HP tends to believe in the saying ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’ theory. The C8180 appears almost identical to all the other printers in the Photosmart series, thus the design brings nothing new to the market. However, if you were satisfied with it so far, you’ll be equally satisfied with this device as well.  What sets it apart from most other inkjet color printers is the new features it has to offer.



One interesting feature  that you won’t find in most all-in-ones is the swivel touch screen that the C8180 includes. You’ll be able to navigate, edit photos, set up your wireless and more with the help of that LCD. Including a touchscreen was a good choice because the front panel isn’t completely covered in big and small buttons for every single feature.



Instead, you get a decent, rather simple to use menu, and you can just navigate by using your finger tips. There are still a couple of buttons left, ones that you’re frequently using such as start, stop, cancel and a red-eye removal one. A bit to the side you’ll also find the memory card slots. The printer supports SD, MultiMedia Card, Memory Stick, Compact Flash and XD.

Just to be sure, let’s define what all-in-one means. The HP Photosmart C8180 offers printing, scanning and copying. Moreover, if you fancy printing out photos there are several features for amateur photography as well. The quality of the prints is good towards great. The speed of the printer is a completely different story though.  If we stop to think about where it belongs , that place will most likely be a home office desk, with a user that wants to have many features in one but isn’t in a hurry to print anything.

Due to the included WiFi, this printer can handle several users all queing up their print jobs. You can connect your printer to your PC/laptop either through the USB cable (included in the pack), Bluetooth or WiFi. Setting up the networking or the printer itself is relatively easy and convenient.

The quality of the prints is most likely partially due to the fact that the C8180 uses six distinct ink cartridges (black, magenta, light magenta, cyan, light cyan and yellow). Each cartridge has its own bay underneath the printer’s front cover.  The capacity of the cartridges is decent, and the black one should last for just about 660 pages.  One special feature that the C8180 boasts is the dual paper input tray. You’ll be getting two separate paper trays, a 8.5 by 11 inch paper one or a 4 by 6 inch one.



There are two big fat inconveniences in the case of the Photosmart C8180 inkjet color printer, the first one being the lack of an auto document feeder. Secondly, the printing speed doesn’t really recommend it for a work environment. It’s considerably slower than most of its competitors and you can really truly feel how slow it is when you try and print a photo.