Customer Rating:  
Summary: 3180 is a voracious ink consumer
Comment: This printer is great looking. It prints photographs well, but they came out dark.
I received it free from Apple with purchase of an iBook.
I believe the reason HP 3180 is free is because it runs through ink at an alarming rate, one will end up paying for the 'free' printer in above average ink cartridge purchases.
When trying to set the print quality to 'Gray Tone' in the 'Color Sync' setting, the blacks print so dark that they are visibly wet when they come out of the printer. I was unable through many different tries to get this printer to slow down on the ink output.
I also had trouble with the printer 'communicating' forever with the computer. Finally, I had to unplug the printer to start over. This happened too many times.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Warning: you will need to edit the registry if you use MS Office 2007 and XP/Vista
Comment: MS Office 2007 will not work properly in XP or Vista if this printer is selected as the default unless the registry is edited. Contact HP for help with this. HP says the problem was created by an Office 97 update. They were slow to acknowledge this problem, but they did eventually develop a fix, though I was unable to find it on the HP Website and had to contact Tech Support to get it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Unreliable
Comment: Mine's just stopped working, after 13 months of fairly light usage. It seems mechanically unreliable. I've had problems with it for some time - after I replaced the first printer cartridges, it began occasionally leaving lines with too little ink across the paper, requiring me to re-print documents. Now, after I just replaced another cartridge, the cartridge carrier is jammed, and the printer is completely unable to function. I didn't expect much out of this device, but I was hoping for something that would remain minimally usable for more than a month after the warranty ran out. Doesn't seem too much to ask.
A lesser problem I've had for a longer time is with the scan software. It's slow, and doesn't have a particularly intuitive user interface. It's automatic selection of a page area to scan is pretty terrible, it's difficult to save scan preferences, and there's no way to scan a multipage document as one file.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great little printer
Comment: I have been using this printer for the past year and have found it to be a great little desktop printer. The quality of the documents and photos are very good and they print fairly quickly. The scanner is quite adequate for my needs although I would have liked a "descreen" function for scanning from printed pieces. Having the ability to read several different memory cards is great because I get a variety of them from company employees who all use different cameras to supply me with photos. I use the OCR function frequently and its pretty good although I have to take some time fixing a number of "misreads" but its very handy to have on my desk. All-in-all, I really like this printer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great print quality, but crazy expensive ink
Comment: The print quality is excellent; we have even printed pictures on picture paper that we felt were worthy of framing. However, the ink goes fast. Actually, make that SUPER fast. With ink costing as much as $15/200 pages, the cost of the printer increases by $100/year if you print a moderate amount of documents. Think about it, if I print a 40 page document for work, it costs me $3 bucks to print! That's crazy. This printer is NOT recommended for moderate to heavy users. It is recommended for occasional printers and picture lovers.
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