Steve the IT Tech Guy

I have alway been a great fan of HP printers. They really started making an industry standard in their laser printers. There Laserjet, Laserjet II and III were built like a tank. They last 10+ years and always worked. Their PCL drivers are a standard. Compatible with everything. I really like the fact that when you get most of the HP Laserjet printers that the older drivers are usually compatible. Their Laserjet 4000 series are a great example. Again built to last and very easy to maintain. The main things that need replacing are toner and fuser units. These and the larger Laserjet printers are really easy to change the fusers. Either with few screws or even just few screw-less connectors. Their earlier Deskjet were very similar. I still see a few Deskjet 500 out there. They are slow and print quality is poor but they still work. Well in the last few years this has all changed.

I think my thinking about HP started to change with their low end Deskjet printers. They started with a few models that were basically crap. I did not just have 1 with problems I had all the same model with problems. Other issues I have is the size of the drivers for a lot of the Deskjet printers. They started with 100-400 Meg installations. 400 Megs for a printer driver is just nuts!!! The installation can take 20 minutes to an hour to install. Then there is the ink cartridges. Some of the models have 5 ml. Talk about a rip off!! You get what 10 sheets with this for $25. The low end lasers (much like the competitors) is to replace the fuser unit is extremely hard and to spend the time and money you might as well buy a new one. Its a disposable society and with the low end Lasers and Deskjets you might as well buy a new one if they are out of warranty. One last thing on the printers is they change their models too fast. It seems like a few months and the new printer you got is obsolete. They don’t make the model any more and when they do change good luck in finding a new printer that is compatible with the ink cartridge you bought with for your old printer. Its not just HP that does this its also Canon, Lexmark and the other big makers.

Myself I have a HP 6122. Its discontinued but the things I like is it has large cartridge 19ml for colour and 42ml for black. Does photo quality really good, extremely quiet in printing high quality. Also has bonus duplex when need it. For major black printing I use a cheap Samsung laser all in one. May cost me $100 for a toner cartridge but I get 3000 sheets. This is the only way to print text docs.

Another thing thats starting to bug me is their online drivers. I know Windows 98 is obsolete and why support it BUT if you had the drivers for the older printers on the website WHY take them off. I don’t expect them to create 98 drivers for newer printers but why take existing drivers off the website. There are still a lot of users that are still using 98.

Next is the XP support for Laptops. One of the reasons that we still stick with Acer and Fujitsu Laptops are because you can still get some of them loaded with XP or at-least XP recovery CDs that come with them. HP and Toshiba don’t come with any new laptop that I know of that come with XP and again like their printers, if you have an older Laptop that had XP drivers they might be gone off the website. I know XP will not be sold after June (unless Microsoft changes their mind) but still keep the drivers around and installations until its gone. A lot of people and I mean a lot of people don’t like Vista. Especially business. I have not sold 1 Vista PC or Laptop yet to a business since Vista was introduced.

In closing I still like the medium to high-end HP Laserjet printers. Their P2015 mid printers are good for small printing. The 4XXX are a standard in the industry, built to last and easy to maintain. The higher end Deskjets with larger ink capacity are good but avoid the low end lasers and really avoid the low end Deskjets with small amounts of ink. I have never liked their laptops and with the lack of XP support I really don’t and for them taking off existing drivers on the website is really not the correct way to compete in this tight and very competitive market.

ADDON:

Found an Article from John C. Dvorak with his frustrations with an HP Printer he has