HP Photosmart C5100 C5180 Inkjet Multifunction Printer, Color

I have owned many many printers and this HP C5180 takes the cake! My pictures come out clear and the colors are great! Copies and scans are just as nice. I love the fact that I can pop the camera memory card in the slot and I have pictures on my computer or just on the copier. The HP C5180 is so simple to use all the buttons are right on the front in perfect sizes. I would highly recomend this to anyone that needs a printer.

While HP has a good reputation for printers, I feel this printer underperforms. Yes, it's a "bargain" printer. I expected bargain trade-offs to be in the form of print quality and features/capabilities, not basic functioning. Frequent issues are paper jams, constant ink cartridge warnings and replacements, and lots of wasted pages where a single line of character garble is printed (even on basic Word documents). The printer needs quite a while to recover from a print error. Unfortunately, we're surprised when a document actually prints without any issues. Too often it seems like my kids can re-write their papers by hand (gasp) in the time needed to print the document.

5 months: This printer does do a nice job on photos. So far as I can tell, the output is photo lab quality and FAST. Ganeral printing is HP Status Quo, in other words, excellent. Duplex mode workaround is built-in and thoughtful. It prevents the scenarios that used to occur when I would accidentally print the back sides upside down compared to the front sides. Not much to say about the scanner at this point, as I haven't used it much to this point. I love the 6 inks. This makes printing much more economical as running out of one color does not necessitate the replacement of all. Complaints: Long Start Up: a lot of self-cleaning/diagnostics or whatever is going on. Somewhat flimsy output tray. I'd like to see a more substantial tray that had tabs on either side to lock it in the elevated position. Momentum: Speedy prints = rapid printhead movement = momentum. Mount this printer on a steady desktop where it won't shake your monitor while it is printing. This is especially an issue during draft quality printing when the printhead is really flying.

I have used this printer since January 2007 (7 months now). I love it. The cartridges are easy to work with. It can be used independently of a laptop for photos. It's lightweight, doesn't take up a lot of room. My cats love watching the paper come through the printer!! The scanning capabilities have been good. I love being able to have a copier in my home now using my All-In-One. No regrets.

Every time you turn it one it goes through a calibration shaking process. Once that stops it takes me 5 sheets of paper to print one copy since it jams up all the time. In between each jam it has to calibrate again. Waste of my time. Not worth the frustration.