HP Photosmart C6380 review

The rest of the driver software is straightforward. A small pop-up window appears every time you assign a job to the printer, but we wish it showed the page status of the print job in addition to the ink levels in the cartridges.

Lifting open the front cover reveals the C6380's five separate ink cartridges: one large black cartridge for photos, and the usual black, cyan, magenta and yellow. The standard cartridges cost between £8 and £10 to replace, but HP also offers extra-large economy-priced versions as well, which cost between £16 and £27.

Performance
We put the C6380 up against some of the fastest all-in-one printers we've tested. While it certainly wasn't the fastest of the bunch, it held its ground and churned out prints at a competitive speed. It couldn't beat the Premium Fax when printing out a page of text or graphics, but it did stomp the competition in our presentation test, rolling out 4.44 pages per minute compared with the Kodak ESP 5's 2.21 pages per minute at the opposite end of the spectrum. All of the printers printed a 3 by 5 inch photo at the same general rate, but the Epson Artisan 800 remains the leader, at an impressive 2.82 colour pages per minute.

Print quality is one of the only areas where the C6380 could use improvement. Although the output isn't the worst we've seen, it's not up to the same standard as other HP all-in-one printers that we've tested. The text prints are generally very good, with some stair stepping in smaller fonts, but graphics and photos are marred with a dull blue cast across the spectrum, and it's visible without magnification. In addition, we saw significant graininess in large colour blocks, including portraits and shading.

Performance test (in pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Photo speed (1 sheet)

Colour graphics speed

Presentation speed

Colour text speed

HP Photosmart Premium Fax

1.33 

3.85 

3.82 

7.57 

HP Photosmart C6380

1.77 

3.4 

4.44 

7.1 

Epson Artisan 800

2.82 

6.06 

6.6 

6.43 

Canon Pixma MP980

2.52 

2.9 

3.72 

5.75 

Kodak ESP 5

1.37 

2.13 

2.21 

4.39 

Conclusion
Overall, we're satisfied with the print quality of the HP Photosmart C6380, and it's definitely fine for casual home users who want to print out snapshots and text. Dedicated photographers, however, should seek out a more professional-orientated printer.

Additional editing by Charles Kloet