HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer

by HP

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 17.4 x 17.7 inches ; 25.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 30 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000UY6M2G
• Item model number: C7280
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (424 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 2, 2007

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

If you're looking for a single device that prints, faxes, copies, and scans, the HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, and Copier is your answer. The printer has a built-in 2.4-inch display you can use to easily print photos without a PC: Simply put your memory card into the memory card slot (compatible with Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard, CompactFlash, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, xD-Picture Card), preview it on the display, and print. Enhancing your photos and removing red eye is as simple as pushing the HP Red-eye Removal button.

The HP Photosmart C7280 produces lab-quality, fade-resistant photo prints by using a six-ink color system for accurate color reproduction. Photos will always print on the correct side of the paper with the right quality settings because of HP Auto Sense technology. And coupled with HP Advanced Photo Paper, the C6280 is sure to produce photos that are smudge and smear-resistant right from the printer. Print speed is outstanding as well, at up to 34 ppm black and 33 ppm color. For those looking to save paper, an included duplexer lets you print on both sides of the paper. Sharing the printer with everyone on your network is simple with both built-in wireless and Ethernet connectivity.

The fax functionality is performed by a 33.6 Kbps modem at speeds up to three seconds per page. The built-in memory can hold up to 90 pages and the fax is capable of color faxing, delayed sending, and auto-redialing with a maximum of 48 broadcasting locations. The scanner uses a Contact Image Scanner (CIS) for scans at up to 4800 dpi optical resolution with a scan size of up to 8.6 by 11.7 inches. The copier supports pages up to this size as well and you can make up to 50 copies in one pass. Color copies are supported and there are settings for enlarging and reducing from 50 to 400 percent. HP Photosmart C7280 supports Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP Home and Professional, and Windows Vista as well as Mac OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4.x. It is backed by a 1-year warranty.

What's in the Box
Photosmart C7280 all-in-one, power cord, phone cord, 02 black ink cartridge, 02 cyan ink cartridge, 02 magenta ink cartridge, 02 yellow ink cartridge, 02 light cyan ink cartridge, 02 light magenta ink cartridge, set up guide, user's guide, paper sample pack, installer CD, and two-sided printing accessory.

Product Description

HP C7280 Photosmart All In One Printer. Fax color and black and white documents with or without a PC. Reprint photos and get quick, crisp copies at the touch of a button. Create high quality photo and document scans at up to 4800 dpi resolution and 48 bit color. Restore old and faded photos, using HP scanning technology. Easily edit, print and share photos, using included HP Photosmart Essential Software. Stay efficient with an automatic document feeder and more. Fax, scan and copy up to 50 pages while working on other projects, using the automatic document feeder. Save paper by using the included duplexer to print on both sides of the paper. Share and print from network enabled notebooks and PCs, using built in wireless1 and Ethernet. Print documents and 4 x 6 in photos without swapping out paper, using an automated photo tray. Print lab quality, fade resistant photos and laser quality documents in 6 ink color. Easily print photos without a PC, using memory card slots, a 2.4 in display and HP Photosmart Express.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

426 of 431 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS, January 2, 2008

By 

Michael L. Andrews (Plano, Tx USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer (Office Product)

This is a good machine, but as many have pointed out the software can be a problem. Here's some software install advice (below) to make it work well for you.

I have a Brother laser AIO at my office that I love, but I chose this HP for my home for several reasons. The WiFi Brother unit has a 10 page document feeder compared to HP's 25 page. This was important to me, maybe not you. I really like the styling of the HP better. The HP rep was in Best Buy and printed off a photo for me. It was fantastic. I've reproduced the same results at home, though I didn't buy it as a photo printer. The Brother has a phone handset hanging off the side that I will never use. The HP looks & feels like a higher quality product, though the Brother reviews are good.

Follow the quick start guide to set up on your LAN. I have WEP and had no problems...literally a couple minutes to setup.

1st, in general, never use photo manipulation software that these printer companies provide. If you need to work with photos invest in a good commercial product. There's some reasonabally priced products.

