 "HP Photosmart C6188 All-in-One")
We did a news story on HP releasing ‘ the world’s fastest MFD ’ a while back. We see for ourselves if it lives up to that claim, and see what else the Photosmart C6188 is capable of doing.
Build
The HP C6188 can be quite a daunting first impression. It has just so much going on, you wouldn’t know where to begin. Firstly there’s that gigantic keypad with a host of buttons that would just about do anything for you. I almost expected a self-destruct button hidden in there somewhere.
Once you get past the buttons, there’s that color LCD display staring right at you with its tilting capabilities.
When your eyes move a little further down, you’ll see a range of memory card slots that support all the common formats used today. A little below that is the pict-bridge socket to print directly off your camera.
A little more experimentation led me to discover the hidden 4x6 inch photo paper tray.
Overall, the feel of the printer is very solid. With all the trays and moving parts in the printer, there isn’t a single thing that feels flimsy. Like I said, the C6188 does look pretty complex, but at the same time it does have a cool ‘Transformers’ like appeal to it. At 450x385x247 mm it doesn’t even occupy a lot of space.
Rest assured, it’ll look good on any desk.
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Features
I’ll start here from the most prominent part of the device, viz. the keypad. Like most other mid-range MFDs, the C6188 is capable of working completely by itself without the need of attaching it to a PC.
You can print straight out of memory cards or the USB port. You can scan images straight to a memory card by a single button press on the device. You can even communicate with it straight via network or through WiFi. In short, the printer offers excellent workarounds making it a complete solution in itself.
The LCD is an excellent and a very essential part of the printer. It gives an ultra-simplistic interface for anything you want to get done, so whether you’re tech savvy or not, operating the device is a piece of cake.
The C6188 takes six cartridges, again a common trait of mid to high end printers. I guess after a certain point, you don’t care about spending the extra rupee as long as the output quality is worth it. The best way to determine that in the C6188 is through our performance and quality tests.
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Performance
As a printer the C6188 doesn’t disappoint. The output is fast and it’s good.
In our speed tests the MFD shot out 20 pages in three minutes ten seconds, which was the fastest result we’ve seen from an MFD so far. I guess it does live up to its ‘fastest all-in-one printer’ claim here. When it comes to photo printing, the C6188 was fast, but not the fastest. Averaging at six minutes per full page photo quality print, it was beaten only by HP’s own Photosmart 3108, among MFDs. Still, six minutes isn’t too bad, and considering it takes two minutes ten seconds for a 4x6 borderless photo print it’s pretty fast by all standards.
The colors were crisp and bright. The blacks as always have a slight bluish tinge to them, which takes a bit of depth away from the dark areas of a photo, but that’s something only a trained eye will notice. Otherwise the color prints were bright and vivid in our photo prints. Our color tests showed excellent reproduction of all the complex gradients present in the test document, which is very hard to come by. The six cartridges make a lot of difference, which is clearly visible here.
Scanning quality, on the other hand, was not as up to the mark, which is a shame, considering everything else performed so well. Though document scanning would not present any problem, our color scanning test results were not too accurate. All colors seemed a bit washed off, and lacked the kind of depth that the subject required. Moreover, anything that was even slightly above the scanner bed came out looking blurred. This is a particular problem I face with most MFDs. They should really start concentrating a bit more on the scanners they incorporate.
Now the problem is, solely because of the scanner quality, even the quality of the color photocopies were a bit marred. The colors in the photocopies, as expected, were somewhat washed out, and that same blurring problem occurred. Still it gave us the fastest black and white photocopying speed at thirty-four seconds. Color photocopies took three minutes fourteen seconds.
Conclusion
Rs. 13,200 is an excellent buying price for the HP Photosmart C6188. Sure, you do get cheaper options, but the overall performance and the sheer amount of features that this one has to offer more than justifies the buying price. The cost of the cartridges can be considered expensive at Rs. 795 for the black cartridge and Rs. 495 for each color cartridge (five total). The good thing here is that the black cartridge is literally double the size of a color cartridge and you only have to bother changing one color at a time as per your requirement, so the cost is cut down into smaller/more affordable bits.
Even with its weaknesses, the C6188 has just so much to offer that makes it worth it. If you’re working from home, then the C6188 will be an essential workhorse by your side, and if you’re looking for a good all-in-one solution for a small office, then I would highly recommend this - as long as scanning photos is not your primary requirement.
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