HP Photosmart C6280 - yes or no?

Burtonsnow9 said:

hey guys, i'll be buying my new MBP soon and I was looking at all the printers and i'm thinking about the HP Photosmart C6280.

here's a link to the printer on the apple website.

what do you guys think about this printer and is there a different one I should get instead?

Click to expand...

It's a pretty good printer. Does network printing through ethernet so you can hook it up to your wireless router. The two stages of paper is nice if you want to do some 4X6 photo printing or the normal 8.5X11 paper without switching.

You did not indicate the intended purpose of the printer so you'll need to be the Goldie Locks on this one. The price and all-in-one nature suggests you are not willing to spend too much.

I have owned many printers - most of them HP but have no direct experience with the model in question. Typically, I look for Ethernet, PostScript, and large ink cartridges. Consumable cost is much more important than initial printer price. There's a boxed up HP CP1700 tabloid printer in the garage that requires $600 worth of printheads and ink cartridges to get going. New printers are introduced every few months; often they are cheaper to replace and refill.

A quick scan on the Web reveals the printer you are considering uses HP 02 ink cartridges with 3.5 ml capacity. At 15 percent coverage, each cartridge is estimated to last 240 pages. There are low-cost third-party remanufactured cartridges available though I recommend using the real deal.

See my article: "How Much is that Printer in the Window?" - particularly the sidebar "Ink Price Per Gallon."

HP Printer is great, **BUT** their drivers stink

Rating: hardware: Excellent 😀 Drivers: Very Poor 😡
I bought this printer and the manufacturing quality of the printer is excellent. Too bad the drivers which go with it aren't nearly as good. I have spent many hours searching the net and HP's site, and chatting with online reps but all I've found are people with similar problems but no solutions. I have literally reinstalled the drivers probably 8-10 times.

Here are some of the problems that I've experienced:
1) It took between 45 minutes to an hour to install the software from the cd (and I have a fast pc). There are way too many programs and services that are installed, and many run as services unseen in the background.
2) Some of those services randomly take over your cpu and run at 100% indefinitely. It doesn't occur all the time, but does often. When it does, the only way to stop it is to use "manage services" and stop the service. (rebooting doesn't do it). Keep in mind that stopping the service will disable the printer function that service provides. The most frequent culprint is the HPZ12 service (net driver).
3) The software driver easily confuses itself. For example, if you turn on 2-sided printing, the printer will tell you the 2-sided module is not installed (though it is). You have to go into the driver and turn it off and back on in 2 different places to get it to work. There are multiple ways to change print settings. Some of them work, a lot of them don't.
4) I do not recommend installing the business-level compact drivers available on their site. It didn't fix any of my problems and made some of them more persistent even after uninstalling the compact and reinstalling the standard drivers.
5) When a cartridge runs out of ink, the software will not allow you to override and print anyway. It forces you to cancel the document. If printing a color document, it does offer to print it in black only, but you have to tell it to do that for every single page. My previous printer (Canon i850) allowed me to override the message and continue printing (and would print 50+ more pages with no loss in quality). Cant do with this printer. At least I haven't been able to find out how.
6) HP support is a joke. I know that sounds harsh, but that is literally what I have experienced. Whether you use online chat or phone call, you end up with an overseas rep that takes forever to respond, and then gives answers that have nothing to do with your problem. If you ask that your problem be escalated, it gets ignored.

I could list more, but I think this gives an overall representative picture of what to expect.
Again, the hardware is great--absolutely no complaints there. But you can't run the hardware without the drivers and those are worse than frustrating.

Additional Comment: From what I have seen in my searching, the above isn't limited to this model. Unresolved driver issues seem to be an all-to-frequent subject for many HP printers.