2nd. Trash the disk that comes with the printer and go straight to HP.com and download the latest drivers. That have fixes most of the problems the other reviews point out. You have two download options, drivers only or full software. I did drivers only and it worked fine, however you loose control of some of the units settings, so I went back and got the full package.

However, I highly recommend this installation method that I used.

Unzip the download and run. then...
1. Choose the custom (not the "easy" recommended) installation option.
2. Choose "NO" on the next pages which asks if you want to do auto updates. Anytime you select this for any product you now have another application running in the background all the time polling the internet. It will slow your computer down.
3. On the next screen select "custom". Don't be afraid, ever if you're not an "advance user" as it recommends.
4. You get a screen with a bunch of options to install. The first one you have to select, the drivers. Then uncheck "shop for HP" (just crap), "HP Updater" (memory & bandwidth eater), "customer particapition program" (memory & bandwidith eater), "smart web printing" (you can try it, but more resident sw to eat up cpu and memory), "HP photosmart essentials" (not essential and from what I read it's crappy software. You can try it, but it'll save you 40MB not to install), "OCR" (unless you really use OCR. If you use it a lot, buy a good program, this will save you another 80MB).

What you do select is obviously "drivers" (it makes you & you do need this), "Solution Center" (no actual solutions here, but it does give you some control over your settings), "imaging & device functions".

Choose the default directory it recommends, unless you really know what you're doing and want another directory.

Choose "connect through network", if you are connecting through the WiFi. Make sure you get the printer on the network first, as the directions tell you.

Don't sign up for the HP offers crap, unless you like spam.

I'm used to the Brother scanning SW, but now that I'm getting used to the particulars of HP's it's not too bad. I do have a problem scanning from the plate glass from Adobe Acrobat. It works fine with the doc feeder, but for some reason not the glass. I just go to the "solution center" and tell it to scan to a pdf and it works fine.

I did jump on the HP support site around midnight and have a live chat with a support person. He's the one who informed me I need to install more than basic drivers to gain some control over settings. I found the support helpful, but I didn't exactly have a brain teaser of a question either.

Good luck...and don't install that darn auto updater.

208 of 212 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Output Quatlity is Great; Software leaves much to be desired, October 5, 2007

By 

California Bill (San Clemente, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer (Office Product)

I did a lot of research into just about every AiO variant out there before deciding on the C7280. This replaces an aging Epson scanner, an old Panasonic Thermal Fax machine and a networked Lexmark Inkjet Printer in a home office. I looked at the various choices from Brother, Epson, Canon, Lexmark, other HP products and even the new Kodak AiO. For my money, this printer had the best overall combination of features and specs. The print/scan/copy resolution ranges, the 33.6 fax modem, the duplexer, built-in ADF, LCD display and the ability to run many functions without a PC all for under $300 was what I wanted. The small footprint was a plus. The various tray/covers, etc. are not the most sturdy I've ever seen, but are about as good as I've seen on most AiO's in this price range. I think that unless you are throwing rocks at it, the pieces/parts should hold up to home office use. The C7280 does a pretty good job in each of the four areas of print/scan/copy/fax. I've had this printer now for 3 weeks, and overall, so far, so good. Everything works as promised, but there are a few HW and SW `gotchas' to note. Here's the Pro's and Con's, followed by the lowdown on most of them:

Pros':
Very Good print and copy quality with reasonable speed
Excellent Photo print quality
ADF works well, no jams, separates pages well
Print/Copy/Fax from the Printer's LCD work very well, with clear, easy-to-navigate menus on the LCD
Duplexer
Reasonably quiet operation
6 separate ink tanks

Con's
Duplexing only works for PC-printing, not for copies
100 Sheet Paper tray is inadequate if you print very much
Software is bloated, buggy and in some areas is not very user-friendly
Some features (including Fax) don't appear on SW installed on wirelessly connected PCs

Initial Setup: The HW installation was pretty straightforward: there's LOTS of tape and plastic film to remove, then the included `Quickstart' guide moves you along quickly. The printer takes several minutes to initially calibrate itself once you insert the six ink tanks and turn it on.

