HP Photosmart C6380 Wireless A4 Multifunction Printer
The HP Photosmart C6380 Wireless all-in-one printer, scanner and copier is designed for home users who want a network-ready all-in-one that offes a great combination of everyday and photo printing, plus the affordability of individual inks. Original HP Vivera inks utilise dual-drop technology to produce laser-sharp text and stunning, lab-quality photos that last for generations with HP Advanced Photo Paper.
Discover a range of intuitive features that makes the HP Photosmart C6380 even easier to use. There is HP Smart Web Printing to help reduce wasted paper by allowing you to resize your web pages or selected content to fit a single sheet of paper, an auto-engaging photo paper tray and high-quality scanning enables easy sharing and archiving of photos and documents.
Good but beware of cartridge regionalisation
This is an accomplished printer that does what it says on the box. The sharpness and colour vibrancy are a great improvement from my 5yr old HP PSC1205 and the wireless works well and setup was relatively easy. Ink ran out a little faster than I expected an I’ll be watching this with the newly-installed cartridges.
All of which is a 5-star performance and the reason I’ve given 3 is that I had to throw away a whole set of new cartridges because the printer allows you to use only cartridges sold in the same geographical region as the printer was purchased.
On a recent trip to the US I bought print cartridges and on installing the printer gave an error message. I emailed HP support who sent me a code number that would regionalise my printer to a US version thus making my cartridges operational. The plan being that once the ink ran out they’d send me another code which would regionalise my printer to the UK. This can only be done 3 times in the printer’s lifetime
The number didn’t work and HP support has stopped responding so I’ve had to throw away the brand new cartridges and replace them with locally purchsed ones.
Nowhere in the documentation are you warned of this regionalisation so if you intend moving or using your printer outside the region of purchase bear in mind that you may have to import cartridges to use it. This is like buying a car and being told that the fuel is regionalised and you can only fill up in certain areas. If you’re happy with this then this is a great printer. If not (like I will be doing when I next buy a printer) buy an alternative that won’t restrict what brand of cartridges you buy and where you buy them from.
Easy to set up but print menu could be better
Came across this printer via an Amazon email but way overpriced on this site and found it for £90 elsewhere. Setup was easy and the printer found my wireless network instantly – just had to type in my WEP code and the job was done. Full marks to HP for making wireless connectivity so painless!! Loading software took a little longer (15 minutes) and had to give it permission to access through the Windows XP firewall – but no problems there. All loaded easily. Looks nice, works well, though a tad noisy on start up. My only gripe? The print menu is poorly designed. With its defaults set for the US of A, the only way you can set it for A4 paper is to store a new personal print profile for each sort of printing – easy to do BUT new profiles are not stored at the top of the scrollable list but immediately *after* the default profile you amended. This is stupid because if you have personalised settings you want them easily available at the top of your print list and not to have to scroll for them. Change the paper size in, e.g., the fast print default, and the print setting switches fast print to automatic – so you have to change this back to fast print again – same happens to all the other settings. This is annoying and unnecessary. All in all a great piece of kit but HP needs to get a re-designed print interface out there so we can work more easily.
