I’ve gone for years without a printer. I never print anything from home. I wouldn’t even HAVE this piece of HP shit if it weren’t free with the purchase of my new computer. It’s been sitting in the box for two months because I don’t have any use for it.
But hey, it’s also a scanner! There’s some things I’d like to scan! Let’s go ahead and hook it up and start scanning.
Except, wait. I can’t scan or do anything else because the printer isn’t detecting any cartridges. Apparently I’m too much of an idiot to figure out how to put them in, even though it LOOKS just like the crappy picture in the shitty manual. And until the printer can detect cartridges, I can’t do shit with it.
Fuck you, HP leftover twat-dripping designers, for rendering this piece of shit dependent on the cartridges to do anything. What the fuck business is it of yours to decide that if I don’t need or want the print function then I can’t have any of the other functions?
Otto, if your HP printer/scanner is anything like mine, those cartridges need a heavy hand. Every time I load one, I’m sure something will break when I snap that piece of plastic down. And if you don’t get it snapped all the way down, you’ll hear the gawdafullest noise when the cartridge moves and the plastic gets caught on the doohickey.
Advice your mother would never give you: Don’t be gentle.
It’s not a printer. It’s an HP ink sales location, conveniently located in your home. I will never buy another HP printer again. Their software is bloated and their ink is overpriced. Brother makes decent printers, and I’m going to stick with them as long as they don’t turn into HP.
I had one with my Mac several years ago. I had to use some halfass software patch that meant having to put the thing on a friggn network, yes, a network consisting of one printer and one computer, and even then the fucker never did work right half the time. After the 10,000th page of nothing but @#%^@&^(()*^*&%*^#@@@%%%% on the first line and the rest blank, next page same thing, repeat ad nauseam, I was ready to hop a transcontinental flight and shove it broadside up Carly Fiorina’s hoo-ha.
Then I got an Epson Stylus. I felt much, much better immediately.
Otto, make sure you remove the tape from the cartriges, before you put them in. This seems to be the problem with most people who use an ink-jet printer for the first time. I don’t think much of ink-jet printers in general, laser printers are much cheaper in the long run due to the higher cost of ink rather than toner. But I use mine all the time for scanning, faxing, along with the rare occasion that I need to print in color. It’s also handy that it can be used as a copier with the computer turned off.
HP has worked pretty well for me, as far as printers go, I’ve tried a few other brands and usually end up coming back to HP.
I got tired of payinmg more for a refill set for the printer than I did for the printers with a number of brands. So, I got me a good quality B/W laser printer for correspondance, and got an acct with a local photo service that provides me with better quality colour out put , in much larger sizes than I would ever be able to do on my own with out spending $$$$.
The B/W I use for correspoindance and drafts for clients, the colour out put from the service is cheap and they will drop ship for me. Typical charge for a 4ftX2ft full colour on quality paper is less than $40.
So far its been great and I will never buy a colour printer again… (or at least until they offer a super large format that is cheap to refill, and compatible with my computer for less than it costs me to use the service)…
Tape is off the cartridges and I did everything short of hitting them with a hammer to try to drive the damned cartridges in.
I don’t give a rat’s ass how expensive the replacement cartridges are because I have no plans of using the printer function. I haven’t had a working printer for probably five years and I haven’t missed it. The only time I’ve felt the urge to print anything in that time was a set of Mapquest instructions and it was just as easy to write them down.
What I’m pissed about is that unless the cartridges are installed, the other functions (scanner, fax, copier although I don’t care about that) won’t work. The absence of the cartridge renders the entire unit useless. It’s a stupid design.
Gaffa had it right. Its purpose is not to print, not to scan, but to sell you ink cartridges that dry out or drip out in 4 weeks or 35 pages whichever comes first.
I try to avoid buying an HP ANYTHING because of their printers. No computer, no laptops. ANYTHING by HP is shit by association with their printers.
I’m soon to have the same rule for Canon as their printer cartridges last longer but have circuit chips on them so that you can’t use after market ink supplies or refill kits.
Even if you do get it working for scanning purposes, it will probably run a “cleaning cycle” periodically when turned on/off, each of which uses a small amount of ink, so it will stop working again when the cartridge is empty.
Run HP into the ground (not that that seems all that hard considering the crap products they make) and get talked about potential VP candidacy. I’m in the wrong line of work.
Thank god for the Agilent spinoff in 1999. I can’t imagine how bad those products would be if they were still part of HP.
I have an $2000 HP printer that is the world’s heaviest paperweight. It is an oversized photo printer, which cannot accommodate any known brand of photo paper, including HP’s. It is 40 inches long and weighs more than I can lift. If I could carry it to the trash, I would. If I could afford to send it back to HP, in pieces, I would.
I have to get a new printer soon. It will be anything ***but ***an HP.
I was gonna seriously defend HP’s honor here until I found out were talking printers instead of calculators…such as my HP-15C, still being used almost daily since 1982.
The thing that really pissed me off about the HP all in one that I had in my office was that you could not use the printer with just a black cartridge in it. Even if you were only printing b/W you HAD to have a colour cartridge installed and it had to have ink in it! ( I tried putting the empty one in) It would NOT print, scan, or fax! I spent an hour with HP tech support till I found someone with the brains (or balls) to admit this “design feature”/
Other than the overbloated software package that I don’t use most of, but that had to be fully installed(no express install of just what you need to do basic document print/scan/copy,you need to load the poor excuse for Picasa/photoshop,too), no problems with my HP.
I’ve not replaced the color cartridge in 3 years and have replaced the black one once.
You want a BAD printer, try Lexmark. Cartridges twice the price of HP’s that last 1/2 as long, frequent jams, “paper out” warnings if you don’t have 20+ sheets of paper in the tray.
Of course, I print my photos @ Walgreens or Sam’s Club, so if you do pictures a lot on your HP, maybe it is an ink hog.
HP hasn’t had anything past the front door of this house in over a decade. Out of all the computer stuff I owned none have died and failed and had terrible support except for two HP printers, and a HP computer that had bad graphic drivers for over 6 months before they fix it. The printers both had their striped gear belt problem, with a one hour toll call to get return authorization. They didn’t have an 800 number for their warranty repairs at the time.
It’s really stupid that a combination scanner printer won’t scan without cartridges. It’s what I expect from a HP product. I truly would have just taken it to Goodwill without opening it.