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Newsletter – August 20, 2009 – Printer Trials and Tribulations

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Hi,

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Printer Trials and Tribulations

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Yesterday I had a pile of urgent documents to print, sign, scan and return. Sadly my trusty old Lexmark printer, which has seen noble service for over four years, but lately has been creaking a bit, finally gave up the ghost.

In a great example of sod’s law I couldn’t drive to any of the nearby computer stores, as I had loaned my car to a relative for a few days, so I had to see what was available on the high street within walking distance.

I finally bought an HP Photosmart C4400, not because I am any particular fan of HP, but because it was all I could get.

Now that I have hammered its printing and scanning functions pretty heavily for a day, I thought I would do something very unusual for me – I would write a product review.

So here it is.

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HP Photosmart C4400 All-in-One series

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This all-in-one printer, scanner, copier was bought to replace an ailing five year old Lexmark, so how does it compare?

Value

On value pretty good. Over the last few years the prices have come down quite a bit. On the UK high street I paid £39.97 (about $US66) “on special” at W.H. Smith. This is almost half of what I originally paid for the Lexmark.

Installation

This I have to admit was a huge disappointment. It took me over 30 minutes to install the software and cope with all the nagging the install process gives you – despite selecting the “typical installation” option.

That I could have coped with but much worse was to come. The install process installed a sneaky little program going by the name of hpswp_clipbook.exe.

This little devil attached itself to internet explorer so that every time I opened a new IE tab it popped up wanting access to the Internet and installed a Yahoo toolbar on my IE. Personally I can’t think of anything more useless to take up valuable screen real estate than a Yahoo toolbar – does anyone actually use one?

So I spent quite a lot of my time getting rid of this little gremlin. It’s so typical of the arrogance of many of these large companies. They just pull stunts like this and get away with it.

So, overall, installation was very time consuming and stressful – 0 marks out of 5.

Printing

I printed my documents ok. The quality seems no better or worse than most other printers.

The speed was a bit of a disappointment. On the box it said up to 30 pages per minute in black and white. That sounded good and a lot better than my old Lexmark could ever manage.

The devil seems to be in the words “up to”. I suspect if you had pages with one or maybe two lines on them, then perhaps it could manage 30 pages per minute. The best I could manage on “normal” documents was 4 or 5. Quite a difference.
Scanning

I had to scan some 70 pages. The scanning function is actually quite good and I was able to complete the task in about 1 ¼ hours – about one page per minute.

It’s a bit more automated than the Lexmark was, as it will automatically scan to a PDF, put it in your desired folder and generate the next filename in a “scan0000n.pdf” system.

The great pity is that you can’t set it up to be totally automatic to the point where you can just feed it the next page and push one button. You still have to mind it and make lots of clicks for each page. So – it could have been really good but it is in fact only average.

So – in summary it’s OK but pretty average. Would I recommend it? No – mainly because of the grief the install process gave me with its bit of “malware”. It really is time these large companies treated their customers with a bit more respect.

In fact, this is the first HP product I have ever had – and it will probably be the last.

Next week we will get back to more discussions about how IT jobs are going in the recession, and a look at one of my favourite project managers.

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Previous newsletters.

In response to several requests, we have published many of our older newsletters. You can find them at http://www.jacksguides.com/news.html

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Enjoy and prosper in your chosen career.

Till the next issue.

Kevin Ramsey

Founder of Jack's Guides