Expert's Rating
Pros
- Simple control panel
- Very good print quality
Cons
- Small color LCD
- Orangey fleshtones on photo paper
Our Verdict
This home/school model prints good-looking text and photos quickly, and the inks are well priced.
HP’s Photosmart C6380 All-In-One color inkjet multifunction may target home photo enthusiasts, but it does a good job at nearly everything. Still, a few of its features are a bit skimpy for the price.
The Photosmart C6380 performed pretty well in our tests. It printed plain-text pages at a rate of 11.3 pages per minute (ppm), and color graphics as fast as 3.2 ppm–above average compared with the competition, though far slower than HP’s claims (33 ppm text, 31 ppm graphics). On plain paper, text is just slightly fuzzy, and photos a little dark but smooth. Everything improved on HP’s own paper, except flesh tones, which were orangey.
The silver-and-white box offers many useful features. Connections include USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi. HP sells a Bluetooth adapter for $40. The control panel stretches along the upper front. Words and images on the 2.4-inch LCD can get awfully small, but accessing menus is otherwise easy using the adjacent navigational buttons. Function buttons (for copying, scanning, and photo-editing) are clearly labeled. Interesting copy features include on-screen previewing and cropping. Below you’ll find slots for MS, SD, xD, CF, and PictBridge-compatible media.
The paper handling is basic. The main input takes a wide variety of media, up to 125 sheets of plain paper. It has a sliding width guide, but no length guide or extension; legal-size paper hangs out the front a bit. A piggybacked tray takes up to 20 sheets of 5-by-7-inch or smaller photo media. The lid for both components also functions as the 50-sheet output tray, which has an impressively sturdy pull-out extension.
The Photosmart C6380 ships with five standard-size ink tanks that fit into a permanent printhead: a 250-page pigment black (K), and 300-page cyan (C), magenta (M), and yellow (Y). The replacements are reasonably priced, but the high-yield ones are an even better deal: $27 for an 800-page black tank (3.4 cents per page), and $18 each for 750-page cyan, magenta, and yellow tanks (2.4 cents per color, per page). A page with all four colors would cost 11 cents. The fifth color is HP’s “photo black”; according to HP, its $10, standard-size tank lasts for up to 130 4-by-6 photos (7.7 cents per photo); its $18 high-yield tank, for up to 290 (6.2 cents per photo).
A few things about the Photosmart C6380 seem not to fit with its midrange price. In most ways, however, it handles a multifunction’s many tasks with aplomb, making it one of the better-designed competitors on the market.
–Melissa Riofrio