An Unmitigated Disaster, Inflexible but Pretty.

Yes, this printer is unbelievable. Unbelievably useless if you want to print tabloid booklets or other documents on tabloid paper.

For years I've used a 1220C to produce sheet music for my business and it did a beautiful job. After producing thousands of copies, it finally needed replacement and so after reading the other reviews on Epinions and elsewhere, settled on the 9800. It seemed I'd found a good replacement.

Set up is a breeze and the software installed without problems (Using XP). After putting in the ink and running the alignment utility, I thought I was ready to rock. Boy was I ever wrong.

Apparently some Einstein at HP decided that the drivers needed to be complicated and controlled by HP, not the user. They also decided to take a beautiful booklet printing driver (with the 1220C) and turn it into a nightmare.

It simply does not work. One supposedly has the choice of many sizing options, paper options, booklets, edgeless printing and many other, at first glance. Well, they seemed to tie what you could do to other options and for example if you try to take a document and print it as 8.5 by 11 on tabloid and print two pages, it reduces the image size down to letter size. In fact, if you check some options, other options reset and you CANNOT use several options together. For example, you cannot print edgeless images on regular paper, it forces to photo paper. You cannot resize pages in tandem with other options and paper and in general, they've rendered it useless and base it on some driver writer's uninspired lack of imagination.

The list of things you cannot do are endless, the things you can do effectively boil down to one, print standard vanilla documents on letter size paper. Well, you can print two pages in small size in the center of a tabloid sheet. Or you could print one letter size page in the middle of a tabloid size page, really useful..NOT.

I spent conservatively well over 20 hours trying to do what my 1220c would do with one box checked and still have not succeeded.

Print quality is excellent for what it is worth but since this is a tabloid printer, it seems the moron that wrote the driver software would have realized that people just might want to print documents at actual size on tabloid paper.

I always have to wonder, do software writers live in a cave somewhere? Do they use limited imagination to guess how something should work? Do they have a clue as to what someone might want to do with a large format printer? The answer is, yes, yes, no for HP.

So, the bottom line is this. If you want a delightfully classy looking wide format printer to grace your desk but don't plan on printing anything larger than letter size, this printer is for you.

If on the other hand, you want a printer that is useful and versatile and allows the user to set up their documents or print large booklets, forget this printer and hope you can find a 1220C.

Seeking help from HP is an entire other story. Like most companies these days, HP works very hard to avoid dealing with customer problems. Instead they rely on "the user community" to help each other. They don't monitor the forums and give no help on issues that people continually seek help for. They advertise a live chat and this printer is supported but they also have software that first detects your equipment and then either disallows access to chat or allows it. I'll give you one guess as to whether or not their fancy software could detect my 9800.

This puppy is being packed up to send back to HP.

UPDATE, 05/29/07
I've just spent over two hours on the phone with "technical support" and am even more frustrated. Like me the tech tried every possible combination of settings and we still could not get it to print a tabloid booklet. Did I say I hate support systems now? I really think these companies need to keep their support service in the USA and use people who can think outside the script. Getting help is an abomination.

In the end, I give credit to HP with allowing me to return the printer for full credit. Of course then they asked if I wanted to order a different one HA! I told them that after almost 20 years of exclusive use of HP printers, I will never buy another. This entire experience has been just miserable.