New Printer - HP Photosmart C6180
The HP Photosmart C6180 is a nice printer/scanner/fax combo. It’s also small, works wirelessly and is fast.
There were no supplied drivers for Vista, but pretending that it’s an HP Photosmart 7180 worked a treat1. The supplied software for the the Mac worked great too.
Now, on one of our XP boxes I installed the drivers from the supplied CD and even after telling it not to install the usual crapware that comes along with such supplied CDs, the installation took forever! I mean, it felt like it took longer than Flight Simulator to install!
Hehe :-)
Anyhow, it’s nice to have a new, modern, networked printer at Casa Del Lacey - it’s replacing our aging Lexmark Z52. Not having to string any wires other than a power cable was a nice treat and having it just DHCP for configuration over wireless (after having set up the WPA goop) worked flawlessly. Well, it did after I snooped it’s MAC address and added it to the DHCP and BIND configurations on the Linux server - users without an over the top geek habit will have no such hassle.
It also has a bunch of media card reader slots, so as a test I popped in an SD card from a point’n’shoot that I have hanging around whereupon it displayed the images from the card on it’s little LCD. I selected one, inserted a 4X6 photo paper (after hunting around for the mini-tray that was hidden under the output slot), hit print and voila! After a minute, a pretty good photo popped out.
Anyhow, it also supports bluetooth for some reason and after connecting a phone line, the fax part of the equation configured itself.
In summary, this is a nice little printer and at just over $200, it’s recommended.
1 A generally workable trick - just guess at a compatible printer.
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It supports bluetooth so you can send photos from your celphone to it.
It also has bluetooth so you can print from a PDA.
What I want to know is if you leave a flash card in one of the slots will it use it as a hard drive for faxes and scans?
You CAN use flash memory(any supported format + USB flash drives) to directly store scanned images. Faxes however, I'm unsure of.
The C6180 is a neat printer, I've had it since it came out in October. I love it.
To use the wireless connection on my Windows XP machine I had to manually edit the "hosts" file so that it could resolve the "host name" (device name) to the IP address assigned to the C6180.
The hosts file is in the systemroot\System32\Drivers\Etc folder
I owned a HP C6180 for home use. Overall it meets my expectation. The biggest drawback on this is the built-in fax modem.
Once it is faulty regardless whether it is lightning or power related that killed it, sorry there is NO REPAIR by any means.
The only way to resolve this issue is to replace the WHOLE unit.
Though my unit was under warranty then, I made two official complains to HP. Guess what, no response from HP. Good Luck.
I used this printer at home for a while until I upgraded to a LaserJet 3800. It lasted a good few years- would recommend HP multifunction inkjets to others.