HP Photosmart C3180 review

The Photosmart C3180 is the most affordable multifunction peripheral in HP's new range and is aimed at home photographers.

While connected to your PC, you can use it to make colour prints, scans and copies, but switch the PC off and you'll still be able to make copies, or print photographs directly from your camera's memory card.

The C3180 is a smart, compact silver and glossy white device. To get it up and running, you need to remove a bit of packing and insert the two supplied ink cartridges through a hatch on the front. Like other HP inkjet devices that we've reviewed, this one comes with a generous software bundle that includes photo-editing software. We were delighted to find that HP's install program now has a 'Custom' option that lets you choose which programs to install - perfect if you already have good photo software.

The HP's printer made reasonably short work of all of our timed print tests, producing high quality black text and colour graphics on plain paper. On HP's photo paper it printed competent photos using its standard cartridges, but if you're particularly choosy about quality, you could spend £14 on a photo cartridge, which makes pictures less grainy.

Although the C3180's printer is impressive, its scanner is a bit of a letdown. Its TWAIN interface, which lets you capture a document directly into a photo-editing program, isn't particularly easy to use. Although we had turned off the driver's sharpening function, our images looked artificial when we zoomed in on them in our photo viewer. The test photocopies we made also looked unnatural in some areas and colour copies had a slight yellow tinge.

The Photosmart's scanner is fine for simple office work, but not up to the sort of high-resolution creative tasks that a photographer might need. It's a reasonable multifunction, but doesn't seem particularly suited to its intended market.