deeblackthorne's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Deskjet F4280 All-In-One InkJet Pr...
Office Space: Let me be frank. I had such problems from the get-go with this computer that it was until a colleague snarked on Facebook, "Did you bash it Office Space style?!" For those not in the know, two peons at the company take a printer outside and bash it with baseball bats and stomp it into a lack of recognition. I wasn't that brash, I'm afraid. I took out the two dead ink cartridges and chucked it into the dumpster out back. I felt slightly rewarded by the scanner bed cover breaking off of the top of the console, and then I returned home to hook up my replacement printer -- not of the HP brand, mind you.
Stunner: I admit it. The real blow is that I have been a rather faithful HP customer for many years. HP supplied me with a total of three desktop computers and perhaps as many printers attached. I gradually became accustomed (even complacent) about needing to replace these things every few years. Electronics break down. Parts wear. I've moved many, many times from high school, through college, a Master's program, and now continuing my studies in the southwest. Stuff just doesn't survive, doesn't fit, or fails to grow with me. But never in my years has one printer raised my blood pressure into worrisome spikes.
The Original Rationale: I bought the F4280 as a replacement printer. My little deskjet was working pretty well, but my graduate studies simply needed a machine with way more output. A social psychology instructor uploaded tons of articles to the course web page, and I needed a printer that could churn out black-and-white copies with relative ease. Hundreds of pages. No, easily a thousand plus. In any sense, I needed a printer that could crank them out with relative ease and speed so that I could get on with reading. I visited Best Buy the next day and dropped a little over $100 on the F4280. The specifications seemed respectable: over 20 ppm in black and white, similarly close in color, scanning, double-sided printing to save on paper costs, and card reading functionality. Seemed worthwhile. I picked it up.
Yes, I was a little annoyed that, I kid you not, Best Buy dropped the price about $10 to $20 for what I paid. Back when gas was still high, I figured whatever savings I could milk out of them retroactively would get me in the pump at the end.
Setup: Very easy and similar to other HP equipment and printers at large. I do appreciate that HP includes super large, unfoldable picture directions for even the most skittish of hardware users. I would wager that it took as much time to unpack all the baubles than it did to get it up and running.
There were only a couple of quirky things.
First, the scanner bed door. The scanner is on the top face of the unit. Users have to attach the scanner cover to two tabbed pegs on the rear side of the printer console. I initially kept my printer on a lower level of my desk, which provided too little room to allow the cover to swing up and down freely, so I would have to readjust it periodically.
(No worries. I'll get to the nightmare of scanning documents in just a moment.)
Second, paper is feed and released through the same tray port. The page capacity is suprisingly miniscule for this all-in-one unit. You can fit maybe 40 to 50 pages comfortably in the tray. Printed pages loop over your stack. You have to extend a flimsy plastic panel to catch printed pages. Because the panel isn't elevated or slanted, if you print more than a few pages, it's easy for the remaining ones to hit the floor. Just do yourself a favor and stand sentinel while waiting for your stuff to print out.
I relocated my printer to an end table. The F4280 included everything in box except the USB cable, which I already had from my previous printer. The box includes a full black and color cartridge. Bonus! I bought a pack of paper and took it home. The setup worked well. It's the aftermath that sealed its fate.
Romancing the Inkjet: The F4280 felt like a couple of good first dates with a premature set tone that things would go well for us in the long haul. The printer did a good job of churning out copy quickly without much hitch. The only grief was needing to manually turn the odd- or even pages around and refeed them into the machine to get dual-sided printing, but it wasn't a big deal.
It was maybe the third week of classes when my black ink cartridge finally gave out. Fair warning to those not in the know. HP makes so much more money off of cartridges than their printers. Regular sized ink cartridges make claims of 200-250 page capacities. This model features an extra-large capacity cartridge that ups the ante to around 600 pages. Over twice the capacity for maybe a bit less than twice the price if you can shop around. (I recommend OfficeMax.)
