Oops, the paper jammed again

I bought this to replace my ancient bubble-jet, and didn't need much in terms of image quality. This attractive HP looked like it made decent prints, and would still cost half of what a laser printer would to operate.

Installation
First, it spends four to six minutes reading the CD, then makes you acknowledge the copyright notice, then another few minutes to install all the software. That would have been fine, except that I have three computers to install it on, and it gave me a lot of trouble with the networking. I couldn't get the print driver to drill through my Norton firewall. After several tries, I abandoned the install to read the manual and get help from the HP web-site. To my surprise, the software did a complete uninstall. Not having found a suitable printer, it refused to wait for me to figure out the networking, and removed itself. I guess they are worried that I might be using their photo management package with someone else’s printer, so they build put this irritating protection mechanism in place. Other people must have similar network problems, because the HP web-site has a networking utility to help in a case like this. The utility immediately located the printer, and presented me with the printer's on-board web page. Pleased with this, I wait through the software install again and it still can't find the printer. The driver can't get through the firewall. I tried disabling the firewall, opening a port, and whatever else they suggested, but still no luck. Okay, I moved on to my old Windows 98SE system. The driver is compatible there, thankfully, although without much of the photo management software. It can't manage to drill through the Internet protection on that system either. I can ping the printer. I can browse the on-board web pages, which lets me do things like set the wireless encryption key and set a static IP address. I cannot print. What makes me so unhappy isn't even my difficulty getting it to work, it's that their fear of copyright enfringment means I have to sit through the long install process with every attempt. Eventually, I uninstall all of my Internet protection products. It turns out that I have to uninstall everything -- the firewall, the virus scanner, and the parental controls. It takes me two hours per system to remove all that, load the printer software, and then reinstall the security mechanisms. Finally, I can print. My kids can print. With the wireless networking, I can carry the printer to whichever computer needs it and it magically receives the print job through the air.

Printing
It is a huge improvement over the image quality of my old printer. I was very pleased. The speed is amazing. The paper whizzes through like I couldn’t believe, again much faster than I was accustomed to, so I was happy as can be. I printed a photo and stuck it on the fridge alongside the same image done on the laser printer at work. My kids let me know right away what they thought. “Crap”, they said, pointing at the one from this printer. “Great”, pointing at the laser printed page. So much for what I think. The laser-print image is brighter and cleaner than the inkjet, but I am happy none the less. Since then, I’ve adjusted the settings and pictures look a little better than that first try, but still are no match for a laser printer.

I mentioned how marvelously fast it prints. It turns out to be not such a good thing overall, because it crumples the paper on one out of two tries. After struggling with this, and reading the manual about the controls, I discovered the quiet-mode button conveniently placed on the front console. What quiet mode actually does is slow the page feed and print-head motions by about half, which helps prevent paper jams. My suspicion is that they built it to run fast so they could post some impressive specs, and put that button there because it doesn’t work worth a darn at the high speed. You pretty much have to use the slow speed to prevent paper jams. The print quality is better too, with the faint horizontal line between passes of the print head markedly reduced. Now it jams only one out of four. My daughter was doing a late-night last-minute school project last week, and it brought her to tears with the repeated jamming of the paper. The rear hatch is very well placed to make clearing the paper easy enough, but I sure wish they had spent more time getting the paper feed to work.

Software
The included software is wonderful. It includes a fancy photo edit, manage, and print package. There’s a handy tool for duplexing. After printing the even sides of the pages, it walks you through reloading the paper in order to print the odd sides. That was very nice, except for how the paper jams necessitated so many reprints. The photo printing tool is excellent for printing multiple shots on a sheet at various sizes, with easy image rotation and cropping tools.