Not a horrible choice, especially at this price. But you could do better.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Inexpensive, prints and scans quickly, good for low-clearance shelves.

Cons: LCD screen nearly useless, one tray for feed and output. No duplexing or wireless.

The Bottom Line: 
Simple, inexpensive, performs very basic tasks reasonably well. Truly average; if you want great quality photos, a true stand-alone machine, duplexing, a usable LCD screen, or wireless...then look elsewhere.

Author's Review
The HP C4480 is a printer/scanner/copier multifunction unit designed for home use. It's cheap, it makes decent photo prints on glossy paper, and it's only 6.5" tall, so it can be tucked into low-clearance shelves.

If you just want a basic, inexpensive printer for home/family use, and you need scanning or copying...then this one isn't bad. But this unit sacrifices a lot to get this cheap and compact, so if you're even thinking about printing on a regular, semi-frequent basis, and you can do without the scanning/copying, you'll be much better off with a regular inkjet or laser printer.

It has no wireless, the LCD screen is nearly useless, and - most importantly - there's just one tray for both paper input and output. This allows the printer to be more compact, but it can be a real hassle sometimes: trying to add new paper at the bottom of the same stack your printouts are piling onto...not fun. This is the main reason I give this printer 3 stars. If you print lots of stuff regularly, then I wouldn't recommend this printer unless space is at an absolute premium and you require scanning or copying.

And don't even think about using this for an office - no duplexing, small paper tray, no faxing.

Now then - let's get to specifics.

Dimensions/Aesthetics/Build Quality

Width: 23.1"
Depth: 17.1
Height: 6.4"

The unit is matte white plastic, with glossy white trim, and looks pleasantly non-descript, like most printers. The card readers are located on the front left, with the LCD screen just above them on the top left.The center front panel flips forward to become the input/output paper tray, and this reveals the inner front panel, which flips forward to replace the ink cartridges. The scanner/copier lid is not removable, so this machine is not ideal for thick books and such.

This unit takes 4x6 up to 8.5x11 paper, and the size of your paper width is adjusted with a little white slider that feels a bit chintsy to the touch.

Overall, it feels reasonably well-built for home use, and operation is simple and straightforward.

The LCD Screen

The LCD screen is a big disappointment. I was hoping this would be an improvement from my last HP multifunction, which I got in 2003. It seems that after six years, HP still likes putting their LCD screens on the top panel. These screens have narrow viewing angles. That means you have to be directly above them to see them, which is obviously a problem if the printer is on a shelf above you, or even on your desk, as mine is.

Other manufacturers, even fancier HP models, address this with flip-out screens, or they just point them in a more viewable direction.

The screen is also quite small, about postage-stamp sized. And it really doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know. I suppose it would come in handy for stand-alone copying, but if you're doing a lot of that, this isn't the printer for you anyway.


Performance

The screen did let me print stand-alone photos from my storage card quickly and easily - I just popped in the card, the photos immediately showed up on the screen. After leaning directly over the printer and squinting to make out my postage-stamped sized photos, I was able to easily cycle through them and print the one I wanted. Since printing photos is a popular activity, I give the C4480 points for passing the CMMDI benchmark. That stands for "Could My Mom Do It" and the answer is yes.

However, I wasn't given the option to adjust photo quality from that screen. In fact, nowhere could I find a way to adjust any preferences at all, for printing, copying or scanning. It seems the software is required for that. But I didn't install that software, because:

1) HP software is horrible. It's bloatware, it's slow and confusing.
2) This is a multifunction device. It's supposed to be able to work without a computer.

So, my test photo, a 4x6 glossy, was, like everything else about this printer...ok. Not terrible. It was grainy and lacked both contrast and saturation, but again, I need to be fair - I used the included HP inks, not the photo inks, sold separately. And it's entirely possible that I could have improved the quality using the HP software, if I'd bothered to install it. But again: I shouldn't have to. I've used plenty of photo printers, and they've printed outstanding photos without me having to turn my computer on.

This test photo took about 90 seconds to print. Not bad. It also printed quietly.

I also test-printed 30 pages of regular text, on regular 8.5x11 paper, in fast-normal mode. According to specs, the max speed is 30 pages per minute. I assume that's in draft mode. My pages took more like two or three minutes. That's not so bad for 30 pages, considering that the print quality was very crisp and readable, and again, it printed quietly.

I then tried scanning a few documents. Scanning is reasonably quick, maybe 30 seconds or so. Unfortunately, the 4480C scans directly to JPEG, which is a compressed, lossy format. That means when your image is scanned, it's already at a reduced quality. This probably isn't that huge a deal for the average user, but if you need this for anything professional, this scanner isn't for you.

The scanner also auto-detects the edge of your document, and crops to that size automatically. This was a constant source of frustration, because it always cut out some of my actual document, and there was no way to turn this feature off. This might not be an issue for a typical document, but I needed my scans to reach all the way to the edge, and that was a problem.

Conclusion

Multifunction printers always sacrifice some of the functionality you'd get with individual units. Unfortunately, this printer sacrificed a little too much for me. However, it is inexpensive, easy to use, and it does the most basic of tasks reasonably well. If that's what you're looking for, it's not a bad printer.