Somewhere in the last few years we’ve changed the definition of “All in One” (AIO) as it refers to printers. It was that a printer capable of printing, scanning/copying, and faxing were knighted with the AIO title. These days, that title has been conferred on printers with only print/copy/scan facilities. That’s how Hewlett Packard’s Photosmart C6380 falls into the AIO category.

Is it a plot? A conspiracy? Nah. It’s nothing so melodramatic. How many of us do faxing these days? If you’re at work it’s possible. If you’re at home, even in a SOHO environment, it’s not likely. In fact, so many of us rely on IM, e-mail, Ethernet, WiFi, and cell phones for daily communications that some of us don’t even have a phone jack to plug a fax machine into.

Speaking of Ethernet and WiFi, if the C6380 can’t fax, who cares? It does connect either wired or wirelessly to every computer in your network rather than use the single-minded USB approach that won’t let you amortize the $149 or so you spent on it. (That’s based on the current sale price on Amazon.) And, as such, you’re not saddled with it on your desk. As long as a Cat5 cable can reach it, or it can see your wireless router, the C6380 is connected.

Setup
I’ve always considered unboxing photos as trite. If you can’t feel enough excitement about a product and the fact that you own it, all of the Christmas-like titillation of opening a box and wading through Styrofoam forms seems just a bit pathetic.

So here’s the deal: You can get the C6380 out of the box, on your desk, and ready to run in under 20 minutes. You’ll need to install the print head, a lock-down carriage type of construct that holds the ink cartridges, as well as the ink cartridges themselves. The bulk of your time is occupied by the printer’s housekeeping as it cycles through each cartridge, finds out if it’s feeling well, how its family is doing, and then, finally as it prints a test page. (WARNING: Do not think that the speed at which the test page is printed is anything near the speed of the printer itself. The C6380 is much, much, much faster in use.)

The WiFi setup is a snap. It will find your network for you and all you’ll need to do, if you have a passphrase for security, is enter the passphrase using the “keyboard” that appears on the LCD screen and the arrow keys to select and choose a letter. Shazaam! You’re on your network. (Wired is a bit easier, as you might suspect, but with 11 computers on three floors, well, wiring everything can get a bit convoluted.)

Specs
The in-depth specifications for the C6380 are available on the HP website. In brief, they are:

· Print speed: 33 ppm black and up to 31 ppm color, 4 x 6 photos as fast as 18 sec
· Scan: Up to 4800 x 9600 dpi
· Copy: Up to 50 copies, reduce/enlarge: 50 to 400%
· Paper handling: 125-sheet input tray, 20-sheet photo tray, 50-sheet output tray
· Connectivity: 2 USB (front and back), 1 Ethernet, 1 PictBridge, 1 Wireless
· 802.11g/b, Memory cards
· Monthly volume (duty cycle): Up to 2,500 pages per month
· Features: 2.4-in LCD color graphics display, borderless printing up to 8.5 x 11 inch

What that isn’t telling you is that the paper tray and receiver platform stick out about 4-inches from the printer’s 17.79 x 15.97 x 8.17 inch footprint. It’s not a big deal and, in my opinion, it’s mitigated by the fact that the paper is fed horizontally into the printer and not vertically. Also, the paper carrier is covered to keep dust from settling on the paper and getting suck into the feed mechanism.

Performance
The worst problem faced by any printer is the time it takes to print the very first (and sometimes only) page of a run. Even HP’s rated numbers are calculated after that first page is printed. To get rid of the suspense, the C6380 needs 18.06 seconds to spit out that first page. (B&W text only; WiFi.)

A full run of 30 copies of that same page required 3 minutes and 53 seconds with the printer set for General Everyday Printing and the Print Quality set for automatic. You’ll notice that it’s nowhere near HP’s rated 33ppm but my time also includes the first page out.

In contrast, the C6380 needed just a hair over 7 minutes to print ten copies of full-color, 1554×1083, graphic image in borderless mode on an 8.5×11 sheet of plain paper. (The first page out was 56.3 seconds.) Printing that same graphic to a 4×6 sheet of photo paper (borderless printing) needed 46.5 seconds.

Keep in mind that each f these numbers would most likely be lower (i.e., the printer would be faster) if I’d used a USB connection instead of WiFi. After all, USB is maxed at 480MBs while WiFi caps out at about 120Mbs in practice, on average. Still, the calling card for the C6380, the thing that separates it from the seven other HP printers I have here, is its un-connectivity. I want it over there in the corner rather than crammed on top of one of my IKEA Mikael computer desks. To that end, come heck or high water, I was determined not to physically attach it to any of my computers.

Quality
This review actually turned into a two-printer special. The first C6380 that arrived was absolutely terrible with photos and graphic images. They were dull and unimaginative, with none of the vibrancy of the original images. It took considerable fiddling with the printer settings to get a picture of Batman’s Tumbler to even approach what the screen representation looked like. It was dark and slightly yellowed.

The original PhotoSmart C6380 didn’t do very well. The replacement printer looked like the original image.

I must admit, I stumped HP with the problems (which also included the C6380 sucking down the contents of the Cyan and Yellow ink cartridges) –so much so that, after about a week of e-mails and phone calls, HP sent me a second C6380.

The image printed on the original C6380 was dark, slightly yellow, and lacked detail.

The replacement worked like a champ. Yes, the image printing was still a bit dull using the default settings but when I switched to “Best” mode, they brightened up to near perfection. (The rule is that nothing is perfect.) Even the Tumbler image required only a few small tweaks in PhotoImpact to bring out the highlights. (Those same things had been attempted with both images on the original printer with no real success.) By the way, the registration from the C6380 was the exception to the rule -it was perfect. Two of the Hulk images. printed one on top of the other, aligned exactly.

The moral here is probably, “If at first you don’t succeed, return the printer and get another one.”

My Nudge
At $149, grab the Photosmart C6380. The WiFi/Ethernet connectivity is worth the extra $30 or so that separates it from similarly featured HP models that use USB connectivity. On the other hand, if you don’t want or need WiFi/Ethernet, the older Photosmart C5550 is a better deal (Sam’s Club lists it for around $115) that also includes direct CD/DVD printing –which is absent from the C6380.

One note of caution: Buy an extra set of ink cartridges. They’re relatively inexpensive, even directly from HP. The yellow, black, and cyan cartridges that arrived with the printer were alarmingly low (to the point of warning messages on the LCD panel about cyan) after about 100 pages of mixed graphics, photos, and text. You’ll be printing quite a bit anyway so you’ll need them.

For more info on the Photosmart C6380.

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