Small business price, big corporation features

We bought and returned the Epson CX11FN MFP. That excellent piece of equipment (reviewed elsewhere in Epinions) was not really up to the task of servicing our small medical office. The office ladies were in revolt, so I broke down and shelled out the extra dough for the 4345.

It turned out to be a strong move, and I went from zero to hero in a nanosecond.

The 4345 was a false start at first. I had to go to some obscure shop in Culver City to even see the beast physically. They don't sell it in Comp USA or Circuit City, but I refused to buy one without actually touching it. HP has a demo program, apparently, but it takes time for them to send you the machine.

Anyway, they had one ready to go at LaserCare, apparently the only authorized HP retailer in LA. The price came out to:
$2500 for the base MFP
$400 for the DSS software (more in a minute)
$400 for a duplexer
$1000 for a three-year service contract (next-day service)

Total with tax: $4800. Ok, so a little more than I expected at first. We didn't get the fax one, since that adds $1000! The one with the stand is also a rip! We don't really need finishing or mailboxes, but if that's your thing, be prepared to pay. You might research buying the options you want piece by piece, instead of stepping up to the x or fx models.

I have heard that it's not worth getting a fax machine option with these things. For starters, this adds $1000 on to the cost. For that much money, you could probably buy a cheapo fax machine every other month for three years! I guess if you want to send faxes from your desktop, it might be handy. But if you really do a lot of faxing, you'll probably have a dedicated fax server, which will also cost less than $1000 in hardware. And anyway, why not just get off your butt for ten seconds, walk over to the fax machine, and send your fax. Done.

So the first one they sent arrived when promised, but it was a dud! Paper jammed every time, and the ADF jammed. Bummer! They sent out a guy to look at it, and he agreed: defective. We had a new one the next day. Nice.

So the new one arrived and we set it up. So far all the office staff agree: it's sweet.

The little ADF can scan the front and back of a page pretty quick. The copy machine cranks out the first page in 8 seconds, a little slower than our analog Ricoh 30ppm beast. It can fire out five copies just as fast as the Ricoh. More than 5 pages, it'll win hands down. The old Ricoh is going back next week, ending a 10 year run at $300/month! We'll make that money back in about a year with the 4345.

The machine works smoothly, and everyone in the office is pleased with its performance. There have been kudos about its duplexing. The paper bin is a muscular 500 pages, and the cartridge life is a strong 17,000 pages. This is a strong player. Two-sided copying is pretty fast, and the duplexer is a breeze to install.

The 4345 slaps a scanner on a very fast monochrome laser printer. HP is the top laser printer company, has been since the LaserJet II. With the right strategy, the company is poised to steal market share from the 30ppm copier people. This machine is just as good as the $12,000 digital MFPs, for 1/3 the cost. It's a solid office-grade machine that is fast enough for modern workers. It gives offices the opportunity to go paperless for a reasonable price.

The machine seems geared to larger offices where you would have three or four of these things on the same network. I think HP would be wise to focus on the one- or two-person offices who just need a copier that can also reliably scan docs to a directory.

I set up the network scan software myself. I hooked the printer up to a "game" wifi box, and my network switch up to the "LAN" port of a wifi router. This allowed me to run the printer onto the network without drilling a lot of holes for new network hookups (where we never needed them before). The wifi setup was cheaper than running wires would have been. Only problem is that the scanner is faster than the network, so documents take a little time to travel to the network folder. The machine is able to make copies while old scans finish transmitting across the network.

Gripe: the network scan software shouldn't cost $400. That's essentially what you have to pay to buy the DSS, a software package that administers scanning to the network. You use the application to set up desktop folders to accept scans. That's pretty much it. That's just robbery, IMHO. That's a 20% tax on a $2500 MFP. You make a networked MFP, you should give the customer a free driver to use it. Period. HP, I'm telling the entire Epinions world what a rip-off your DSS software is. Shame on you.

The machine as sold allows you to scan to email. Can you imagine--it can do something complicated like generate a new email message, connect with an SMTP server on some IP address, then send the document you scanned as an attachment--but it can't simply file that document in a directory on your network unless you use special software!

I considered working around the DSS "tax" by using email sending, then using the attachment directory of an email client as my scan-to directory. Too much work!

And don't tell me it does workflow stuff. Bollocks. The "workflows" in the DSS is not a value-added item. If you give me a programmable agent, for example, that does different things with each incoming scan, that's good. I'll pay $400 for that. Adobe Acrobat does that, and it's a Good Thing. But $400 for a network scan administration utility--I'm sorry. That is not nice.

The "workflows" in the DSS package, as anemically documented in the user manual, simply means the person making a new scan can enter info about the scan on the copier control panel. I agree this is a marginally useful item, but it should be called "metadata" or something. Also, if you have the ability to turn PDFs into searchable documents (something the DSS and 4345 cannot do), you don't need a lot of metadata anymore. You just need Google Desktop Search to search your scanned documents (and this is exactly what I plan to do with our EOBs and patient lab data).

Epson manages to give a very decent network scan utility for free with their $800 MFP. Why does HP's utility cost $400 -- half as much as a very respectable color MFP? And it's not just that HP gets $400--they have a very elaborate license scheme, where they send you this license ID on a colored sheet of paper, then you have to log into their website to receive you actual license key. Real cloak-and-dagger stuff. If you reinstall on a different machine (like when you realize this software likes Win XP Pro, not Home), you have to call HP to get them to reset your license key. Who has time for all this crap? The machine should just work right out of the box without all this extra stuff. They act like they're doing you a huge favor to just administer a scanner over the network. Gimme a break. Heaven forbid you'd want to use linux!

To designate a networked folder for scans, you have to have each computer on the same domain. So you have to have XP Pro on each machine. The software specifies that you can't use network drive mapping to open other directories, and as far as I can see, that's correct. You can't designate computers by their IP addresses, you have to use Windows UNC addressing. So now I have to reinstall DSS on a non-XP Home machine and hope it will allow me to reuse the same license on a different (XP PRO) machine. Forget about scanning to a Linux machine running Samba(?)

Gripe 2: Why does this machine need a 20gb HDD? Are people really using these machines to store documents for sending or printing later? Why not just use a PC or server to do this? Seems to me, everything wants to have a hard drive these days--your VCR, your refrigerator. It's not like you're going to use this HDD to serve documents on the LAN--you're going to have a dedicated machine for this, or several machines. Why not make the DSS more sophisticated to designate NAS for the landing zone for stored documents?

These two gripes ("features") really presuppose an IT department. Maybe market research will determine that most of these machines are selling to small offices with no dedicated IT department. Self-install is feasible when all you want to do is scan to a directory, make copies, and print stuff out. You can complexify it with LDAP servers and all that fancy stuff, but that won't appeal to many end users.