These days, it’s possible to buy an inkjet printer for next to nothing. For simple print jobs or for those who only print documents and nothing fancy, there are tons of budget printers that will get the job done fairly well. Up for review today is the HP Deskjet F4480 from Geeks.com, a machine that would certainly qualify as a budget printer. Running just over $50, this little guy can print, scan, and copy, all with a variety of features and settings.
Hearing that, the first sentiment that comes to your mind is probably “yeah, and I bet it does all those things like crap.” For such a small price tag, a printer that claims to be an all-in-one can’t possibly be very good, right? Let’s take a look.
Specifications:
Save energy and print effortlessly with this eco-friendly HP DeskJet F4480 All-in-One Printer!
With an easy-to-use control panel and simple, straightforward setup, you’ll be printing, scanning, copying and photo printing in no time. Plus, with HP SmartWeb Printing, you can save paper by printing more usable web pages. This color inkjet printer can print black ink documents at up to 28 ppm and color ink documents at up to 22 ppm.
Scan old documents and photos using the flatbed scanning function. Make quality color copies with up to 1200 optimized dpi from 600 dpi input and resize a copy from 25 to 200%. The DeskJet F4480 also does borderless printing for up to 8.5 x 11-inch photos.
Made from 20% recycled plastic and Energy Star qualified, the CB745A is good for your home office and the environment.
General Features:
-USB 2.0 interface
-All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier, Photo Printer
-Standard memory: 16 MB
-Standard printer languages: HP PCL 3 GUI
-Easy-to-use control panel
-Made from 20% recycled plastic
-PC and Mac compatible
-Prints from the Web easily and efficiently
-Includes black and tricolor ink cartridges
-Includes Photo Greeting Card software
Printing Specifications:
-Print speed, black (draft, letter): up to 28 ppm
-Print speed, color (draft, letter): up to 22 ppm
-Print speed, black (normal quality mode): up to 9.5 ppm
-Print speed, color (normal quality mode): up to 6.5 ppm
-Print speed, color (draft, 4 x 6 photo & 10 x 15 photo): as fast as 26 seconds
-Monthly duty cycle: up to 3000 pages
-Print technology: HP Thermal Inkjet
-Print resolution, black: up to 600 dpi
-Print resolution, color: up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi from 1200 dpi input data (when printing from a computer on photo paper)
Scanning Specifications:
-Scanner type: Flatbed
-Optical scanning resolution: up to 1200 dpi
-Bit depth: 48-bit
-Scan size flatbed (maximum): 8.5 x 11.7 inch
Unboxing:
The box isn’t real big, but neither is the printer. It’s your standard-looking HP printer box on the outside.
Opening the box, we find the printer hugged by typical egg crate materials and wrapped in a plastic bag, with all the HP discs, literature and other paraphernalia on top. This particular printer came with the driver installation and software CD as well as a free greeting card program. The literature is the fairly redundant installation instructions and manual.
The printer itself is small, black and doesn’t look too bad. It would certainly fit on most desks. As far as construction goes, it’s what you’d expect. I think people these days generally know what to presume from an inexpensive printer, and for the money it doesn’t look too shabby. There’s not a lot to look at on most of it, and there is a pretty nice control panel on the left-hand side that allows for push-button setting changes. It’s a slick looking little machine with a nice flatbed.
The front door drops down and serves as the paper tray, as this is a front-loading printer.
The top lid lifts up to reveal the scanning surface, like any all-in-one.
The back of the printer has the paper jam access and the USB/DC ports.
The printer uses one black ink cartridge and one multi-color cartridge. The multi-color cartridge is a downside in my opinion, because when you run out of one color you have to replace the whole thing. That’s a tremendous waste of money and it’s how the manufacturers rake in more dough after you pay basically nothing for the printer.
The front tray has a swing-out arm for extended paper lengths.
Finally, the power adapter is also included. Like most printers these days, there is no USB included with the unit, so you have to either have one already or purchase one in addition to the printer. It’s just another way for the companies to get an extra $10 out of your pocket.
Installation, Performance, Comparison
Installation is simple and can be achieved by popping the included CD into your computer and following the directions. It takes about 5-10 minutes to install, and once it’s done, the printer is ready to use without a reboot or anything else.
Once installed, the printer will add an icon to your taskbar for the HP Solution Center, and open it automatically for your first use. This is the nucleus of the printer’s included software and the place to perform all scanning and copying functions, get help, check ink status levels or shop for HP products.
