HP PSC 1311 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier Review

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(More customer reviews)UPDATE: If I could change my original 3-star rating to 1 star, I would! There is no need to put up with such frustration after all, even at the low-tier price range!
It's one year later, and I finally gave up putting up with this piece of junk, and replaced it with a Canon Pixma MP150 (which was about $20 less than I paid for this HP). With the HP, I got "jams" reported after EVERY page printed. The "fix" I'd thought I'd found (in my original review) stopped working. No good especially since I usually have to print things in duplicate--and I have more things to print now (still not lots but enough to get sick of this nonsense)! Even worse, it said it even though there was no real jam. But I'd have to reset it after every sheet. Intolerable! And, sometimes it'd come up as having an error when I first turned it on and hadn't even tried to print anything yet that day. Argh argh argh!
Cheap does *not* have to mean shoddy, and the HP is just plain shoddy. The Canon I just installed breezed through a multiple-sheet print test with no problems. Installation was a breeze, too. The only thing that says "cheap" about the Canon, other than the price, is it's a little less than solid sounding, but IT WORKS RIGHT, unlike the HP. I just wish I'd picked a Canon to begin with.
-Original Review-
Before I get into specifics, I'll say that the belief that cheap all-in-one devices are mediocre at everything, seems to be correct! But, for the great [ie, CHEAP!] price of this machine, it's good enough. I rarely need to print, copy or scan, so buying individual devices or even spending much for an all-in-one just wasn't justified in my case.
The machine's working fine now, but HP doesn't really seem to have its act together. First off, it was supposed to come with an installation CD. There wasn't any. Even whoever wrote the instructions didn't seem to be sure on whether it comes with one - one picture of the accessories shows CDs, but the picture of how they're packed shows NO CD! So I guess the packing team got confused.
Then, when I went to HP's site to download the software (rather than wait for them to send out a disk), it says that the download doesn't have all the software on "the CD." But, the download actually *did* have all that was claimed to be on the disk.
So finally I got to turn it on and set it up. It set up easily enough. But, I quickly found annoyance. Most importantly, every time I tried to print more than one page it would report that the cartridges had "stalled," stop printing, and dump the rest of the print job. I discerned that this was due to it holding onto the first page "so the ink could dry," which would be cool but when it did that, its own jam-detection software was thinking that the page - the one it, itself was holding onto - was a paper jam!
Also it would print a new alignment page every time I turned it on. What a waste...certainly HP doesn't think people will leave their printers on 24/7??
I figured that these irritations had to be due to poor coding of the driver software, rather than mechanical errors. YEP! Sure enough, the next day HP's auto-update detected a couple of available patches. Usually it's necessary to download a patch for things like this when the original came off a CD, but it seems that actually fixing the one live on the site isn't the HP Way! That has to be patched too, rather than them doing it themselves for the live downloads and putting out a single fully-functional version!
Immediately after installing the patch, I tested printing a 2-page document. No more "stalling!" Whee! Now it counts as a functional printer!
Unfortunately, it STILL starts printing an "alignment page" every time I turn it on. That's an utterly ridiculous, ink and paper-wasting behavior and I'll be looking to find out how to stop it. For now I'll turn it on with my other hand hovering over the "cancel" button, but I'm hoping that there is some way to turn that idiocy off.
As for the other functions: I haven't tried the copier function yet. But, I have used the scanner for some photos. These photos are in a catalog. It makes a grainy scan. Fortunately, I have Photoshop, so I am able to clean up the images well. Their own image-editing software is a basic-type program. Photoshop works very well and allows a lot more things to be done.
Strangely, it will auto-set to a resolution of 200 dpi and then complain when it's turned up. And, it wants to put "sharpening" on everything (ever see those lines in a .jpg? That's where they come from!) So I ditched that, which also caused an "alert" box. I found out how to stop these irritating "alerts" from appearing (If I didn't want more res and no sharpening, I wouldn't have clicked for it, would I have!!?)
While that did improve things, I still had to "blur" out the dots and lines in Photoshop. THEN I shrank the picture (dimensions and filesize) back down, and it looks almost as good as the catalog's original. But if I had let the scanner put it in as a small picture to begin with, it would have been lousy. Better to make it do a BIG picture and shrink it back yourself after retouching it.
I am presuming that the scanner will do better with text documents that don't have much detail to begin with.
A couple of other things about this machine are that it's loud, and does a whole lot of moving the print carriage for no apparent reason on startup. When using the scanner, the parts related to that start moving, apparently for nothing, when the lid is opened, then about 10 minutes after I'm done scanning they'll move some more. And it all sounds clunky to me. I'm not too confident in how long this machine'll last.

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HP PSC 1311 Multifunction

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