Worthless
Pros:
It doesn't look half bad and makes a great paper weight.
Cons:
The quality of print might be better achieved by a child. Terrible software.
The Bottom Line:
Hardly producing decent text documents, this printer should never be used for photo printing, even though it comes with the software to do so.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I purchased this printer because it came with the same ink cartridges my current printer used and it was on sale to the point where it was actually cheaper to purchase the printer with the ink cartridges as opposed to just purchasing the ink cartridges. I now know why.
This printer does not come with a USB cable, which is becoming more and more common of printers today. I know this because I work in an electronics store and we carry lots of printers from several different companies. It does say this on the box, so it should not be a surprise when you get home. Lucky for me, I was able to use my USB cable from my other printer.
The software that comes packaged with it for photo editing is beyond worthless, it's actually quite detrimental to your supply of time, sanity, and check book. The software may lead you to believe that purchasing photo paper for your new printer is a good idea. Once you have purchased your photo paper and you are trying to use the software to edit or print your pictures you will become increasingly infuriated by the program "Not Responding" and automatically shutting down (I've tried on both Vista and XP with VERY little success). You will also be quite upset to find that, though HP has reassured you multiply times that a backup copy of your original image will be saved, once you've cropped an image to focus on a specific detail there actually is not a way to go back to the original image because HP cannot read the image file it just created, nor can any other program. Now say you were able to make it through all of the frustrations of the software or you use your own software to get the photo print ready, the printer itself will probably spit out a few blank pages, or you could get your image ...chopped up so as to look like window blinds, or the color will be off and there will be streaking. It's not all bad though, I once got it to print a text document that nearly looked decent. I'm going back to my old HP All-In-One, not that it is all that much better.
One more thing: There are three buttons and the manual does not tell you how to use any of them. Two are self explanatory and the third, well I just don't know.
Adorama
