HP Photosmart C4480 All-In-One Printer review

Reviewed by: Josh Norem
Review Date: August 2008
HP's Photosmart C4480 All-In-One is a fine multifunction inkjet that is easy to use and pumps out great-looking photos and crisp text. It can print, copy, and scan) with equal aplomb (but not fax, making it a surprisingly well-rounded printer with just a few small flaws.

Even though it's an all-in-one printer, the C4480 is geared toward photo printing, with a multiformat media-card reader on its face plate. You don't need a PC to print from the media slots—you can just stick a card in and use the integrated 1.5-inch LCD to help you print your pictures. The display also lets you start a scan or copy job.

The C4480 is capable of producing high-quality 4,800x1,200dpi prints, and when we first printed some test images with the stock tanks, we were very impressed by the color accuracy, saturation, and overall quality. Prints were a bit dark, but they still looked very good, with rich, bold colors. They looked even better with HP's special "photo" cartridge, designed for those who print a lot of snapshots. The $24.99 cartridge both enhances print quality and lets you save your regular black ink tank for text jobs.

Text reproduction, meanwhile, was equally rich, jumping off the page. It's not quite as sharp as what a laser printer can output, but it's much richer, and text looks dark and bold.

Scanning (either to PC or to a print) and copying are also simple and elegant; simply press the buttons on the unit's face plate. The scanning engine runs at 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) and produced good results in our tests. Scanning a document took about 25 seconds, then another 25 seconds to print it. If you opt for saving it to a file, it shows up under "My Scans" as soon as scanning finishes.

Still, we had some issues with the C4480. The printer comes with two stingy introductory tanks, with the black tank rated for just 190 pages and the color tank just 150. Fortunately, replacement tanks are more reasonable. A black tank costs $14.99, with a cost per page of 8 cents; a color tank will run you $17.99, boosting the cost to 12 cents per page. These prices are a bit on the high side, but the tanks are rather inexpensive, so it balances out a little bit. HP sells high-yield tanks for $29.99 (black) and $34.99 (color). These tanks lower costs to a more wallet-friendly 4 cents per page for black and 6 cents per page for color.

A more serious concern is print speed. HP's claim of 23 pages per minute (ppm) color and 30ppm black is pure fantasy. Our 10-page mixed document of text, photos, and graphs took 2 minutes and 49 seconds, and our 20-page text file took an agonizing 4 minutes and 48 minutes. HP claims you can print a 4x6 photo in just 25 seconds, but our time of 49 seconds was almost double that. An 8x10 took 2 minutes and 44 seconds, which is also slow. We tried printing our mixed document in "fast draft" mode, and though it was certainly much faster at just 52 seconds, it's still not even close to achieving 23ppm. One tradeoff for the slow print speeds is that the printer is very quiet in normal (non-draft) mode.

We also had problems with the included software. If you're printing from a PC, HP provides a do-it-all program called the HP Solution Center that helps you administer tasks and check on ink levels. We like the Solution Center, but we wish HP's photo-printing software was integrated into it. The program, Photosmart Essential, was unwieldy—to print, we had to import photos into it; even worse, it accepts only one folder at a time, so printing photos from separate folders required us to import each folder separately, which is a time-consuming annoyance. Finally, the C4480 doesn't include a USB cable, nor does it provide any networking features, so you'll have to attach it to a local PC if you want to share it on a network. (If wireless is a must-have feature for you, HP's Photosmart C4385 is very similar to the C4480 but includes Wi-Fi connectivity and costs about $30 more.)

The C4480 has a few flaws, but none of them are deal-breakers. We wish it printed faster, and that it had wireless connectivity options and an easier wizard for photo printing. Nonetheless, we can recommend the unit to those looking for a multifunction printer that delivers great photo output.