While many All-in-One (AIO) printers tend to excel in one function over the rest, HP’s C7280 seems to be an all-round performer, combining high-speed, photo quality and office functions. For office use, the C7280 offers scanning and copy functions without the need of a PC. The scanner is equipped with a 50-sheet automatic feeder for fast unattended scanning/copying operations.
For connectivity, the HP C7280 comes with both a wireless 802.11g and wired Ethernet connection, facilitating sharing the printer at the workplace or even at home. For printing functions, the C7280 uses a front-loading tray which holds 100 sheets of paper up to Letter size, with a dedicated tray for photo papers.
A welcome feature for business users is the built-in duplexing capability, letting you print on both sides without human intervention. If you don’t hook the printer up via the standard USB connection, you can still access all the functions thanks to an extensive control panel directly in front of the printer. The panel should be familiar to any office printer/copier/fax user, and the HP C7280 is also equipped with a built-in color LCD display that can be tilted 45-degrees.
Installing the C7280 is pretty much the same as any other HP printer. The installation CD installs about 350MB of applications that do all kinds of things from auto-updating to performing all the fax, print, scan and copy functions.
Print output from the C7280 was impressive overall. Even at draft mode, all text and graphics remained clear and legible. But most impressive was the print speed. Our tests proved that the draft black-and-white performance was a speedy 30ppm. This is quite fast for an inkjet printer, to the point it was almost scary as there was a lot of high-adrenaline mechanical activity during printing. Color printing was of course slower, but still very fast at 13ppm.
Despite having to cope with a variety of functions, the HP C7280 is also capable of high quality photo prints. It uses a 6-ink system of HP’s Vivera-branded inks. Colors were bright and saturated, while blacks were very deep and true. With the right paper, the photo results looked very impressive. Not only does the C7280 print good looking photos, it does it reasonably fast. In our test, the HP C7280 pumped out 4R photos at 1 minute 12 seconds each.
As mentioned from the start, the all-round capabilities of HP’s C7280 make an excellent proposition for power users or small business users. Despite having a healthy range of features, it actually does all of them well.
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