Best value MFC on the market

Category: Review on HP F2180 Inkjet Multifunction Printer

Posted by: 12-Jul-2008

Strengths: Good print and copy quality.

Weaknesses: Scanning is very slow. Supplied software is a bit buggy; slows down my PC unless the mfc is left on.

This is the second MFC I've owned; the first was an EPSON which cost $160, the HP is an infinitely better machine in every way. Print quality is as good as any ink-jet I have seen for text and graphics, photo printing is also quite good although I had to adjust the colour settings as out of the box they weren't vivid enough for my liking. Aligning the cartridges is a snap. Upon powering it on for the first time it spits out a piece of paper and asks you to place it in the scanner and voila, the cartridges are aligned. Waaaay better than staring at a bunch of lines trying to work out which is straightest. It was whisper quiet when I first bought it but one year later it's starting to get noiser. Print speed is adequate, have seen faster but you have to remember this is a cheap machine. The copy function works quite well; scanning is of decent quality but painfully slow.

HP MFC software has a reputation for bogging down PCs, I have to leave my MFC on all the time or the spooler service will chew most of the cpu. My laptop is pretty quick but older pc's might struggle with the software which chews more resources than it needs to. The auto update feature has never worked either.

With any ink-jet printer the choice of paper makes a huge difference; if you're dissapointed in the quality of yours I would try using Reflex paper; the difference might suprise you.

For the price I payed for mine which included 2 starter cartridges which lasted longer than I expected, and even a USB cable I cannot fault the value for money equation. If you do alot of scanning, especially at higher resolution you could probably do better spending a little extra on a higher spec machine, but otherwise this little machine is great. If mine broke tomorrow I'd buy another one in a snap. Only the slow scanning ruin an otherwise perfect little MFC, for the price I doubt you could do better.