone through several color printers in the past few years. This printer by far is the best quality color printer to date. In my opnion it should be rated as a number one printer for the money and quality it puts out.
It is one of the few out printers out there that use 6 color cartridges which makes a HUGE difference in the way your photos appear. With a higher spectrum of color, the blend of colors are much more natural.
I work in an industry in which I work hand in hand with a lot of print shops (I don't work for HP). The shops that use large format HP printers use the same 6 color configuration that the C6280 uses. What that means to you is that you are getting virtually the same quality out of the C6280 as the more expensive $30k to $40k large format printers that print shops use.
One of the greatest features of this printer is that you can get a photo that you had taken lets say 4x6 print, scan it, and print out a 8x10 copy of that photo with just as good resolution. You can do all this without using a computer. You do it all from the printer itself. It is really like your own portable photo lab.
The biggest recommendation that you need to follow is that you MUST use HP photo paper to achieve the best results. That is all I have used and I have not been disappointed yet.
(1 out of 5)Poor print quality, slow over Ethernet, large
UPDATE (Sep 4, 2008): I updated to the new HP drivers from Jan/Feb this year. They DO NOT fix the 100% CPU issue. If the printer is OFF, you are running Windows XP, and you are connected via Ethernet, your computer will both slow down dramatically and also heat up. The only solution is to leave the printer on all the time. I suppose that's all right because whenever you turn it on it takes sometimes up to 2 minutes to warm up--but I believe it does suck in 30 watts in idle mode according to the manual.
I have yet to see one person report this configuration (WinXP + Ethernet) who does not have this 100% CPU issue when the printer is off.
UPDATE: I recently changed the Paper Type setting from "Plain Paper" to "HP Premium Paper" (or "Other inkjet paper"), but kept the actual paper the same (20-lb. multipurpose paper). The print quality becomes much better, and I've found the best setting is Fast Normal (the quality is better than Normal, go figure) with HP Premium Paper. HP definitely needs to update their drivers to assign the Plain Paper setting more of the HP Premium Paper properties, and to make Fast Normal the default for text documents. I suspect that poor text printing quality on the C7280 and C6180 may also be fixed with these changes. Thanks for letting me QA your product HP!
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I recently upgraded from a 3-year-old HP PSC 1510 (the one with the paper feed problems). This printer has print quality issues (you will find a famous mainstream consumer hardware site also confirming the same results).
There are lots of extra dots ("fuzz") on every single letter when you print a Word document on Normal setting. It's definitely legible, but the quality is noticeably worse than my 3-year-old PSC 1510 (and I just did an apples-to-apples comparison). Surprisingly, the print quality gets much better (becomes normal ...) if you print on Fast Draft (the fastest setting) and duplex modes ... but the ink is not as dark. Fast Draft also has a tendency to print your pages off center (even after you've made sure the paper guides are flush against the paper). If you don't believe me, print one on Normal, then print one on Fast Draft or in duplex mode, and compare the difference. The Normal one is WORSE (but darker). (There is an intermediate setting, Fast Normal, but it combines the low darkness and low quality problems. "Best" mode has the same problems as Normal. "Maximum dpi" actually (finally?) looks better than Fast Draft, but it's slow, and may use more ink than Normal mode.)
If you print in duplex mode, the printer also defaults to waiting about 10 seconds per page for the ink to dry, so keep this in mind. This compared to a laser printer which will print the other side right away. There is an option to reduce drying time, but do you want to do that?
The Ethernet network interface also appears to be slow. A 64KB page (just a simply formatted page out of a Word document, no graphics) transfers in after, you guessed it, 25 seconds (you can double-click the printer icon in the System Tray and watch the progress). The PSC 1510 (over USB) seems twice as fast.
After that (using Normal quality), it takes 5 seconds for the printer to get aligned, then 15 more seconds to print a page. So total time to print one page is about 45 seconds, and this is consistent! Subsequent pages will come out every 15 seconds (yep, that's 4 pages per minute in Normal mode--a far cry from the 33pm that's advertised AND with the poor print quality). You can get faster print speeds on Fast Draft, but this is unusable considering how you're guessing whether on this next piece of paper the paper will be pulled in crooked.
The software takes a long time to install (more than the average) on a 2-year-old computer, and you distrust it a bit as your computer slows down in strange places where it didn't before.
The one plus is that it does appear to be more ink efficient than my old printer. I did go through three print head alignments and one cleaning of the print heads before collecting all the results I reported, and the ink levels are still pretty good.
The printer is also larger and twice as heavy compared to the compact HP PSC 1510.
I suspect that HP might be able to update its drivers to fix some issues (faster over Ethernet, don't pull pages off center, print reasonably dark, don't have fuzz around the letters like an inkjet from 1997), but I wouldn't wait around for that, if it ever comes out, and if it ever does bring us to the year 2007.
I just read a review for the parent of this model, the C5280, and the comments on text printing quality are also at the bottom of the range: "a lot of wicking and jagged edges".
