Home > Consumer Reviews > HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer

Hello all, first of all I need to say I have only had this printer for a couple weeks, I have had quite a time getting all my computers to see it on installation, so why am I giving it 5 starts you ask? because I have found most problems are due to routers, network setup, type of Windows you are using and any Firewall software you have.

First point you should absolutely follow the instructions posted here by some other reviewers about downloading latest software of HP.com and installing only what software you will use, this will make your life a bit easier, however the problem with these network printers is you usually have to have a little more than basic knowlegde in networks and Windows and even with that, I struggled for 4 days to get things up and running.

As for wireless, following the included instructions I had my printer connected wirelessly in a jiffy..if you can't connect make sure your printer and router are using the same encryption type for the password (WEP or whatever), as soon as you are connected to the network, go and setup a static IP address for your PC, this will make it so your computers on the network can always resolve it to the same IP, this is done from the printer screen, go to setup => advanced Network Setup and choose a manual IP address, now you will need to know what range is assigned by your router by going into the router setup page through Internet Explorer (hey no one said this would be easy but trust me totally worth it in the end) most routers give a default range of say 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.150 now this means the first PC to come on to the network will get the IP 192.168.1.100 the next will get 192.168.1.101 and so on, so if you have 3 or 4 PCs the highest it might go to is 105, what you want to do is pick an IP adderess high above this range so you cause conflict, I set my printer to 192.168.1.149.

Now for installing on the computers I have 2 XP computers (one PC and one Laptop) and a Vista laptop, I use a Linksys router (which I highly reccomend, they have great routers) and I use AVG Firewall. first thing to do as everyone says it shutoff all Firewalls (some firewalls when shut off automatically turn on the Windows Firewall so you will have to go and disable it from Control Panel), I did this and shut down all firewall software, still the installation software could not find the printer, what I found out the hard way is that AVG and a lot of other firewall softwares run a firewall service in the background even when you shut down the program!!!! dang it!! go to service through Control Panel again and sure enough AVG Firwall was running, you need to disable and stop the service.... and...WALLA...PRINTER found..

since then it has been smooth sailing, the printer is not all that noisy, it is very fast even for color printing, photo quility is ridicolously great! and I love the duplex feature..sure it take a little longer, the printer waits for each page ink to dry then like magic, takes the page back in and and prints on the reverse side. The printer goes to sleep after some idle time and once you send a document to be printed, it wakes up and spits it out! love love love it, I no longer have to carry my laptop to the office and hook it up to print.also the web printing software is not half bad, you can select which part of the page you wanna print and presto... no longer have to print a whole page with ads in order to get the one tin box that I needed, if you tried printing selected text in the past then you probably know that the text comes out all messed up.
Sorry for this long long review but I just thought I had a little more to add that had not been mentioned in other reviews, hope this helps someone.Happy printing..totally recommended!!

Works very well. Ink consumption seems good. A little trouble with Lotus printing, does not print all the lines. Downloaded updated drivers, but did not change anything.

I bought the HP Photosmart All-In-One because my parents had one and I knew that it was a good quality machine. It's very affordable and has great features. I'm so glad that I no longer have to do any of my printing/copying/scanning/faxing at any other place than my home now that I have this machine.

I liked it so much, I bought a second one. This is a GREAT item. Very well made, has really made a difference in my work. HP SCORED! Highly recommended.

This printer seemed like such a great deal. Reasonably priced, containing all the necessary features. But it is the most frustrating piece of computer equipment I've owned in 20 years.
1. It prints slowly.
2. It won't print a black and white document unless all of the color cartridges are full unless you press "OK" on every page.
3. It randomly won't be connected to the LAN and if you use the digital imaging monitor which takes a lot of unnecessary cycles on your PC, it continually tells you it's disconnected, or it's reconnected.
4. I can't ever see to get it to scan using the feeder.
5. The software is bloated and difficult to use.

There is much more. When we replace this one, we won't even donate it to a charity. We'll give them some money and drop this from a building or something.