

If light duty is all you require, however, the C7280's full set of office features-from ADF to standalone fax-make it a superb choice. The slow speed, low paper capacity, and less-than-ideal text quality limit the C7280's appeal mainly to home offices with light-duty printing needs. The photos were also reasonably waterproof and scratch-resistant on my tests, which means you can pass them around for people to look at without worrying about their coming back ruined. HP claims a 200-year lifetime for photos kept in dark storage, as in an album, 40 years for photos behind glass, and 30 or more years for photos exposed to the air. If you don't print black-and-white photos, however, this won't be a problem.Īnd the photos should last. I saw slight, but obvious, tints in some shades of gray, with different colors in different shades. The one flaw worth mentioning was a color-balance problem in a monochrome photo.
Hp photoexpress 7280 professional#
With the plain paper we use in our tests, full-page graphics tended to make the paper curl slightly.Ĭolor-photo quality was terrific, close to what I expect to see from a more expensive photo printer or a professional photo lab. If you print full-page graphics, you may want to spend a little extra on better-quality paper. Otherwise, the graphics are good enough to give to an important client or customer you need to impress with your professionalism. Thin lines tend to disappear, which is a common issue with printers. Graphics are easily good enough for any internal business use, including projects like PowerPoint handouts. I'd call the text good enough for schoolwork or most business use, but not suitable for, say, legal contracts with small fonts or anything approaching desktop publishing, such as a client newsletter. Most fonts in our test suite were easily readable, with well-formed characters at 6 points, but only one was easily readable at 4 points, and heavily stylized fonts with thick strokes needed 20 points. The text quality is typical for an ink jet, though on the low side of the range. The C7280 also takes its time printing photos, averaging 1:26 for a 4-by-6 and 3:51 for an 8-by-10.Īs for output quality, the C7280 is a little weak on text, but strong on graphics and photos. In contrast, the similarly priced Editors' Choice Canon Pixma MP970 Photo All-In-One took 15:58, and the less expensive Canon Pixma MP610-also an Editors' Choice, and one of the fastest ink jet AIOs I've tested-took just 12:18.
Hp photoexpress 7280 software#
It plodded through our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing, in a poky 20 minutes 10 seconds. The C7280's performance is similarly limiting, particularly considering its price. Refilling it could quickly get annoying if you print, fax, and copy more than about 20 sheets per day, making the C7280 suitable only for those offices that have the lightest of printing needs. Unfortunately, the primary tray holds only 100 sheets.

The C7280 includes two welcome touches: a duplexer for automatically printing on both sides of a page, and a 20-sheet, 4-by-6 photo tray so that you can switch between printing on standard paper and on 4-by-6 photo paper without having to swap paper. While you're waiting you might contemplate the paper handling, which is a mixed blessing.

Then plug in the network cable, run the automated installation program, and wait while the software installs. Simply find a spot for it, remove the packing materials, plug it in, turn it on, and load the ink cartridges and paper. The AIO measures 9.8 by 17.7 by 17.5 inches (HWD). Setting up on a network is straightforward. Still another feature that helps the C7280 fill a dual role is its network connector and Wi-Fi support, which make it easy to share on a home network. It can even scan legal-size pages using the ADF. It makes quick work of scanning, faxing, or e-mailing multipage documents, thanks to a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF). Best Malware Removal and Protection SoftwareĪs for its office features, it can print, scan, scan to e-mail (launching your e-mail program and adding the scanned file as an attachment), fax from your computer, and work as a standalone fax machine and copier.