The ink status screen is fairly useful, assuming it is accurate. I don’t plan to blow through the whole ink cartridge right now to see if it stays in line.
The help screen offers videos, step-by-step troubleshooting and documents to solve any problems you may be having. It’s actually pretty comprehensive and impressive, and I could see people getting answers to their problems from it.
There are also settings for each function of the printer that can be changed from the Solution Center.
Alright, so now that we’ve taken a look at all that, let’s find out how well this thing actually works. We’ll start with the scan feature.
When you select scan, you are given the option of scanning a photo or a document. We’ll start with photo. It asks whether you’d like to scan your photo to a file or directly to an email. When you make your selection, it brings you to the scan screen. You just pop your item to be scanned into the corner of the printer’s scan area and click the button. After a few seconds, it goes to work.
In honor of the recent release of Bioshock 2, I decided to scan the collector’s edition CD sleeve that the game’s musical score comes in. The scanner wasn’t super fast, but it wasn’t slow either. Again, it was as quick as you’d expect it to be.
Once the scan is complete, you can crop, rotate and otherwise edit the photo right here.
Here is the final scan. Overall, I was actually quite impressed with the scan quality. It’s quite clear and picked up the finer details of the artwork. It definitely exceeded my expectations from such a low-price unit.
Scanning a document was the second test. As with a photo, you have options when it comes to scanning documents. They can be instantly saved as TIFF files, PDFs, or sent to an email. I grabbed a Rolling Stone and scanned the first random article I turned to. The PDF quality also wasn’t too bad considering it was from a magazine that couldn’t rest flat on the bed due to being folded on itself. There are some glare lines, but those probably could have been fixed with a few different scans and flattening out the magazine further.
Ultimately, it’s not a bad scanner at all. Good work, inexpensive machine.
Since it’s tough to show you its print quality for documents, the best we can do is talk about it. I printed a copy of my resume, which of course is just black and white text. It printed fine. These days, I think just about any printer will print a black and white text document fairly well – at least as good as it needs to be printed. It wasn’t blurry or smudgy, came out with standard inkjet printer speed and looks fine. That’s the buzzword for a $50 printer – fine.
The printer isn’t terribly noisy, which is a plus.
Photos are a different story. Again, nobody would buy this printer thinking it’s going to be a stellar photo printer, or even a decent one. It’s a printer you buy to scan things and print text, otherwise you should be spending a little more money and getting something better. That said, this thing prints photos like garbage.
I printed a picture of my dogs. It was printed on standard paper, with all the settings changed to photo printing optimized for a 4×6 print.
Taking a photo of a photo obviously isn’t that great of an idea, but you can get the gist of how poorly it printed the photo of my dogs. Above is the original photo, then a shot of what printed out. The print is extremely washed out and blurry. You can do whatever you want with the settings, use photo paper, change ink intensities, etc., but you’re going to get a pretty awful looking photo print no matter what you do. It’s just not cut out for printing pictures.
The other silly bit about this printer is that the ink cartridges cost more than the printer itself. Seeing as it uses a multi-color tank, you’ll replace it more than you need to and pay heartily to do so. You could more easily trash the entire machine and buy a new one with new ink tanks for the same money.
Conclusion:
Overall, the F4480 is a pretty solid black and white printer and has fairly strong scanning properties. It’d almost be worth buying to use solely as a scanner if you’re in the market for one at a good price. Printing black and white documents isn’t bad either, but photos and black and white and color mixes look pretty terrible. The price tag on the F4480 can’t be beat, but with expensive ink cartridges, it’s really not worth buying if you plan to do any color printing whatsoever.
If what you’re looking for is a dirt cheap printer with a decent scanner and fair black and white printing ability, go ahead and grab it. If you need more, look elsewhere.
Pros:
+Fairly quiet printing
+Nice scanning ability
+Decent software with good help and tools
+Easy to install
+Inexpensive
Cons:
-Ridiculously priced ink cartridges
-Garbage color/photo print quality
-No USB included
Ratings
Overall: 3 out of 5
Performance: 3 out of 5
Aesthetic: out 4 of 5
Build Quality: 4 out of 5
Disclosure: This product was given to Bona Fide Reviews for review by the company for review purposes only, and is not considered by us as payment for the review, we do not, and never will, accept payment from companies to review their products.
