HP Photosmart C5280

The HP Photosmart C5280 is a bargain of an inkjet multifunction at AU$199. Its task speeds aren't stellar, but they are acceptable for the average home user. It's better suited for graphics and photo printing than for text printing, though, so look elsewhere if you need a lot of high-quality text prints. Its photo-printing feature set is fairly well fleshed out, though some of its menu organisation doesn't make sense. Additionally, the CD/DVD print feature is easy to use and produces good-quality prints. The AU$100 more expensive Canon Pixma MP600 offers faster speeds and slightly better quality (though not with scans), but the Photosmart C5280 will keep average home users happy.

Design
The HP Photosmart C5280 uses a body design similar to what we've seen with the Photosmart C5180. It stands 45.2cm wide, 38.7cm deep, and 23.7cm tall, and weighs a mere 7.13 kilograms.

The 2.4-inch colour LCD is top-mounted on a panel that swivels through about 90 degrees, so you can easily see it whether you're sitting or standing. The onboard buttons include task buttons, menu buttons for photos, scan, and copy, a red-eye removal button, and start buttons. Additionally, there are the usual menu navigation buttons, including a four-way rocker, OK, and back.

Four memory card slots are mounted on the front of the unit and take all the major card types, though some require adapters. Unfortunately, this model lacks a USB PictBridge port, so you can't print from a PictBridge-enabled camera or a flash thumbdrive, as you can with the Dell Photo 966. Paper handling is simple: the input and output trays are combined into a single cassette, with the output tray on top. The main input tray can hold up to 125 sheets of plain paper. Additionally, a dedicated photo paper tray is mounted into the output tray and can hold up to 20 sheets of 4x6 photo paper. One new feature on this printer is the ability to print directly onto the back of specially coated CDs and DVDs. The disc feeding mechanism folds down sit to atop the output tray and a disc tray is hidden under the input tray.

The Photosmart C5280 uses a two-tank ink system: one black and one tricolour tank, though you can swap out the black for an optional tricolour photo tank for six-colour photo printing. Both black and regular tricolour tanks come in regular and XL (or high-capacity) versions. The monthly duty cycle is 3,000 prints.

Features
The Photosmart C5280 is a USB-only printer that works with both Windows and Mac operating systems. The scan and copy features are standard. When copying, you can resize within a range of 50 to 400 percent, change the output quality, and make up to 50 copies at once. A couple of unexpected features include the ability to crop the original document and preview the copy before printing it. We really like the latter option because it prevents wasted paper from errors such as incorrect positioning. When scanning, your three target options are reprint (basically, a copy), a memory card, and the attached PC. When scanning to your PC, you can have the scan opened in a number of programs including MS Word, Paint, and HP Photosmart Essentials 2.01; save it to a file; or attach it to an e-mail. File options include JPEG, TIFF, BMP, RTF, HTML, and PDF, among others. The editable formats are created using optical character recognition.

The Photosmart C5280 lets you reprint photos via the flatbed scanner and the onboard control panel. You can apply colour effects (antique, sepia, or B&W), crop, adjust brightness, and so on. When you insert a memory card, the Photosmart Express menu pops up on the LCD. Your options are: View, Print, Create, Share, and Save. The Print menu lets you select photos to be printed and apply tweaks, such as colour treatment, brightness, red-eye removal, and so on. Oddly, the Print All option is buried a few levels down. You have to select an individual photo, choose Options, then Preview All, and then you can select Print All. It makes much more sense to put the Print All option at the top level of the menu, such that the first choice you make is to print all or select individual photos. You also can't just click through the photos to choose them and then do editing at the end. The Photosmart Express software forces you to click on a photo, do a print preview, and then select Add More to choose additional photos. This procedure is slow and clunky.

View lets you step through the images singly or in groups of six thumbnails. From this menu, you can also select photos to print and the procedure is the same as if you'd started from the Print menu. It's not clear why both options are offered. The Create menu allows you to print panoramic photos, wallet photos, and passport-size photos. The Share option lets you select one, some, or all photos to be shared. After you select photos, the printer triggers the HP Photosmart Essential software on your PC. Here you can choose whether to send the photos as an attachment to an e-mail or upload them to HP's Snapfish service. The latter will send an e-mail with a link back to Snapfish. Finally, the Save option copies over the images to your PC. Again, you can select all or just a few to be copied, though you can't specify where you want the files saved. The program defaults to the My Pictures folder within My Documents. You can also print an index of the contents of your card, but it serves as a reference only, as you can't perform a scan-and-print with it, as you can with the Kodak EasyShare 5300. We noticed, too, that you can't sort the card contents by date or print just last X photos, as you can with the Canon Pixma MP600, which is useful if you tend to add to a card without first offloading older images.

