| Summary |
I purchased the HP9800d with two tasks in mind: to do production printing of sales materials and to print digital photos in high resolution, large format. I am disappointed to conclude that the 9800 will do neither. In short this printer will not come close to doing what it is advertised to do. I have been the full distance with HP customer support and they also agree that it will not perform yet they did not respond to my request for a refund. I have spent enough time, money and wasted paper to have bought three of these things, or better yet one good printer. This does not include the cost of sales materials mailed late and of poor quality.
Lets start with printing photographs. The printer is advertised to print at a simulated 4800dpi at up to 13x19 inches borderless. One would assume (foolishly) that the printer will do both at the same time. I am a graphics professional using industry standard software, Photoshop CS2 and QuarkExpress 6.5, my computer is an Intel based graphics workstation running XP pro. Sometimes I can get the printer to print an 8x10 at maximum resolution; I have never gotten it to print larger unless I drop the resolution down to best. HP support responded that best and maximum are almost the same so don’t worry about it. If you want to print borderless in Quark, HP support will instruct you to use the old 9600 printer driver and set it to the default printer for that printing job. What a bogus solution when working in a networked environment, no one knows which driver is currently set and the printer tends to get confused along with us. If I send it an 8.5x11 from Quark with 4 full frame images it will only print 3 of them, leaving a hole in the layout. Thus we are forced to design our layouts around what the printer likes not our customers.
Now let’s look at production printing. The 9800 is rated by HP to print 5,000 pages a month. That is 10 reams of paper. One would assume that at this rate the 9800 could do small production runs of specialty sales materials, which is one of HPs advertising points. We have been trying to print a 20 page catalog using two sided printing. We are using HP bright white paper. Paper handling is very poor. Many times it will refuse to pick up paper from the tray, we have found that if you only put 50 or so sheets of paper in the tray it works a little better but is still unreliable. We will set a print job and come back to find that only 2 or three sheets out of 100 have printed, repeat this a dozen times and the schedule is now shot. The 9800 has a nasty habit of pulling several sheets at once from the tray resulting in blank pages in the document and blowing two sided print order. This means that we have to go through every catalog, by hand, and look at every page to make sure they are there and correct and then go back and print the pages that are missing. Do that 100 times and now check your schedule again. To top all this off, paper outfeed is unreliable also. Printed sheets being ejected from the printer will catch sheets already in the out tray pushing them off onto the floor in a big pile. Great way to get the day started to come in in the morning and find 100 sheets of catalog in a big pile on the floor, completely mixed up and out of order, and don’t forget some pages are missing and there are blank pages in there also. Now where did that sales schedule go?
If you connect the printer via USB and load the toolbox software you are in for a computer crash. The software attempts to establish bi-directional communications with the printer and cannot. It will continue to load copies of the toolbox and continually ping for the printer until it uses 100% of cpu time and grinds the machine to a halt. How many poor consumers are out there wondering why their computer hates them when they just bought it a new printer?
In summary, the 9800 might serve a snapshot photographer where demand and expectations are low. It is no where near satisfying a professional graphics artist. The 9800 might serve a very small office that does occasional printed mailings of low resolution and they have the time to baby sit the printer and double check it’s output. The 9800 is definitely not the printer that HP would lead you to believe and I would not recommend for demanding professionals. The 9800 is a consumer printer, at best, that is posing as a professional machine. I have worn out piles of HP printers over the years and have been a very loyal customer. When it comes to the 9800 I feel that I was grossly mislead by HP and then left to hang when they could (would) not address the issues. Any equity or good will that HP had built with me over the years (and there was a lot) they cashed in when they sold me this printer. Rather than just going out and buying HP I will shop the field.
|
Print
| 
Help
Enlarge image
Write review
4.0 / 5
3.0 / 5
2.0 / 5
1.0 / 5
Buying advice
| 
Report errors
| 
Send to a friend
| 
Price watch