HP brands the F4280 cartridges as "Vivera Ink," renowned for high-quality, smudgeless, clear color ink at an affordable consumer price. The Dunkin Donuts of Ink, you know. I went to a local store to get an ink cartridge refill. Having had no problems in the past, a retailer could not refill the Vivera ink. Puzzled, I asked why, and one delightfully honest lady said, "They won't let us. The ink is too new to do it." I thanked her and picked up a couple of XL cartridges, though I had blown a bit more money than anticipated.
So, one printer and two big cartridges assumed to last me a while, I went back to my typical printing habits. I did what every other ink tightwad would do. I printed in draft mode. I did two-sided printing. I only kept my printer on as long as I was actively printing documents, and I turned it off so the ink would evaporate off of the cartridge heads. I had a few bucks left on my university card, so I would kill eight cents a page in the lab on the first floor instead. I'm a little fuzzy on the time, but the ink ended up running out on me again maybe two, three weeks later despite best-intended efforts. Despite saving $3 in recycling my used cartridges, the F4280 was really milking my pocketbook dry!
I remember on one occasion wanting to scan some notes from a statistics class. Nothing fancy. Just some notations and graphs written on notebook paper in pencil. Scanning was absolutely atrocious.
One thing you have to know is that the software and drivers package for the F4280 is so bloated and clunky on even a relatively swift and stable PC. Utilizing different functions of the PC requires opening a separate software program for the F4280 and navigating pretty yet unsubstantive menus and icons. Whether you want to scan a document or update your printer settings, you have to wade through a lot of garbage and distraction on screen to make even minor changes and updates. And say you're like me and are a diehard for dual-sided printing, you have to set the changes through this program or else you'll have to manually configure those settings over and over in your word processing, spreadsheet, or office programs.
Anyhow, after needing to select Scan on screen and hit the scan button on the printer, the F4280 grinded and grinded through the process. Now, I haven't used a scanner in quite a while, but I "get" the whole "warm-up" scan before seeing the finished product on screen. Not with the F4280. Even after manually scanning the notes a second time (just one page alone!), maybe only the top quarter would be visible and grossly distorted in size. It wanted to zoom it to maximum size even for a standard 8.5 x 11 page. I tried tweaking settings to no avail.
"Screw it," I said, recognizing that I just needed to print articles. I bought this thing for printing speed, not the bells and whistles.
The end of the end came last night. I took advantage of a 15% off sale at my local office store. During one ink refill visit, I discovered that you could kinda get away with removing a dead cartridge and using the remaining one instead of needing two cartridges simultaneously to use the product. I had been running off of a color one for the rest of the semester, and I had since abandoned the intentions of printing all the articles. I just saved the PDFs and read them (and highlighted them) on screen (as much as my eyes hated me for that!). I popped in a new black cartridge -- number five of the series -- and it didn't survive the stuff needing to be printed up for next Tuesday's class.
Sartre's "The Look" and some stuff by Husserl took up maybe sixty pages, not even that. It survived five pages of Gadamer before grossly streaking and eventually drying up. I popped out the dead black cartridge and barely eked out a sickeningly pale, lifeless green out of the other cartridge. Utterly unreadable, I went to bed angry, remembered that Circuit City was going out of business, and resolved to get a replacement printer. I went to Office Max to drop off a total of four dead cartridges and lucked out in an Epson model priced around $70 before discounts.
Moral of the Story: Don't waste your time with this printer. Just don't even try it. Not that I was expecting anything spectacular. I wasn't! I just wanted to get the specifications as packaged on both the printer and the cartridges and both failed me miserably. Despite taking appropriate preventative measures to extend the life of my printer, the substandard performance empowered me to part ways with this brand. I have had such trouble with HP that I am highly hesitant to purchase future products.
How appropriate that I got off the HP bandwagon when I picked up a Toshiba laptop last semester. Between that and this Vivera crap, maybe it was high time we both moved on. I can't really wish HP the best of luck in good conscience. This experience was nothing shy of terrible. I believe that HP has provided better products in the past and I hope the company returns to such standards.
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