Excellent hardware, poor software
Written: Aug 19 '03 (Updated Aug 19 '03)
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Pros: Fast, sturdy, excellent stand-alone operation
Cons: Incomplete assembly instructions, complex installation, poor scanning software
The Bottom Line: For use as printer and copier this machine is excellent. Look elsewhere if you scan more than the occasional single page.
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| jwvee's Full Review: Hewlett Packard OfficeJet D125xi Inkjet Multifunct... |
I bought the OfficeJet D125xi to replace my aging printer and defunct scanner. The D125xi's dual paper trays, duplex printing and copying facilities with duplex sheetfeeder on the scanner were the deciding factors.
Assembly and installation took longer than expected - while most parts went together easily, approximately as illustrated in the documentation, the bottom part of the D125xi caused a bit of worry - apparently the rest of the machine simply has to sit on it. It does not seem to latch, and the documentation illustrates it already in place without admitting that it is packed separately, as are many other parts. It takes a while to assemble.
The software should be installed before connecting and switching on the OfficeJet. This I did, and then I had to search around for a printer cable (it can run on USB or parallel). No cable was included (tut, tut, HP). Not having a spare USB cable handy I used the old printer's cable. It plugs into the OfficeJet via a separate adaptor - it is not clear to me why this adaptor is not integrated with the unit. It took a while before the PC saw the unit - after an hour and several reboots it was eventually working - and no less than three copies of the Officejet icon were on my desktop. Not a very clean and neat installation. I uninstalled two of these, and at next reboot it promptly reinstalled one again.
Next day I replaced the parallel cable with a USB cable, and, sure enough, it asked for the installation CD again and reinstalled yet again. I then uninstalled EVERYTHING and started with a clean sheet. This time it went more smoothly, so after slightly more than a day it seemed to be working.
No problems with the printer - it is fast and neat, and the dual-tray facility is bound come in useful. Stand-alone operation, as a copier, is also quite effortless; you insert the original and hit the Copy button (there is one for colour copies and one for B&W). I have not yet tried the reduction and enlargement functions.
Since the sheetfeeder has duplex capabilities you can copy double-sided originals too (to single or double-sided, since the printer can also duplex).
So far so good. However, where HP slips up royally is in the scanning software. On the control panel two dedicated scan buttons (called 'Scan' and 'Scan to') are used to initiate scanning. Using 'Scan' the software fires up on the PC and the HP Image Viewer allows you to preview, select an area and set the scan resolution, bit depth and threshold (in the case of B&W scans). Not that these are all immediately accessible - most are buried deep in separate menus. Having done this, you click on scan, and the image is scanned and sent to the HP Photo Viewer. Be sure to disable the page analysis and automatic cropping, for my attempts to scan sheet music resulted in huge full-colour image files, rather than the 300dpi B&W images that I wanted. The problem is, if you want to scan another page, you have to set up the scan area and threshold all over again. This means you press the Scan button on the Officejet, then you move over to the PC, where you redo the whole wearisome business. Setting threshold to 'Auto' does not deliver satisfactory results, so you have to do it manually every time, for the value does not seem to be saved. It is extremely time-consuming.
It is possible to bypass the Image Viewer altogether, and send the scans directly to the HP Photo Viewer. Remember to disable the auto-analysis, to prevent it from doing full-colour scans on printed pages. Since you cannot set the scan area it scans the whole glass area, so you will probably have to crop quite a lot afterwards. Don't use the auto-crop - it is inaccurate and often removes wanted information too. Also, the B&W threshold is wrong and cannot be controlled if you bypass the Image Viewer. And all images are save as huge .bmp files. Unimpressive, to say the least.
Another glaring shortcoming in the scanning software is the absence of an option to use the sheetfeeder duplex capability. As demonstrated by the stand-alone copying function, the machine is perfectly capable of doing double-sided scans. The scanning software does not allow this, so, if you have double-sided originals, you will be better off to feed them in one by one, flipping them manually each time, otherwise you will end up with the scans in de-interleaved order, and a lot of work to re-order them again.
Using the 'Scan to' button you can send scans to a different program. However, the software only recognises a few programs (mainly Microsoft, Corel and Adobe applications) as valid destinations, and you cannot specify any destinations not on their list. JASC Paintshop Pro is also on the list, so I picked that as my primary destination. However, every time I press the 'Scan to' button it fires up another copy of Paintshop, so if you scan 20 pages, you end up with twenty copies running. So this is useless too.
Also integrated with the scanning software is an OCR program called Readiris, which is one of the reasons you should disable page analysis. It is not very good, and you are far better off using Finereader, if you need OCR. However, you cannot dislodge Readiris, and no other OCR program is on the list of allowable 'Scan to' destinations. I assume Readiris is the reason why the installation takes well over 230MB of disk space, just to get a printer and scanner working.
By this time I had contacted HP customer service via e-mail. Their reply was prompt, but boiled down to: you cannot scan double-sided, you better learn to love Readiris, for you cannot get rid of it, and no, you cannot choose your own destinations. Using the TWAIN driver to scan directly into other programs works, but the same limitations apply - no support for double-sided scanning, lots of mouse-clicking for every page, and the buttons on the front panel are useless. This is actually a fairly serious problem for, unlike a normal flatbed scanner, the Officejet is huge. When scanning a book I have to get up, put it on the glass, then return to the PC, do everything needed to scan it the way I want, and then get up and repeat the same process FOR EVERY PAGE. When I indicated that HP customer support's answers were incorrect and/or unsatisfactory the reply was that my suggestions would be forwarded to the proper persons for 'up gradation of the software'. One can but hope that this potentially excellent machine will not forever be hamstrung by poor one-size-fits-all software.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 380
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
jwvee
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Reviews written: 1
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