Last month I bought an HP All-in-One Printer/Scanner/Fax at Costco. It refused to recognize the paper in the input tray. 49 out of 50 attempts, the Out of Paper light would flash and the printer would just sit there. I called customer support; half an hour later a friendly woman was asking me to do everything but chant over the printer. I cleaned rollers, changed surge protectors, re-stacked paper, and loaded a different weight paper.
Finally, I tried print and it worked! I was amazed that the help desk voodoo had done anything. Thank you so much.
The next day, the printer again refused to sense paper in the tray. I called HP service back and once again checked the rollers, cleaned the insides, etc. After a long wait, HP said it sounded like the printer was defective. They would send me a replacement.
![crumpled_paper[1]](http://www.internettime.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/crumpled_paper1.jpg "crumpled_paper[1]")
The replacement, an upgrade to the newer J4580, arrived. It ate paper. Just crumpled pages beyond recognition. WTF? I went to Staples and bought 24 lb. paper. Whew. The printer started printing properly.
Today I need to scan a few documents. My Mac refuses to acknowledge that I have a scanner attached. I snoop around HP’s customer site and find a new set of drivers. These are compatible with Snow Leopard. Download, install. Computer still refuses to acknowledge the scanner.
Back to HP’s site. I go to the place where you chat online with a service person. I enter Officejet 4580. The response:
We’re sorry, but an unexpected error has occurred. The error has been logged and will be examined for further review. 2009-10-02 22:12:10Z Error on 15.201.8.159: Unhandled exception caught: Error Message: ... and so forth.
I have burned up more than $1,000 worth of my time on this so far. And I still can’t use the machine.
Bill and Dave are probably rolling in their graves over this new HP Way.
HP used to be synonymous with reliability.
Times change.
RSS Feed
Follow Jay on Twitter
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
This post almost brought tears to my eyes because we’ve been living a similar nightmare here with the same printer model. When we launched our IT business a few months ago, the all-in-one functionality of the OfficeJet 4580 seemed like a very good deal. But the excitement lasted less than two weeks when we started having all kinds of problems, from strange paper jams to ink getting finished before you could click “print.” There have been whole days when the machine simply would not work. Then you come into the office the next day and everything seems to be working just fine.
The printer produces good quality output (i.e. when it does actually get to work) but we’re seriously thinking about decommisioning it because our accounting shows we’ve already spent far more on ink than we spent purchasing the printer and it’s been just 2 months since we acquired it.