The HP software is a completely different story. First, you MUST turn off your firewall and antivirus SW if you are planning to install the C7280 as a network-attached printer. If you don't, the SW will not `find' the printer and simply hang during install. Second, you can select the various HP SW components you want to install/exclude. If you pick them all, you are going to slog through over 350 MB of SW installation. Depending on what SW you select, it takes a good 30-40 minutes to for the installation to complete, so be patient.

I installed the SW on three different Win XP Pro PCs in my home (two wired networked desktops and one wirelessly networked laptop). All INITIALLY worked fine, but after a couple of days, the laptop would boot fine and then just respond so slowly that it would take 7-10 minutes for any application to load. After some investigation, I found that removing the HP Update software corrected the problem. As near as I can tell, it was opening a port and continuously polling the web for updates to the HP SW, thereby burdening the CPU and the network, and leaving the laptop completely unusable. It took a while in Safe Mode to figure it out. Then the two desktops also starting acting sluggish, but not as bad as the laptop. Again, removing the HP Update SW resolved the problem. Then I started seeing various HP programs hang (`not responding') when I shut down any of the PC's. I ended up removing the entire HP SW set and reinstalling only the core SW on each PC and now all 3 are working fine with the printer. I'm not a PC software expert, but 300MB+ of software for this printer seems very bloated (and I didn't even install everything on the HP disk!). For comparison, all of the other printer, scanner, and photo software products I have COMBINED (and which this printer replaces) used less than 175MB. C'mon HP, you should be able to write leaner, easier-to-use applications.

General Printing and Copying: Regular Color and B&W output (print and copy) is pretty crisp. Black is very black, grays are pretty well defined and the colors seem to be pretty true. Print and copy speed is fine for home office use. The printer is pretty quiet when printing. Mine sits about 7 feet from my phone, and I can carry on a conversation (handset, headset or speaker) with it churning in the background with no impact to my call. The one big gotcha I have found so far is that the duplexing function works ONLY when printing from the PC. You cannot automatically generate two-sided copies, period. This would seem like it should be a no-brainer, since the duplexer could simply flip the page to handle the next sheet in the ADF, or could signal you to place the next original on the platen. So far the only choice has been to manually flip the output and put it back into the paper tray. I think this is a big miss by HP. As for paper supply, the 100 page tray is pretty lean. For my print volumes it's OK, but repeatedly refilling it for higher volumes would be extremely annoying. One additional nit here: when it runs out of paper during a job, and you refill the tray, you have to hit `OK' on the printer's control panel to resume printing. Other printers I have used (including my Brother laser printer) automatically resume printing when it senses it has paper again. Yes, it's a nit, but it annoys me.

Photo Printing: The photo print functions on the printer are excellent. I have inserted a couple of different cards into the media slots and the C7280 has quickly found and displayed the images on the cards. Printing directly from the printer is very straightforward, and the menus on the LCD are easy to navigate. View, crop, red eye removal, etc. all seems to be pretty intuitive and work pretty cleanly. The quality of the photos is great. It's hard to tell them from prints I've had from Wal-Mart, via web services, etc. Printing photos from the PC works, but the `HP PhotoSmart Essential' software is cumbersome, and takes too many steps to import in image, set up to make a print, verify that you are really ready to print, and finally, print. I've seen and used too many other too many other photo programs (I have a couple of Canon photo printers) to believe it has to be this complicated just to import and shuttle a 4x6 off to the printer.

Faxing: I've only used the fax a couple of times but it too seems to work as advertised. My fax use has fallen off in recent years, but I still need to occasionally send/receive a Fax, and the ADF/Fax features seem to work well. One oddity here: the Fax feature does not appear on my wireless laptop, which is not a big deal, but if I can set speed dial numbers, etc. on the desktop, why doesn't it allow me to do the same from any PC that can access the printer settings? Doesn't make sense to me.

