Multi-function printer advice

[Gurm]

Yah, HP's MFC's are hit-or-miss. Some are good. Some suck (bad drivers mostly, the hardware is just great).

I personally stay away from individual cartridges - because when the head finally goes you must replace it (~$100) separately.

The HP personal photo-quality MFC's are decent nowadays. Same (basically) software as the Photosmart printers. But... the scanning software is yucky. Luckily they provide a TWAIN interface still, and you CAN override their settings.

I still recommend HP... or Epson.

- Gurm

[Wombat]

Originally posted by the maddman
Unfortunatley, all of them. A user decompiled the code and found them using win16 calls that block in the driver, and reported it to HP and in the 8 months I followed it HP never responded or even acknowledged the problem.

When was this? I never talked with those guys (company is huge), but I would have thought that they would have had to have drivers that were clear of Win16 crap in order to get XP certification?

[Chrono_Wanderer]

WOW if that's the case I will skip HP myself...

I guess epson is the way to go. Besides their inks are relatively cheap (probably due to the lack of printer head in the carriages that wombat has described... which of course reduces pollution heheheh) My Epson Stylus C80's ink (BTW the printer is very fast) last extremely long also... most of the time i use it to print documents, essays, and some photos.

[the maddman]

Originally posted by Wombat
When was this? I never talked with those guys (company is huge), but I would have thought that they would have had to have drivers that were clear of Win16 crap in order to get XP certification?

I'm trying to find it, I found this in HP's user support message boards once, by searching google with the name of the .exe that hangs when windows trys to login. How ever, since I'm not at work I can't look that case up to get that filename. And there isn't any win16 code in the drivers, they are calling a win16 function in windows compatibility layer. It's been months since I worked on it, it might be fixed for the newer models, but after them not fixing the older drivers, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

(edit)
Can't find the original post, but here's some users fiddling with the fix, HP wrote the driver with a call to PeekMessage which blocks the system for 300 secs, they are binary patching the exe to call GetMessage instead, which doesn't block

http://bizforums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xbbc4a1abbac8d5118ff10090279cd0f9,00.html

(edit)

[K6-III]

Personally, I tend to view Canon's MFC's in an excellent light. Cheap individual ink cartridges, removable printhead not integrated into cartridge, incredibly fast print/copy speeds, decent scanning capability for an MFC....and again, VERY CHEAP INK!!!

[Belwarrior]

Anyone has any experience with a HP PSC 750 three in one(printer/scanner/copier)?
This is for a basic home usage..

[Taz]

Well I've ordered the HP PSC2210, I'll let you all know how well it works

[Wombat]

Please do. I'm still leaning towards the F60, but haven't bought anything yet. Nobody's having sales or rebates at the moment.

[Pace]

Technoid: HP Scanner software is bad?

[Taz]

Update : Well it's arrived, (HP PSC2210) and it's connected up so now for the initial impressions

Priting - Text printing is really sharp both in B&W and colour this is on standard copier paper. Graphics printing is good on both copier and coated paper although I still think the Epsons are a tad better. Print speed is good which is normal for HP inkjets. The photo catridge is extra so I haven't got one of those to try yet, obviously with one fitted the graphical printing should improve.

Copying - Ran some colour copies results were much better than I was expecting. Two problems though, as there is no ADF you have to put one sheet in at a time also the scanning area is almost exactly A4 which could make scanning things like magazines a bit tricky.

Scanning - Haven't managed to do this yet as it keeps producing IE scripting errors . According to HP's docs it requires IE 5.0 or higher, I'm running 5.5 so it should work. Will need to fiddle with it a bit more

Faxing - Haven't had a reason to fax anyone yet, will give it a go sometime in the week.

One nice feature is it has flash memory slots on the front so you can stick the memory card out of a digital camera into it and print off the pictures. Printing off some pictures I took over Christmas, results were pretty good.

As you would expect from HP the menu's on the printer are pretty self explanatory so there's no need to go to the manual when you want to change a setting.

Apart from the issues with scanning I'm pretty happy with it

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Originally posted by Pace
Technoid: HP Scanner software is bad?

Confirmed: HP Scanner software is bad!

[Kurt]

make it _baad_

HP all-in-one look nice but Canon's usually work better...

[the maddman]

Originally posted by Taz
Scanning - Haven't managed to do this yet as it keeps producing IE scripting errors . According to HP's docs it requires IE 5.0 or higher, I'm running 5.5 so it should work. Will need to fiddle with it a bit more

<snip>

Apart from the issues with scanning I'm pretty happy with it [/B]

HP's new scanners use this same IE based interface... It's horribly flaky if you're not Administrator, so we cuss it out at work. (We don't let users be Admins, I work for a city, and after finding spyware on a machine containing DOJ secured data....)

[Jammrock]

I got some advice for ya! DO NOT USE POSTSCRIPT DRIVER WITH MFD'S AND OFFICE XP!!! Office XP does not work right with 99% of PS drivers. Use PCL5e or PCL6 drivers.

Thank you!

Jammrock

[Taz]

Two weeks later and I've still yet to scan something, yeh I know you all said HP's scanning software was crap but I thought it would at least work

It uses some sort of web based interface, I can't tell you exactly because it hasn't completed loading without errors yet When I try and run it I get the following error :-

Line: 172
Char: 2
Error: Member not found
Code: 0
URL: file://E:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\Digital Imaging\bbfe\director\director.htm

If I click on OK to carry on running scripts I get the following error :-

Line: 185
Char: 2
Error: Object doesn't support this property or method
Code: 0
URL: file://E:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\Digital Imaging\bbfe\director\director.htm

Clicking Ok again and I get a window with the HP logo in the middle, no icons, menus or anything.

Being IE related I tried uninstalling IE5.5 SP2 and re-installing it, installing the latest scripting engine and finally installing IE 6.0 SP1, none of these have changed anything. Installed SP3 for Windows 2000, un-installed the HP software and re-installed it, fiddled with the secrurity settings in IE. The user I log in as is an Administrator and the HP software has full control set for system and admins.

Today I phoned HP tech support who said as it was an error from IE it was a Microsoft problem, I then explained to them the error occurs when processing one of their files so it's down to them They then said I need to install IE 6.0 which I have already done, I was then put on hold and after a few seconds the line went dead

I'm going to try setting it up on my laptop in case there's something odd going on with my PC if that don't work then I'm tempted to send the damn thing back. Don't really want to do that as the rest of it works really well