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Tue, 17 Apr 2007

One year later: HP Officejet 7310 All-in-One

OK, I have to admit... part of this is me just wanting to play with my new camera. But still, I've been meaning to blog for a while about my printer. I've had it for over a year now. This means that it is likely that the article isn't useful to anybody that is thinking about buying a printer. But it also means that I can give a fairly experienced review of this machine. So here goes.

Overall review: One thumb up, One thumb down

I have mixed feelings about this machine. In general, I think it is a great piece of hardware. Unfortunately, it is coupled with horrible support. Just about every negative comment I have has something to do with a limitation of the bundled software or the incompetency of HP tech support. Knowing what I know now, I would not have bought this machine.

Control panel: Two thumbs up.

The control panel is well laid out. They didn't try to compress all of the features into a few buttons and a labyrinth of menus. On top of being functional, it just looks gosh darn good. The controls are expansive, also. Lots of functionality available in each set of menus.

Card Reader: Two thumbs up.

Lots of different media supported here. One of my requirements when shopping for a printer was that it had to accept the Olympus xD card format. This one does. Once you put the memory card in, there are a ton of options available through the menu system for printing out the pictures. I can even choose the pictures to print via my camera menus, then stick the card in the printer, and the printer will just start printing for me. That's very nice. The other thing I like is that the HP software puts a mapped network drive on my computer so that I can browse and modify the media in the printer just as if it were connected directly to my PC.

Flatbed Scanner: One thumb up, One thumb down

It works well enough. The flatbed wasn't really one of the reasons I bought the machine. Sometimes the scanner gets confused when I try to use the flatbed. It keeps telling me that the document feeder is empty. Well, duh.. that's because I'm using the flatbed. Not even tech support could help me (more on that later).

Document feeder: One thumb up, One thumb down

This was the primary reason I bought the machine. It has been both my greatest source of joy and frustration with this machine. This is one of very few machines in its price range that is rated to handle up to 50 pages and scan them duplex (scan both sides). I scan a lot of stuff! Having a scanner that can handle all that for me unattended is a massive time saver for me. I really love the duplex option (when it works).

The problem is that it doesn't live up to its ratings. First off, it often has a difficult time scanning old papers. The rollers don't move them consistently, and the results are often what appear to be streak marks as each section of a page is scanned longer than it should be. Second, I'm rarely able to scan more than 6 or 7 pages consecutively without the scanner software coming up with some kind of error that forces me to start my scanning all over. As a result, I usually don't even try scanning more than 6 pages at a time. Doing so just wastes time. I've spent many hours with tech support on this issue. I even followed their advice and paid $300+ for an upgraded copy of Adobe Acrobat to no avail.

Fax: Two thumbs up.

I don't use this functionality much. But when I do need it to send things now and then, it's really nice to have. I haven't ever had any problems with it.

Network interface: Two thumbs up.

This machine supports USB or Ethernet. That's really nice for me, because I like working via wireless from my laptop. I can scan, print, whatever from wherever I am. The hardware support for Ethernet is pretty good also (see below for software). The menus support static setup as well as DHCP, and it was really easy to configure.

Duplexer: One thumb up, One thumb down

I like printing on both sides of the paper. It reduced the amount of paper I have to waste. This is one of the reasons I got this machine. I've never had any problems with the duplexer itself. However, sometimes even when I tell the software to print in duplex, it decides not to, or will decide to only print duplex on some pages. Very frustrating when I think I'm saving paper and come back to find that I actually used twice as much as I expected.

Printer: One thumb up, One thumb down

The print quality is average. There are some issues with the vertical registration. That is to say, a perfectly vertical line doesn't print perfectly vertical on the page. The photo's come out looking nice enough for my needs. Though, I really wish I didn't have to change out the black ink for the photo ink when printing pictures. Other HP modes have 3 slots so you can have your black, color, and photo inks in the machine all at the same time. Knowing what I know now, I would have put this on my "required features" list. Ink is expensive, each cartridge is around $30. Fortunately, I don't do a lot of printing. I might use 4-5 cartridges in a year.

Software: Two thumbs down.

The software that comes with the printer is aweful. The TWAIN support between the scanner and other applications takes so much control of the process out of the hands of the user that there's no way to fix things when they go wrong (almost always). Many of the menus and settings are outright ignored when its time for the printer/scanner to do something, and it always is coming up with some kind of error to interrupt what I'm doing.

Part of the problem is that everything is so proprietary. I wish there were alternate generic drivers out there that would work with my machine. But, alas, there aren't. And, there's really no hope of HP ever fixing any of these issues. I'm quite certain that somewhere out there, there's a programmer that could probably fix all of my problems with 5 lines of code if he wasn't so isolated from the customers with dozens of layers of management in between unwilling to justify the cost of his 15 minutes plus the dozens of hours of documentation and QA that would be required to solve my issue. As a programmer, I've been on the flip side of that situation and I know exactly what it is like.

The biggest frustration I have with this stupid machine is that it is constantly telling me that I'm out of disk space when scanning something, when it is clear that I am not. However, every time I get that error, it always makes me start over from page one. Sometimes I can fix this a little bit by restarting my laptop. But that usually means I can get about 7 pages in before the error hits me instead of only 3. I have spoken to HP tech support about this so many times, and they just don't know what to do about it. Which, brings me to my final issue...

Tech support: One thumb down.

I only give tech support one thumb down, because they do have one redeeming quality: They provide online chat support and are usually available fairly quickly whenever I want to talk to them. That's nice that I don't have to wait too long before talking to a person. Too bad that person has no idea how to solve my problems. There has never yet been an instance when I have spoken to HP tech support and actually resolved my issue.

I have lost count of the number of times I've either rebooted my machine or re-installed my software on their instructions. Once, they even told me I needed to buy a new copy of Adobe to get my scanning working (see above "Software" issue). I did what they told me.. man, that was stupid.

Bottom line with tech support is that they really don't seem to know how to fix anything. All they really do is read the stuff off the support site that I already read before contacting them. They treat me like a moron, and then when they find out that they can't fix my issue by following their checklist of things to try, they try whatever technique they can to get rid of me. Having worked tech support in a call center before, I'm well aware of the techniques for getting rid of a customer you can't help.
posted at: 22:52 | permanent link to this entry | Comments: