December 4, 2009

HP Printers - bleagh...

Our office printer died yesterday so I went in to Costco to get a new printer. Picked up an HP OfficeJet 6500 multi-function unit (fax/scan/print) and had two observations. #1) - HP did not offer the option of just installing the driver. It installed a "suite of applications including the Yahoo Toolbar and some print-to-web app that opened up a dialog box every single time I opened a web page. I was able to uninstall these but still, to do this sort of fundamental system change without giving me the option to refuse is a very bad customer experience for me. #2) - the printer has separate print heads and ink cartridges. Priming the printer used up enough ink to drain the Magenta cartridge. If I didn't already have a couple of replacements, I could not have used the printer at all until I got another cartridge. Not a good customer experience either considering that it was 6:00PM, I had some stuff that needed printing and the Costco was 30 miles away. For small office printers, HP is one of the best but they have always, until now, been good about keeping craplications to a minimum. This is not a good trend. And yes, I will be letting HP know my feelings as well... Posted by DaveH at December 4, 2009 6:14 PM | TrackBack
Comments

...but on a plus note: HP always has a huge support base for linux drivers. I have yet to buy an HP printer that didn't work with linux out of the box.

I'm not sure how you're measuring the ink -- but I've noticed when measuring it via SNMP it is a very wacky non-linear measurement. In fact, often it moves backwards -- 50% ink today, 75% ink tomorrow.

Posted by: Spork at December 7, 2009 2:43 PM
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