Shilling For My Employer

I've been pretty critical of those HP products that haven't met my expectations; it is only fair to praise the products that work well. I bought an HP Photosmart C6280 All-in-One yesterday. This is a combination color inkjet printer, scanner, and copier.

It is surprisingly compact and dense, compared to previous inkjet printers that I have owned. This uses a six ink system to print photographs that I can't distinguish from professional photo labs. (Perhaps someone can; the next step up in photo quality from HP is an eight ink system--but that was more than $300, even with the employee discount.)

In text mode, the first page out is a bit slow, because the printer goes to sleep when not in use. Once the first page is printing, the rest come out pretty quickly--and the claimed speed of 32 pages per minute doesn't seem hopelessly optimistic.

When printing pictures, of course, it is a good bit slower--figure on at least a couple of minutes to print out a six megapixel picture on 8.5" x 11" photo paper. But my, does it look good!

For those who don't like downloading pictures from the camera into the computer, then printing them out, the C6280 has slots for inserting the more popular camera memory cards into it, such as CF, SD-MMC, XD, and MS/DUO. There's a little color display that walks you through viewing the pictures, doing some limited processing of the images, and then printing them out.

For several years now, I have had an HP 4100 MFP here at home which provides me a very fast laser printer, scanner, and copier. This was a laboratory rat during the development process, which is part of why they let me bring it home. It has more than 400,000 pages through it, and as you might expect, it is showing its age, both in terms of its condition, and the limitations of the scanner technology of the time, so I was looking forward to getting something with higher resolution scanning.

The scanner part of the C6280 works very nicely--much more quickly than the 4100 MFP's scanner. It is possible to start a scan from the C6280's front panel, but I'm told by someone with expertise with this product that starting the scan from your PC gives you more control over scan resolution. It defaults to 200 dpi (usually sufficient for archiving documents), but the included software lets you select resolutions as high as 19,200 dpi (although everything above 2400 or 4800 dpi is an interpolated resolution--above the physical scanner's limitations). Unless you are scanning 35mm negatives or slides, I can't imagine that you would ever use those resolutions--the images just get enormous.

The C6280's copier also has the virtue that it can copy in color--and the results are stunning. I copied a very fancy piece of marketing collateral from Sky & Telescope. It was less than a minute to make the copy--and I could not see any degradation of resolution of the pictures from the original--and if anything, the colors were a bit more intense on the copy.

Setup instructions seem to have been actually written for someone who doesn't know much about computers--which is a nice change from some previous HP products. They were simple, didn't make a lot of assumptions of prior knowledge, and everything went very smoothly.

The C6280 has the option of using either a USB or Ethernet cable. Since I share this printer across the local network, I went ahead and used Ethernet. This required pulling out a spare Ethernet hub from the closet, but everything otherwise was painless and simple.

Best of all: it's not made in China! The printer comes from Malaysia; the ink cartridges come from Singapore.

UPDATE: I've heard some grousing from readers about how expensive the inkjet cartridges are--and this Popular Science column points out that the ink costs several thousand dollars a gallon, because that's where printer companies make their money.

Well, duh! Take a good careful look at what one of these printers costs to buy--and then consider the engineering and manufacturing expertise that goes into designing these wondrous gadgets. I work in a building so large that I sneezed once, and the echoes from opposite walls of the building arrived at different times. (Yes, the building is that large, and yes, I sometimes sneeze that loudly.) And that's just one of several buildings at this location. We do laser printers, not inkjet printers, but I am quite sure that their engineering operations are of the same order of magnitude. If you had any idea how much code goes into this stuff, you would find the price of the printers astounding. Heck yes, we make our money on the consumables!

It is definitely cheaper to upload your pictures to WalMart, or SnapFish, or whoever, and have them print them, instead of printing the pictures at home. Just like it is cheaper to buy a hammer, instead of buying a blast furnace so that you can make your own hammer. Having a photo printer at home is a convenience, and I would not encourage you to print 1000 copies at home, anymore than I would encourage you to smelt your own iron.