Scan capture works well, but the SW takes some getting used to in order to understand how to set the DPI resolution, type of file to create (e.g. jpeg, gif, etc.). The SW is slow to respond and bring up the multiple menus/dialogue boxes where you set the various defaults you want. It all seems to work, but again, the SW is slow and cumbersome to navigate compared to other products I've used. I haven't tried the OCR SW yet.

In summary, the C7280 seems to be a pretty solid printer, and the printer features work pretty well. The copier, fax and scan functions all seems to work as promised, but are pretty basic. The SW is very disappointing. That, combined with the HW shortcomings (e.g. the duplexer) prevent me from giving the C7280 a higher rating. Output quality is definitely a `5', but the software and the hardware misses limit me to a `4' overall. For my purposes, it will do the job, and even with its limitations, it does provide more functionality than the old device it replaces. Time will tell how well it holds up.

252 of 262 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Many-in-One Marvel Machine, September 12, 2007

By 

Robert Salita "Software Developer" (CHI PAR PHX SYD PDX CLD NKC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer (Office Product)

Printer, scanner, copier, fax, ADF, duplexer, color LED information display, USB, wired Ethernet, 802.11B/G wireless, memory card reader (CF, SD/MMC, XD, MS/Duo). The HP C7280 is a marvelous dream machine. Has a photo paper tray and a red eye removal button too. My unit (French) came with OCR scanning software. Haven't tried it though. The unit is surprisingly modest in size.

Documentation and software is very good. Be patient with software installation. It is not a quick process. All my computers are Windows Vista Premium. Before installing, disable anti-virus software, possibly firewall, file sync, and backup software. The software warned about this. I ignored the warnings and the installation process failed until I disabled them. An end user should never have to be concerned about this -- but I digress.

I'm using the printer to print documentation (mono), usually two-up and double sided. Print quality seems fine although I'm not looking with a critical eye. My printer is networked wirelessly to the router. First page out is very fast on my Ethernet wired computer but somewhat slow on my wireless notebook. The slowness is probably inherent to the notebook-to-router-to-printer wireless networking as opposed to the C7280. Making one of the links wired seems to make a speed difference. If you find this to be an issue, consider putting the printer on an AC power line network such as the well reviewed Panasonic BL-PA100KTA HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptor.

With so many functions, this machine is a modern marvel. I'm really suprised at how well this newly produced machine works. There's a lot of difficult technology packed into this box. Great work HP!

I have three minor issues. First, the installation software shouldn't ask me to disable software to install new software. The software industry needs to sort this out. Second, give me an option to disable the balloon popup that says something like "Printer HP C7280 is disconnected from network". It appears often and intermittently. I'm not sure if this is a wireless network issue or an HP issue. Regardless, I want to opt to not see the message. Just an icon change is sufficient. Third, I haven't found an option to print pages in reverse order.

Update 22-Sep-2007: Wireless printing performance was improved when I changed the router's wireless channel to a lesser used channel. I used a WiFi finder device to show all wireless networks and their channel numbers. There's software that can do that too. I then picked a less noisy channel. I also changed the printer's IP address to a static IP. It seemed that the router was assigning new IP addresses when the connection got flaky. This was particularly a problem since three computer's were using the printer. The static IP assignment will lock the printer's IP to a fixed address thus ending the IP roulette issue.

Update 11-Nov-2007: Flaky wireless problems have been resolved by upgrading to a D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router. Fine product. Recommended. YMMV.

Update 21-Mar-2008: Update software available! I found their new software, filename 100_228_PS_AIO_02_Full_Net_enu.exe available at HP's website, to be a much more pleasant install and a bit better usability. I installed using the "custom" mode, selected manual update, deselected checkboxes for update, supplies and web printing. Be sure you have a C: drive though. One of my three computers has no C: drive which causes the install to abort. I'll have to change the drive letter to C:

Update 24-Mar-2008: New software didn't recognize duplexer unit. Asked me to manually flip paper. Solution is to set Printer Properties->Device Settings->Duplex Unit to Installed. Why doesn't the software automatically detect the duplex unit? Argh.