In order to print discs, you'll need to install the Roxio Express Labeler software that comes with the C5280 (on a separate disc from the one that contains the printer's drivers). To start the process, engage the disc-print mechanism by flipping down the disc feed tray. Doing so will start a video on the LCD that demonstrates how to insert a disc, and the Roxio software will start up on your PC. Express Labeler includes templates for a regular-sized CD/DVD, a mini disc (80mm), a DVD case insert, and a jewel case insert. For discs, you can add text or images and customize both. Express Labeler offers various preset layouts that you can customise by adjusting the size and placement of text and image boxes. Additionally, you can choose one of the 50 or so thematic backgrounds that fill the surface of the disc, or import an image for a custom background. The downside of doing the latter is that you can't resize or move the image; the program will automatically centre the image on the disc. Another option is to drag-and-drop images onto the template and move and resize them as desired. You can even layer images over a background. We found the program very intuitively designed and easy to use. We also liked the resulting quality of the print -- it didn't look like it came from a commercial printing facility, but was good enough to be impressive. HP recommends burning the data to the disc before printing on the back surface.

Overall, the HP Photosmart C5280 offers a full and balanced feature set, but we'd like to see HP rework the Photosmart Express menu to make it more logical and easier to use (like putting the Print All option at the top-level menu). We'd also like to see some of the features we've found on similarly priced printers, including the ability to designate where to save photos to, sort memory card contents by date, and so on.

Performance
Compared to similarly priced inkjet multifunctions, the HP Photosmart C5280 is a middle-of-the-pack performer with printing. It produced black text at a rate of 5.53 pages per minute, slower than both the Canon Pixma MP510 and the Pixma MP600. It did beat both the Dell 966 and Kodak EasyShare 5300, though. It produced colour graphics prints at a rate of 2.07ppm, a little slower than most, but not by much. It scored 0.76ppm for 4x6 photo prints, which again, was the second-slowest performance of the group. The Photosmart C5280 was the slowest of the bunch by far at greyscale scans, but then turned it around with colour scans, beating the others by a wide margin.

CNET Labs' inkjet multifunction speed tests (pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Colour scan

Grayscale scan

4x6 photo

Graphics

Text

Canon Pixma MP600

4.36 

4.44 

2.33 

2.32 

7.88 

Canon Pixma MP510*

5.2 

5.28 

1.26 

2.09 

6.37 

HP Photosmart C5280

8.1 

3.26 

0.76 

2.07 

5.53 

Dell Photo 966

6.57 

4.71 

0.67 

1.87 

4.82 

Kodak EasyShare 5300

6.3 

6.36 

1.08 

2.59 

4.34 

The Photosmart C5280 was a mixed bag with task quality. While its black text prints turned out a deep, pleasing black, we saw a lot of wicking and jagged edges. Also, the printer tended to cut off parts of the character descenders (parts that drop below the baseline, as in the lowercase g and y), which is a major issue. The colour graphics print was impressive, with smooth gradients, smooth colour saturation, and sharp and detailed photo elements. The 4x6 photo print was equally good: sharp details and pleasing and believable skin tones, though we would've liked to see a bit more warmth and brightness to the colours.

The greyscale scan was sharp and nicely detailed, but we did notice some compression on both ends of the greyscale. The results include overblown highlights and lost details in shadows. The Photosmart C5280 did its best work with the colour scan. Colours were true, details were sharp, and elements such as barcode patterns were nicely rendered.

Overall, the Photosmart C5280 is better with graphics and photos than at text, so you shouldn't rely on this machine to produce a lot of text-heavy reports or documents. But for a AU$199 multifunction, we were impressed by its graphics print quality. If you need better and faster text prints, go with the Canon Pixma MP600.

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

Colour scan

Grayscale scan

Photo

Graphics

Text

Canon Pixma MP600

Fair 

Fair 

Good 

Excellent 

Excellent 

Canon Pixma MP510

Good 

Good 

Excellent 

Excellent 

Good 

Kodak EasyShare 5300

Good 

Good 

Good 

Good 

Good 

HP Photosmart C5280

Excellent 

Good 

Good 

Good 

Fair 

Dell Photo 966

Excellent 

Excellent 

Fair 

Fair 

Fair 

HP backs the Photosmart C5280 with a standard one-year warranty. HP's site has drivers, software downloads, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides, as well.

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