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General Performance
The HP C5180 performed without incident. No paper jams occurred during testing. Overall, dry times were quick, although the trailing edges of photos were damp for several minutes after exiting the printer. Roller marks did not occur. The output printer tray is cramped and difficult to access without lifting the access door. Even then, the ink housing is fixed in place above the output tray. The HP Advanced Photo Photo Paper that shipped with the unit is fairly thin and easily dinged. As is the case with most multifunction inkjets, only one function can be performed at a time.
Warm-up Time (4.24)
Warm-up time was slow, with the scan head still making noise and jumping around after 40 seconds. Functions could be performed before this time, but the scanner and/or print heads needed to initialize a little too much.
Power Usage (6.52)
HP specs indicate that when it is powered up and ready to go, the C5180 uses 5.6 watts. When it is in its sleep mode, it uses 5.3 watts and when turned off, it uses only 0.2 watts. Our tests using a watt meter in our test labs showed a few differences. The HP 5180 is one of the few printers we tested that registered power usage, 4 watts, when the unit was turned off. This is less than the Kodak ES 5300, which registered 6 watts, but more than the Canon MP600 which did not register any power usage when off. Ready power usage is a measure of how much power the printer draws when it is ready to print. The HP C5180 drew 5 watts in idle (or sleep) mode and when ready, the same amount as the Canon MP600, while the Kodak ES 5300 drew 13 watts. The HP C5180 drew 12 watts of power when printing; this is less than the Canon MP600’s 16 watts and significantly less than the Kodak ES 5300, which drew 24 watts of power when printing.
Document Speed (5.39)
This printer’s document speeds are very fast for a printer in this class—6 pages per minute for black text and 1.71 ppm for color PDFs. PrinterInfo tests document speed on a 7-page Word file on the printer’s best quality. The black text document rate leaped ahead of two competing all-in-ones, the Canon Pixma MP600 and the Kodak EasyShare 5300; speeds were twice that of the Canon and nearly three times that of the Kodak. Color text and graphic document times were nearly twice that of both the competitors. HP’s reported times for the 5180 were 32 pages per minute for black-and-white documents and 31 ppm for color. These tests are not comparable to ours since HP testing, although not reported on their website, probably uses draft quality speed.
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Pages per Minute
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Black Text
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Color Text
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and Graphics
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HP Photosmart C5180
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6.00
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2.57
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Canon Pixma MP600
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2.81
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1.35
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Kodak EasyShare 5300 ES
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1.59
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1.33
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