(4 out of 5)Great bargain for the price
I bought this printer for $200 to replace a 10-year-old SCSI scanner and an aging HP PhotoSmart printer that cost me $50+ every time I had to replace the two ink cartridges (which was too often). I also wanted to network it to two wired PCs running Windows XP, a wireless PC running XP and an wireless laptop running Vista.
I do a good deal of digital photography, so high-quality printing is important. I also have many articles published on the Web that I wanted to print two-sided on heavy stock paper. I don't need fax capability, but having a copier at home is a definite plus.
The C6280 was easy to set up and get running right out of the box. It fits into the footprint vacated by my old HP printer. Initially, it was easy to network with my other computers, but the printer tended to disappear from the network until I assigned it a static IP address. Once I did that, it became a very reliable network printer.
I didn't expect this printer to be speed demon, and it's not. However, it is plenty fast for my purposes. It is a bit noisy when it first starts printing and does shake my desk a bit. I consider those minor annoyances, not big problems. To me, the text is black, crisp and clear. I have no problem whatsoever reading it.
For photo printing, it's taken a bit of experimenting with my photo editing software and the printer settings to get the image quality I desire. However, now that I've worked out the settings, the image quality is fantastic. I've done a limited amount of scanning and copying with the C6280, but in general, it seems to perform those functions very well.
The criticism about having to wait for duplex printing to dry on one side of the sheet before printing the other is rather silly. This is an inkjet! Of course it's slower at two-sided printing than a laser printer. If fast duplex printing is important to you, buy a laser printer.
For $200, I thought that this all-in-one printer was a good deal. Now that prices are coming down, it's an even better deal.
Additional comments: I've had a problem with the scan function not working with the primary PC on which I do the most scanning. When the HP digital imagining monitor failed to properly initialize, the scan function would hang up and the only way I could get out of it was to reboot my computer. I finally decided to try using the newest C6280 drivers alone without any of the HP software. This appears to have solved the problem.
(5 out of 5)Excellent All-in-One Printer
I purchased this printer to replace my older HP 7260 Photosmart printer that had run out of ink and an old $5 scanner that I picked up during a Black Friday sale several years back. I really wanted a printer that I could use with my all wireless laptop house - 1 XP, 1 Vista to do routine printing both photo and regular printing, and the fact that the all-in-one was only $20 more than the 7460 with a built-in duplexer and scanner, I thought why not?
Setup Vista: The Vista laptop setup was a real breeze. (I ignored their instructions to try and avoid the HP bloatware) When I went to the Add Printer setting of the Control Panel, Vista detected the printer on the network. I selected have disk to get the driver, and then had a functional printer without going through the HP install process. Yay!
Setup XP: The XP laptop setup was a bit more cumbersome as we had to use the HP install disk. Despite selecting all of the options to not install all of the optional HP software (such as buying your HP supplies online, checking automatically for updates, providing customer feedback, etc.), it detected that our previous installation had those features and updated them all. Argh! It really isn't that big a deal to then go and uninstall all of that junk, but it is annoying. I had 6 HP programs running in the background after the first install. HP should really be ashamed of themselves...Once I uninstalled all of the bloatware, I was up and running with zero problems.
Printing: Classic high quality printing from HP that I have always liked. Did some black and whites using only the black cartridge, a 4x6 photo, some web pages, all were reasonably fast...by the time I got up they were done...that's why I wanted wireless anyways.
Scanning: I wanted to scan a picture. So I went over to the unit, put the picture on the glass and hit Scan Menu. Saw 2-3 options, Scan to Card, Scan to computer. Hit scan to computer and it showed my computer's name. I hit OK, then it scanned and by the time I got back to my laptop I had a dialog box asking about resolution, file name options etc. Once I set up those options, it was done. I scanned a second picture and all of those options were saved, and it was just done before I even got back to my laptop. Excellent!
All in all, a great experience so far. I would definitely recommend this printer.
(5 out of 5)GREAT PRINTER, LOVE IT!!
I recently bought this HP C6280 after searching for a printer that is compatible with VISTA. I had gone thru four other printers, 3 HP and 1 Canon to find one problem after another due to VISTA issues. This printer is fantastic. Set up was a breeze and with the ethernet I find the connection to be as speedy as with USB, not at all slow. I have it hooked up to both my PC and notebook. I like the paper tray and the dedicated photo paper tray is handy. The printer is larger than some and a bit noisey. The price will most likely come down, be careful when purchasing ink, they make two size ink cartridges. Overall I'm happy with this one.
6 MONTHS LATER: I have to admit my initial review was far too soon after buying this printer. It has been the worst choice I could have made. It is noisey. It sucks up ink like crazy, always needing one or the other of the six inks. It is slow, when I hit the print command it decides to do "ink maintenance" then shimmys and shakes when it prints. The on screen status is not necessary and no way to turn it off. Finally today I got tired and am now using a different make printer.