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HP needs to fire whoever it is they use to write their software, and start over with some new drivers and interfaces. As an example, after you send a fax using the front of the printer, a window pops up to ask you what you want to do. I like the quality of printing, the speed, the automatic duplex and document feeder. The printer is a great piece of equipment, everything is does it does well. The newer HP's do not use the six print cartridges that this one uses, so I can only hope they are still available in a year or two. That window pops up to tell you it is paused to let the ink dry, to tell you you'll need in pretty soon, and a host of other minor things that you don't need to know.
The fax works well, and it is the photo printer is amazing. This is the third HP C7280 I've purchased so far, two for work and one at home. The software is not so great, and although it constantly updates itself, it still is the weak link. Despite the problems with the software, I would recommend the printer.
Worst purchase I ever made in the IT industry (the last 20 years) next step. too many problemsI chose this printer for it's all in one capabilities and wifi mainly-Had problems with printing over wifi many times, it works only from my mac and not fron another laptop with windows-got many errors and spent too much time on ink cartridges/head errors-too expensive to replace catridges, this printer is an ink eater.the final one was a mulfunction error (that I spent hours and hours tryng to resolve it with no success). For the last 3 months the printer is just sititing on the desk without operating. I will buy another all in one printer and that definitely will not be an HP one , even I was a big fun of HP printers till now.
If you haven't gotten the idea yet, I'm really down on the HP C7280 and HP in general. That was the HP line for many months, just click through the dialog, we're not going to fix the bug. Oh wow. While printing, the number of pages reported dynamically in the MS Windows printer control panel is 3 pages for every side printed.Now a word about an alternative machine. One might think that cropping would be the obvious way to handle aspect ratio changes, but hey, this is HP and I think by now you've got the picture and it's not 4:3 or 3:2, it's HP:TreatsCustomersAsMarks.Oh, now back to the ink and paper situation, HP sells both, so what do you think.
If you ignore the Memory/In use light steadily on even when the manual says it shouldn't be on, you'll be OK. It may be that the more one spends on a machine, the fewer intentional limitations are present, but who knows without buying multiple products.Now for some examples:I was trying to print a hardcopy of some Tom Swift Books that I got off of Project Gutenberg. And let's say you run out of color ink and want to just print a B/W doc. I hope now you're really getting the picture.Now let's move on to pictures. Anyway, I'm finally roused from my reverie and I won't buy or recommend another HP product, period. One might think that this would be an obvious thing to support. My plan was to print the odd pages, turn the paper over and put it back in, and then print the even pages.
Well, well, have you ever heard of expired ink. And of course an HP machine couldn't work with expired ink that it's not supposed to be using could it. Ha, ha, think again.As I said before, this baby has every possible sophisticated feature defeated. I have a PhD in image processing and what is really getting to me is that I've stayed with HP out of loyalty, or sloth, long after anyone with far less training would have bailed on them. In fact, I haven't bought a non-HP printer since I purchased one of the original HP inkjet printers circa 1984 while working for Watkins-Johnson Co. I wanted to create a booklet with four pages on each sheet of paper, two front and two back, and I wanted to be able to cut the sheets in half and bind it like a paperback book: 1/2 of 8.5x11 or 5.5x4.25. At this point, though, I feel personally insulted by HP. Just ignore the light, the machine works fine with it on.Now a final summary.
The camera is 4:3 aspect ratio and you're trying to print to a 3:2 media, say 4x6 paper. And let's say you want your paper picture borderless. I will say, though, that most of the waste can be defeated with enough time spent at the LCD control panel.OK one final item that may have some humor value. In fact, everything of any sophistication that I've tried seems to have had significant thought at HP and intentionally defeated. Now, not all of these printers were C7280 models, but I feel personally insulted by every one of them. The cropping algorithm doesn't even approximately work and it crops away obviously useful information. Perhaps there's a decent model out there somewhere but one certainly can't tell via the "technical" specifications or literature what arbitrary limitations may or may not be present in a particular product.
So the page registration would get goofed and of course no booklet. To go further, let's say that you've found the driver setting that cuts down on color ink use and you don't run out that often. Don't think of this machine, or any HP multifunction machine for that matter, as anything other than a toy. And second, even if you find the driver setting that defeats the use of color ink, the machine still uses it, albeit somewhat less voraciously. Well.
Of course one can create a multipage PDF by feeding from the glass and hand uncropping each image before it's sent to TWAIN. What I find most interesting about this particular tidbit is that the device hardware is perfectly usable for a pretty serious task, but the driver software has been intentionally broken in a way that precludes the task. It's not as if features are randomly there or not, it's that every one is defeated.Now let's move on to faxing. Let's say you've got a compact camera, say a Canon SD1100IS.
