HP Photosmart C8180 All-in-One Color Inkjet Printer w/Built-in CD/DVD Drive

I have used this model for more than 7 years. It produces amazing color photos. I use it primarily for my professional work and make 8x10 prints for my clients and also for friends. The HP ink cartridges are expensive but they are worth it. I would strongly recommend not to get them refilled because that will damage your printer in one of 2 ways. It may short something inside and/or it could create air bubbles and make the entire printer mechanism useless. I bought another used HP Printer on Amazon and it workd perfectly out of the box and I am off and printing. I just did a portrait session at one of the gatherings where I was asked to set up my studio and I made more than 150 8x10 prints and all the clients were extremely happy with their portrait photos.

This is my last HP printer. I have never had a Photosmart printer last for more than 2 years. They just die (actually I kill them!!) Kaput...it just doesn't work anymore. We have Epson and Kodak printers in the household and they just keep going and going like the Energizer Bunny. The difference is that they have an inkjet cleaning protocol you can execute periodically. HP on the other hand basically gives away their printers so they can sell their expensive ink cartridges.Here's the lowdown. HP ink cartridges tend to easily dry out and foul up the inkjets. Therefore HP creates an expiration date that is hard coded into the cartridge. The printer firmware detects the expiration date and shuts down and requires you to override the warning and proceed printing with an expired warranty. Unfortunately when you do, the result is often irreversibly clogged inkjets a voided warranty and wasted money on unused ink cartridges since they are expired or because HP uses new and different cartridges every time they make a new printer.You may have just purchased the cartridges but the they may have been sitting on the shelf (or Amazon.com's shelf) longer than the expiration date so they are no good as soon as you put them in. Naturally you don't want to waste the $38.00 you just spent, so you bypass the warning, void your warranty and do your printing which seems to work fine (for awhile). There you go, you just did exactly the wrong thing (and you know it!!). Perhaps someone knows how to reset the printer or clean the inkjets, but HP doesn't and they won't and can't help you (even if you're under warranty.) If you bypassed the "warranty void" warning then you're completely out of luck.The truth is, that HP ink cartridges really should not be used past their expiration date because they ruin the ink jets (obviously HP knows this) Bottom line is that the cost of ink cartridges drives us to do something we should know better than to do. So, unless you like spending a lot of money on ink cartridges, avoid HP printers as you will not be able to buy your ink supplies in bulk, you have to buy them just as you need them to avoid the expiration problem or expect your printer to stop working in fairly short time.So there's my story, you may read this and believe that the problem is all my creation, and you'd be right. So why the 1 star rating? Because we do not have this problem with other printers. The cost of the ink cartridges is more reasonable than HP, the ink seems to last longer than HP without fouling the inkjets, and there is an inkjet cleaning protocol you can successfully run to keep the printer in good working order that I cannot find in the HP printers firmware menu.

I owned this product for just over two years. The pluses: it's wireless and the scanner seemed to work OK. The minuses: It has, I believe, six ink cartridges, which didn't seem to last very long and also didn't seem to have a very long shelf life; they kept expiring quickly. You couldn't opt to simply run the printer with just a black cartridge for b/w hard copy. Also, it seemed to me that this product required in inordinate amount of very noisy warm-up time prior to doing anything. My machine simply died telling me that there had been an ink system failure.

I have owned this printer for almost 2 years. has anyone had any problems with the lights on the printer blinking uncontrollably. you have to turn the printer off to stop the lights from blinking. now the printer doesn't work at all. when you turn the printer on, it appears to be powering up for about 60 seconds, then it turns itself off, then repeats powering up and turning it self off. does anyone have any answers to my hp problem

I've had this printer for more than two years, and it has been going strong. I've printed close to 8,000 pages or 16 reams in that amount of time. For most printers, I've probably expected it to last through about 5,000 for an inkjet. The print quality is good. The scanner is amazing. I love that I can actually crop a copy, so I don't have to copy the whole page (I can copy only a part of a page). One thing that is annoying is once in a while, it says that it's out of paper when there is paper in the closed tray, so, to fix this, you must press ok and just hold the tray against it's stopper. Depending on what the settings are for a scan, it can range from a few seconds to an hour. Although, I've had trouble telling the printer to scan something around 1200 dpi. The print speeds really vary. I have it default to Best because if it's much less than that, it will not look good for images. Otherwise, the print quality is pretty good. In my opinion, if you print a lot of images, you may consider a laser jet because they produce much better pictures of regular pieces of paper. Also consider that ink jets produce ink bleeding through paper, depending on your ink volume setting. To replace an ink cartridge, you simply open the lid, take out a cartridge, and pop a new one back in--simply easier than other printers. If you plan to purchase this printer solely to print photographs, I would choose a different printer. If you're a photographer, go find a professional printing service for photographers--they have the professional printers unavailable to consumers. For the occasional photograph, the print quality on photographs is great, except it's usually darker than what you see on the computer screen, but you can calibrate your screen to better match that of the printer.

Works great.