HP Photosmart C6380′s contain five separate cheap ink cartridges: one large black cartridge for photos, and the standard black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Each standard cartridge costs $10 to replace, but HP also offers XL economy priced versions as well, which we’ll use for our cost-per-page analysis. Each XL colored ink (black, cyan, magenta, and yellow) costs $18 apiece for 750 color pages and the XL photo black cartridge costs $35 for 800 pages.. With those costs, a page of color from HP Photosmart C6380 cheap cartridge will cost just 2.4 cents and a page of photo black will cost just 4.3 cents. Those prices are in line with today’s average cost per page for an all-in-one printer.

Isn’t the worst we’ve seen, it’s not up to task with other all-in-ones we’ve tested from HP. The text prints are generally very good with a bit of stair stepping in smaller fonts, but graphics and photos were marred with a dull blue cast across the spectrum and visible without magnification. In addition, significant graininess in large color blocks including portraits and shading can also be seen. The print quality of the C6380 is satisfactorily, and it’s definitely fine for casual home users who want to print out snapshots.

HP DeskJet D2660 contains two separate ink tank cheap cartridges: one for standard black ink and another for HP’s tri-color tank. Using HP’s XL page yield and cartridge costs, black ink page alone cost 5.8 cents and a page of color cost 9.3 cents. That said, if you do plan on printing a large volume on a single function, we recommend the HP Officejet 6000. It’s double the price of the D2660, but the cheaper cost per page (2.7 cents per black, 2.1 cents per color) will definitely save you more money over time. We aren’t surprised to see that the D2660′s dual-cartridge ink can’t really handle more than simple text and light graphics documents. Black-and-white text output looks fairly pleasing, but the imperfections are obvious to the naked eye: thin lines result in slight bleeding, and blurred characters and cloudy white speckles tarnish the thicker letters, but for all the criticism we can provide, most people tend to care less about text quality as long as it’s at least decent.

We don’t recommend you print too many full-color photos on the D2660. The colors in our sample 3-inch-by-5-inch photos are all grossly under saturated at a low contrast, with choppy gradients and grainy lines running throughout the image. In addition, the skin in the portrait samples falls flat with overly cold, pink tones. If you’re looking to print a lot of photos from your digital camera, look elsewhere for a more true-to-image solution.

The printer is fixed at a 600X600dpi resolution for both black and color. The CP1215 has four cheap toner cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black and contain roughly half of the standard volume of toner. Luckily, the cost of the CB540 toner series compatible with the printer is about average: $72 for the color cartridges that should yield 1,400 pages, according to the Web site, and $78 for 2,200 pages of black toner. Using those figures, since no high-volume toner cartridges are available, our calculations come out to 5.1 cents for a page of color and 3.5 cents per page of black. Finally, the CP1215′s cheap toner cartridge monthly duty cycle maxes out at 1,000 pages. This is definitely suited to a much smaller office with proportionally lighter printing responsibilities.

As usual, we have to congratulate HP on the quality of both color text and documents. While the output speed leaves a great deal to be desired, HP still manages to present well-formed black and color text with sharp edges and even shading across dense graphics. Overall, the HP LaserJet CP1215′s cheap toner cartridge print quality is definitely good enough for small offices that mainly print outtext with an occasional presentation.