Don’t ever buy an HP printer. Ever.
We had an HP Photosmart 7350 inkjet printer. Why didn’t we like it?
- It was very slow. It would take at least 30 seconds to print one page of text. When you’re in a hurry, that’s way too long.
- Pictures would take in the order of 20 to 30 minutes to print.
- HP has horrible support for Macs. It is unbelievable, but when their printer driver ran on any of our Macs (G3s and G4s) the driver would peg the CPU at 100% the entire time the document was printing.
- Just installing the printer on a Mac was a pain. Their driver didn’t just show up in the list of HP drivers. I had to drill down through several advanced options to load their special (read: lousy) driver.
- I tried plugging the printer into our wireless base station to allow network printing. No dice. HP don’t play ‘dat.
- I could have it set up connected to my spare iBook running as a print server, but why should I have to run ANOTHER server just to do that? We ended up just having to plug directly into the printer if we ever wanted to print. A big pain.
Our printer finally ran out of ink. We decided that instead of paying $45 for new cartridges, to pay $50 for a new Canon IP1700 printer. This was one of the best purchases we have made. I am in printing heaven!
The printer was instantly recognized by our laptops as soon as I plugged it into our wireless base station. I downloaded the driver from Canon and was good to go (no extra “special” software to “help” me print, just the driver, yay!) I printed off my first page. It took no more than 5 seconds. The printing process barley added a few percentage points to my CPU usage. It practically launched the page at me when it had finished! Yes! Supposedly, this printer will print 4”x6” photos in one minute. It also prints in a much higher resolution.
So, moral of the story: HP, while it may be cheap and fancy-looking, isn’t worth the hassle.