Don't ask to have it working properly, though, as Canon support will say the printer is broken and you'll have to return it for warranty exchange. Of course in the HP way, even the patch has a bug. It's not perfect, but at least I can scan whole 8.5x11 pages from the ADF. Ha, ha, think again.One can use the ADF to scan of course, but the scan driver is configured to automatically crop documents fed from the ADF. in Scotts, Valley, CA. And there's no way via the TWAIN interface or even via HP's solution center software to change the default behavior. But some big customer must have gotten to them, for recently they've put a patch up on their website. But the MX860 has an input duplexer so one can do not just 1 to 2 sided, but 2 to 2 and 2 to 1 copying jobs as well.
Imagine the exchange between engineering and marketing when marketing asked for random sheets to be ejected if the back sides were already printed.Now let's move from printing to copying. One might think that since this thing's got variousflash ram ports that one could configure the machine to receive faxes to flash. Between myself and my recommendations, HP has benefited from four printer purchases in just the last year. One still can't receive faxes to USB flash. Well, well, this does work. Well you have now.
The machine's got an output duplexer, so one might think one could do 1 sided to 2 sided copying. It's turns out that you can just click through this dialog and get a duplexed print. So one might think one could use a product like Adobe Acrobat to scan letter sized sheets from the ADF and store them to a PDF. Maybe you're starting to get the picture.Now let's move on to scanning. Let's say you install this machine on the network and set it to auto-duplex.
Of course you know, I hope by now anyway. I don't need to laugh any more I hope. Before discounting my rant as paid for by Canon or something, consider that up until I purchased the Canon, I was a "buy American" consistently HP customer. What's really disappointing is that retrospection shows that I've had indications of HP's decline that far precede the last four purchases. It's not just that I've made a fool's purchase, it's that I've consistently recommended HP to family and friends. The printer somehow detected that the paper had already been printed on the back side and would randomly eject pages without printing on them.
Yes you can do this, in a way, but the data is stretched to go from 4:3 to 3:2, making everyone either very fat or very thin depending of course on the orientation of the picture. So I messed around a while and found a scheme where I could use Microsoft Word to print first the odd pages and then the even pages at two to a page. First of all, it's a nifty printer with good speed and nice looking output. And the way that the machine constantly abuses you by wasting paper and ink, and the limitation that it won't work in black and white mode without color ink installed are quite insulting. The MX860 crops when making aspect ratio changes on photos and the cropping algorithm is not bad.
I called tech support and after much run-around, I got the official statement thatI could only do this by selecting "manual duplex" in the printer driver, thereby forcing me to separately feed each sheet. I won't say much about paper, except to say that this machine takes every opportunity to print a superfluous page quite seriously. And it's even worse than getting different sized pages. But that's about it, everything else, copy, fax and especially scan are really amateurish. No need to say what happens, you know. Well of course none of the printer driver's booklet modes would do what I wanted. Ha, ha, think again. First, by default the machine uses color to ink to print black and white documents.
I got so fed up with the C7280 that I went out and bought a Canon MX860. Well what do you know. I've had the C7280 printer now for more than a year so I'm quite familiar with it. This thing's got an ADF, right. But ha, ha, every time you print you get an error dialog that the duplexer feature is not installed.
We are junking it, not even giving it away for a tax deduction. We didn't buy a maintenance agreement or we would have taken it back. Stay away from it. Stay away from it. We have owned this "printer" for 7 months and it has NEVER worked right. It is junk. Fax has never worked right, printer continually jams.We have called someone out twice to work on it and it still is junk.This is truly the absolute worst printer I have ever owned.
In HP's case it is too far. As with all major issues when I cannot find a fix myself or on the web I emailed the company support desk but did not get a reply.I strongly recommend that when buying a printer people consider: A) What they need the printer to do. Held to ransom by my printer, "pay or else."Having a printer that cannot be relied on because the manufacturer purposely builds in a way to force the purchase of consumables is just wrong, and for that reason I will not buy HP again. What is very difficult to find out is: To what lengths will the company go to get the revenue from ink. The HPC 7280 printer was not the worst HP printer that I have ever owned, but it certainly forced me to make a decision that I should never have had to.As usual with HP, the hardware is very good but the software is diabolically cumbersome not to mention CPU and memory hogging - but that's not the worst of it. The firmware (the software in the printer itself) prevented me from getting normal mono printout because the light cyan ink cartridge was empty.I tried all sorts of things to find a workaround as the black cartridge was full, but no joy, the firmware was preventing any printing until I replaced the color cartridge. B) The cost of consumables.C) What the printer does if you run out of ink in an individual cartridge.Certainly it gets progressively harder to discover the facts as I believe it is well known that the money is in ink, the printer has a much smaller profit margin compared to the consumables so the printer is discounted to reap the ink benefits.
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