HP LaserJet 3055 All-in-One Printer/Copier/Scanner/Fax (White) Review

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(More customer reviews)Note added October 15, 2008: Amazon still won't let me change my rating, which now would be 1 star (the lowest) based on horrendous quality control. I bought two of these and both had hardware failures within a year or two, of course outside of warranty. The one I bought for my daughter had its network card fail. She can still use it via USB, but not over the network. The one I bought for myself recently failed to scan, fax or copy when using the document feeder, which uses a separate sensing window from flatbed copying and scanning. As a flatbed copier or scanner, it still works. But when using the document feeder, the copies or scans come out blank. And, yes, I've put the paper in the right side up. I suspect that there's a separate sensor or light for that window and it's broken. On top of the horrible QC this seems to imply, my email to HP took them eight days to answer and then all they said was "this case is a hardware issue so our recommendation for you is to call 800-HP-INVENT (800-474-6836) so you can talk with a Hardware technical agent that can guide you through some trouble shooting steps to determine the cause of this problem and also give you the best solution." OK, I call and after over a significant wait time, I learn that they can help trouble shoot by phone for a fee, offer me a trade-in on a new model, or repair this one. No way am I going to waste more money on this disaster. While maybe I've just had a bad run of luck, this does not appear to be the HP I used to know, where quality was top notch.
Note added March 19 2007: Amazon won't let me change my rating from 4 to 3 stars, but I would do so if I could due to networking problems that resurfaced. I suspect that this is an issue with networked printers in general, not HP, but the time it took to solve the problem makes me wonder whether I would have bought this printer if I knew then what I know now. When the network access works, it's great, but if your network undergoes a change (I had to replace a Linksys router that went bad), be prepared to do some work. It took me several hours to get things working again. Before I had this problem, I bought one of these as a gift for my adult daughter, living in another state. She had to get the "geek squad" in to solve her similar problems, at a cost of roughly $200. The problem seems to be changes in the IP addresses in the network, and the manual didn't make it easy to figure out how to even find out the IP address that the printer currently is using. (Hint: Print a Configuration Report from the printer's front panel, using the menu. The manual does tell you how to do that, and the IP address is part of that report.) Once you have the IP address, I think getting the printer back up would be a lot easier -- but I'm not about to bring it down and find out! Hoping this helps.
I have several Macs and one Windows machine and had been using two separate printers for the two "tribes." I also had a fax machine, an old flat bed scanner, and a copier -- all taking lots of real estate. When the Samsung ML1430 that I was using on an Airport Extreme USB printer sharing system broke after three years, I decided to go with a networked printer that could be shared between the Macs and the PC. I wanted a major printer brand, and HP was at the top of that list. Why? Because Samsung had stopped supporting the Mac and, as I upgraded my OS, I had had difficulties keeping the printer working. The old driver didn't work with some OS upgrades. I hoped that a networked printer would make sharing among the Macs and the PC easy -- and to a large extent it has.
I did have minor problems getting the printer to work with the PC since I had to turn off all firewalls during the installation and Dell had two. After about an hour of on-line research and fiddling, I got it to work. Getting the Macs to recognize the printer was a snap -- sorry Redmond, Apple's ads seem on target here, though part of the problem may have been with Dell putting two firewalls on the PC.
After the initial hassle with the PC, which has nothing to do with the 3055 per se, I am very happy with all functions -- with one minor caveat below. As a printer or copier, it's fast (almost 20 pages a minute and less than 10 seconds to first page). The automatic document feeder has worked flawlessly so far -- often the Achilles heel in my experience. Some other reviews (elsewhere, not here at Amazon) noted that half-tone copies weren't the greatest and I'd agree. The pictures come out a bit dark.Some of those reviews noted that changing the default setting from text to picture (or whatever HP calls it) helps, but I haven't tried that yet which is a sign that it's not a huge problem.
I haven't used the scanner much yet, but did a few test scans which looked good. On color photos, the 300 dpi scan was poor, but setting it to 600 dpi did a nice job. The level of JPEG encoding changed from 300 to 600 dpi, with the 600 dpi scan being a much larger file, so it's not clear how much of the poor quality at 300 was due to the scanner and how much to the JPEG encoding. I also have a Fujitsu ScanSnap and will keep it since it is much faster than the HP -- but it cost as much as the HP and just does scanning, so that's not an indictment of the HP. The ScanSnap is intended only for sheet scans, not books or other flatbed material, but is excellent at what it does.
The fax features work well too, and I got rid of my fax machine, freeing up space. I haven't yet gotten rid of the copier, but might. The 3055 will enlarge and reduce by up to a factor of four -- a nice feature. Having only one toner cartridge to keep track of, instead of the three I had before (printer, copier and fax), would be nice. HP toner is about 3 cents per page, a bit more than some laser printers, but much less than ink jets and OK in my book.
The 3055 is also good on energy usage. I hooked up a power and energy meter and, after about 180 continuous hours of light use (only two of use it and we're not heavy printers), it averaged only 8 watts. When the laser engine is working, of course the power peaks up to about 500 watts, but HP has been good about making sure it doesn't use too much power when idle, while still allowing it to start up fairly quickly. I've seen the idle power drop down as low as 6 watts at times.
I'm not sure if I should have given four or five stars to this unit, with the one star loss being mostly due to my networking problems mentioned above. As I said, that's not an HP problem. So if you're looking for a networked all-in-one, consider this five stars within that category.
Note added February 22, 2008: My network did come down again, and this time I set up a static IP address for the machine. With what I'd learned in the interim, it wasn't such a big deal to do and has been working well for months. Now, I'm not worried about the network coming down and causing major problems. But you need to learn what static IP addresses work with your router (it varies!), how to set it (from the Menu on the console on the HP 3055 and choose Network Configuration, TCP/IP, Manual), and then how to tell your computer to find the device (hint: Intel Macs need the newer HP Setup Assistant and will not work with the one I had; accessible from HP's support site). On the negative side, the one I bought for my daughter seems to have a bad network card now. That cost her another $200 geek squad visit to figure out, plus now we have to figure out if it's worth fixing. My rating would now be 3-4 stars (depending if her bad card is unusual or not) if you understand networking really well or can rope a friend with that knowledge into helping you, but no stars otherwise.

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