HP Deskjet F380 All-in-One

The HP Deskjet F380 is a low-cost All-in-One printer designed for light home use. It combines printing, scanning, and copying into one reasonably compact device for AU$89. Its slow speed and mediocre print quality will disappoint users who need high-volume printing or high-quality photos, but it will suffice for anyone who just wants to print the occasional Mapquest directions or a casual snapshot. If you need more features, such PictBridge compatibility for printing directly from a digital camera or a built-in media card reader, invest a bit more money for something like the Canon Pixma MP450.

Design
The adage "you get what you pay for" applies to the Deskjet F380. The body of the light-gray-and-white printer is boxy and made of more lightweight plastic than HP's more expensive printers, such as the HP OfficeJet 5610 or even the basic Deskjet 6940. The printer measures 426mm wide, 260mm deep (with the paper tray folded in), and 170mm tall, and weighs a light 4.7 kilograms. Still, it feels well-enough constructed, though the glossy white scanner lid is a bit wobbly and flimsy. The scanner lid's hinges don't lift to accommodate thick materials, and A4-size paper (slightly larger than letter size) is the largest that fits on the platen, or scanner bed.

A transparent blue-plastic tray in the front folds out to serve as both the input and output tray. The input tray can hold up to 100 sheets of paper, and a paper guide slides smoothly to hold the pages in place. The printed pages drop down on the pages in the input tray, which can make refilling the input tray in the middle of a large print job awkward. (You should pause the print job if you need to refill the paper.) A flap folds out of the tray to help corral longer sheets of paper. There's no door in the back for straight pass-through, so heavier media such as cardstock might prove problematic.

Along the left side of the printer's top sits a row of off-white buttons that comprise the very limited control panel. You can key in multiple copies (up to nine), indicate whether you're using plain or photo paper, initiate black-only or colour copies, and trigger a scan job. A power button, a cancel button, and two indicators (paper jam and low ink) round out the control panel. You won't find more advanced features such as an autoduplexer, a PictBridge port, or an LCD on this printer, but again, you're only paying AU$89 for it. Keep in mind, you still have to buy a USB cable for the printer.

Features
Once you open the paper tray, you can flip down an internal panel to expose the printheads and ink tanks. The HP Deskjet F380 ships with two full ink tanks: One black and one tricolour (CMY). Replacing the ink tanks is a simple task: Just push down on each tank until it snaps out of place and pull it straight out. Reverse the process to replace the tanks. For six-colour photo printing, you can replace the black tank with a tricolour photo ink tank. The ink costs are fairly reasonable.

Setting up the printer is fairly simple, though installing the drivers and software from the included CD takes a few long minutes (most of it is hands-off). Once prompted, connect the printer to your PC via USB cable (not included). The printer can be used with Windows 98/98 SE/2000/Me/XP PCs and Mac OS X versions 10.3.9 and 10.4. HP includes its Photosmart Essential software, which helps you organise, edit, print, and share your photos. It even has templates for creating products such as photo album pages and online projects. You can initiate print, scan, and copy jobs from the printer itself or from HP's Solution Center, which lets you tweak settings for each job individually. The F380 has the basic features you'd expect from this printer: Borderless printing (up to 4 x 6 inches), multiple copies (up to nine pages), and copy scaling. More expensive printers will let you do automatic double-sided printing, make hundreds of copies, and print straight from cameras or media cards.

Performance
If you're in a rush to print a lot of pages quickly, think twice about the F380. It's on a par with other budget all-in-ones -- faster than the Epson Stylus CX4800 but slower than the Lexmark X3350 -- but nowhere near the speeds of pricier multifunctions such as the Epson Stylus CX7800 or the Canon PIXMA MP500. It printed text at 3.94 pages per minute (ppm), a PowerPoint presentation at 1.21ppm, graphics at 1.14ppm, and 4x6 photos at 0.38ppm. It did beat some of the other budget all-in-ones in scanning, though: 5.68ppm for black-and-white scans and 3.03ppm for colour scans.

CNET Labs' multifunction speed tests
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Colour scan speed

Grayscale scan speed

Photo speed

Text speed

Lexmark X3350

3.98 

5.31 

0.21 

7.43 

Epson Stylus CX4800

1.75 

4.06 

0.52 

1.57 

HP Deskjet F380*

3.03 

5.68 

0.38 

3.94 

Image Quality
Print quality left something to be desired, particularly in our colour tests. We saw decent results on our text printing tests; text was dark, cleanly formed, and legible down to very small point sizes. There were no egregious problems, though close inspection revealed a little jagginess to the edges, and some bolded letters exhibited the faintest shadow. In our graphics test page, however, we saw obvious banding in both colour and grayscale gradients. Photograph elements in the graphics page were grainy and washed out. Colour in our photo print (on photo paper) was also washed out and dull; the photo lacked an overall brightness to it. The dark end of the grayscale was compressed, so details in the shadow areas were lost.

The F380 fared the worst in scans. The colour scan showed bands in the colour gradients, instead of a smooth progression. In the grayscale scans, we saw compression on both ends of the grayscale, which means details are lost in the dark shadows and the highlight areas tend to be overblown. Overall, this printer will suit you if you'll be primarily printing text pages and the occasional snapshot. Don't buy if it you plan to use the scanning feature more than occasionally or if you need high-quality graphic prints or photos.

CNET Labs' multifunction quality tests
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Colour scan

Grayscale scan

Photo

Graphics on inkjet paper

Text on inkjet paper

Epson Stylus CX4800

Good 

Good 

Fair 

Fair 

Good 

HP Deskjet F380

Fair 

Fair 

Fair 

Fair 

Good 

Lexmark X3350

Poor 

Fair 

Good 

Fair 

Good 

Note: Products in this test are for comparative purposes only and are not necessarily available in the Australian market.

HP backs the F380 with a one-year warranty. Toll-free phone support is available 24/7 for the length of the warranty and e-mail and online chat support are available for the life of the product. HP's site has a wealth of product manuals, drivers, software, and FAQs.

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