The HP Photosmart C4580 Printer is small and neat and a regular HP home printer being offered every year. It is a smartly styled all-in-one which comes in two colors – ice white and pale grey. It has all the core capabilities most families and small businesses are looking for – printing, copying, scanning, and Wi-Fi connectivity. The print quality is also very good though the speed isn’t.

It has a 38mm LCD display showing only a few menu choices at a time and twin memory card slots for Memory Stick, SD/MMC and xD cards. The paper feed tray is located under the front cover and the power is supplied from a separate black block power supply.

The C4580 Printer supports both USB and Wi-Fi connections; the installation of the Wi-Fi is a little complicated though. The printer has to be installed either through a USB connection or a Wi-Fi connection. The option to install both is not there. For this, you have to install the software again and select the other connection type, giving the computer two C4580 printer profiles to choose between.

Unlike the other low-end models, the HP Photosmart C4580 Printer is equipped with scanning features like the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. This enables you not only to initiate the scan from the printer’s control panel as well as from your computer, but also select the networked computer which will receive the initiated scan. It takes a slightly longer time for the printing work to be done but it makes up in the well formed and easy to read text.

There is a difference in the quality of photo print when using the best quality photo paper and the normal plain paper. The printing time is significantly more for the photo paper as compared to the normal plain paper. The copy speeds also varied when using different quality papers.

HP Photosmart C4580 Printer is an affordable all in one which makes the jobs easier for a home computer user.