HP Photosmart C6380 All-in-One

Rating: (4.5 / 5)

The C6380 is HP’s newest all-in-one printer this year. Well, it’s one of two that I’ve seen. So I got one and put it through its paces.

I started by putting this wireless device on my network. I didn’t read the instructions, and I didn’t look at any paperwork. I just took it out of the box, plugged it in and started going through the screens on the front panel to try to set it up. I think any device that’s meant for end users should be intuitive enough to be configured with little to no help. So I started entering in my network information and within 5 minutes my printer was on the wireless network and working perfectly. There are several points to note here. First, the interface is really nice. HP clearly put a lot of time into designing a nice interface that includes an on-screen keyboard. This is really important to me because my network password has 32 characters with plenty of non-standard characters. So I like anything that makes it easier for me to type that thing out. Second, the display is logically laid out and in full color. I’ll get to more of the interface in a minute. So putting the HP on my network was fast, easy, and just what I would expect from putting a device online. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with the Epson. You can read details about that here.

Next it was time to load the ink. I’ve been complaining for years that I always run out of one color before the rest of them in the cartridge run out so I’m actually excited (probably more than I should be) that they’ve gone to a new 5-ink system. Each color now comes in its own cartridge so you can change them out as you need them. OK, on to putting in the ink itself. One thing that really surprised me that I really loved was not only how easy it is to put ink in the C6380, but there’s actually a video that comes up on the screen that shows you how to do it. It really can’t get much easier than that.

So now I had ink in the printer and it was on the network and I’d only had it out of the box for 10 minutes, and hadn’t opened a single manual yet. So I installed the software on my workstation and connected to the printer with no problems. I immediately put some paper in the tray and pushed a couple simple docs to be printed just to test the connection and basic printing. It worked as expected.

I then started with the high-quality prints by going for a couple photos. I can’t really say that I was surprised with the quality of the photos it printed… I was amazed. The photos came out so clear, and so bright, I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between these and photos printed in a professional lab. And of course it helped a lot that the pictures were of me. So now back to reality. If I haven’t made it abundantly clear, this printer prints amazing photos. Of course, the secret is in the paper as much as it’s in the printer and the ink. For pictures like this you really need an excellent quality high-gloss photo paper. Now, in the past, say with my OfficeJet 6110, printing photos took a long time. The quality was really good, but it just took forever. So imagine my surprise when the C6380 printed a photo in just a few seconds.

I also tried re-touching a couple photos directly on the printer and it was as easy as everything else had been. It was easy to figure out how to do what I wanted, and printing when I was finished was a snap.

Scanning was also easy, and comes with a couple nice features. If you’re scanning from your desktop you can set it to attach the scanned image to an email so you can send it to anyone you like. And if you’re scanning from the printer itself, you can set it to scan directly to your computer. This is really convenient because it keeps you from having to keep running back and forth from your desk to change-out the docs to scan and manage the process. After all, it is a wireless network printer, so it should assume it won’t necessarily be stationed anywhere near your desk and give you a way to manage these types of jobs directly from the console. So in this respect, this HP rocks. Scanning speed wasn’t lightning fast, but it was certainly as fast as I could expect it to be. I wasn’t at all disappointed with the speed. The only thing that even slightly disappointed me about the scanning was the lack of a document feeder. I really got used to that feature on my 6110 and now it’s hard to go back to loading docs by hand. I also tried to OCR a few docs and while the scans went pretty well with typed text, they didn’t go so well with handwriting, no matter how neatly I tried to write. All the same, the printer will scan and OCR to different formats including MS Word.

The Bottom Line: While there are many features I didn’t talk about, you can rest assured that this is one solid printer. The print quality and speed are both outstanding, and the intuitiveness and usability of the console menus is second to none. Putting the printer on the network is as easy as pie, and it will even connect to a hidden wireless router. You wouldn’t think that would be a problem, would you? But I’ve had issues with other devices so you never can tell. I wasn’t going to say this so plainly, but sitting here looking back on the review, I have to. The HP C6380 is by far my favorite printer. I don’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out how things work, and I don’t have to spend a lot of time troubleshooting simple printing issues. I trust this will be a solid printer for a long time to come.