HP Photosmart C4180 review

Pitched squarely at home users who are looking for a quick and easy way to print photos from either a Mac or a digital camera memory card, and who want to copy documents and pictures, the C4180 from HP also enables what the company calls CD/DVD Tattooing.

The tattoos in question are thin plastic labels onto which you print and which are then applied to the disc. Although they look impressive, we have reservations about any sort of system that involves applying labels to discs and with printable media now widely available and reasonably priced, the tattoos seem like an unnecessary and expensive gimmick (they cost 75p each, more than the cost of a printable disc).

The four-ink printing, which uses HP's Vivera ink system, can be optionally supplemented by an additional two colours for improved colour reproduction, although we suspect most people will use the four-colour, two cartridge set-up nearly all the time. At £13.99 for a black cartridge and £16.99 for its tri-colour partner, consumables are very reasonably priced, which is hugely important in a device aimed at the home market, and good to see. The disadvantage with the system, of course, is that there are no individual tanks for each colour, so you need to replace the tri-colour cartridge whenever one colour goes. However, unless your photographs feature one colour predominantly, this is unlikely to present much of a problem.

The 6cm colour LCD makes printing from most of the popular memory card formats easy. In front of the LCD there is a range of buttons to enable you to perform basic editing such as cropping, rotating and removing red-eye on the printer.

In use, the best word to describe the C4180 is inconsistent. Set-up is pain-free and relatively quick. And inserting a memory card and beginning the process of printing is easy. However, the sheer number of buttons on the control panel is daunting and it requires a good read of all the documentation to figure out what they're for. Navigating the photos on a memory card is painstakingly slow, and if you try to go too fast, you find yourself kicked back into the menu. Stepping through the menus to edit images is easy, but once you're ready to print, it takes three button presses to confirm that you actually want to output something.

Printing is reasonably quick: it took about 1min 25secs to output a 6x4in image from a Memory Stick Duo and 1min 10secs from our Mac. Results were variable. We were very impressed with the output of photos taken with a camera phone and printed from the memory card slot. But images printed from the Mac appeared to be under-saturated and have a slight yellow cast. Reprints, obtained by scanning the first print and then outputting were significantly faded when compared to the original.

The tattoo system works reasonably well, but it is cumbersome and time-consuming. You print an image onto the tattoo, then peel it from its backing and, with the aid of an applicator, apply it to the disc. It's both more expensive and more complicated than simply printing onto a printable disc, and the results are only a little better.

We were ultimately disappointed by the C4180; the output is inconsistent, it's complicated to use and there are too many gimmicks. However, at £100 for an all-in-one with LCD and card slots, it's well-priced. And if you want all the features and are prepared to put up with a little frustration, it may be the device for you. Otherwise, it's best avoided.