HP OfficeJet Pro K850dn

Summary: I paid $500 for a printer that WILL NOT print envelopes of any size or texture. I repeatedly went back to HP, they replaced the printer, but it didn't ...

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Summary: I paid $500 for a printer that WILL NOT print envelopes of any size or texture. I repeatedly went back to HP, they replaced the printer, but it didn't improve envelope performance.

One tech said it would take envelopes better if I remove the auto duplex cartridge and put the other cartridge on. Helloooo -- I am not going to disassemble my office and the equipment to print about four envelopes a month.

Any time I have to print an envelope my eyes well up with pending tears. I am going to unload this thing for $300 and buy something that will work for me. I believe for this amount of money I get to use ALL the listed features. I have got a box of crumpled envelopes I have pulled out of equipment.

Sorry HP, I have been a dedicated and loyal customer for close to 15 years. On the K850dn I have had way too many emails and phone calls with tech support people that are too accented to understand -- you are going to lose my business. I am no further along after having the printer for about six month.

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Summary: My firm bought the K850dn less than a year ago to replace an old 13 x 19 tabloid format Epson Stylus (who's model number now escapes me) that we ...

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Summary: My firm bought the K850dn less than a year ago to replace an old 13 x 19 tabloid format Epson Stylus (who's model number now escapes me) that we had been using for ages but finally was showing its age and wear over the seven or eight years of often heavy service that it had given us. The K850dn was roughly half the original price that the Epson had cost us, and in the past HP inkjets had performed well in use within our company. Seemed like a no-brainer at the time, so out came the company credit card.

The K850dn was easy to set up on our internal network (the Epson had to be tied in as a local printer to one of the computers on the network), and did pretty much everything we asked of it--most of the time. Print quality was very good; while color calibration and matching took a bit of time (it's bad enough doing it for a single computer and monitor, try doing it for a dozen different workstations), generally most of us were all quite pleased with the K850dn's end print results.

I did notice right away that the HP seemed to be considerably more expensive on the consumables budget than our old unlamented Epson was. At first we thought it was because the K850dn was the new kid on the block and that many in the firm were just using it more (given that towards the end, printing to the Epson was NOT an enjoyable user experience), but in truth as time passed we were actually having to buy replacement cartridges quite frequently with the HP. The HP uses four separate cartridges whereas the Epson used a combined color cartridge with a separate black ink cartridge. While the idea of having the flexibilty of replacing only the specific color that runs dry that the K850dn's design utilizes seems good, in practice our actual color usage habits more often than not seem to use up two or all three of the color ink wells fairly evenly. With the Epson, that cost us $50-60 each time that the color well needed replacing, whereas with the HP the typical bill runs $120-130 for replacing the entire color set (both printers seem to go through their respective, separate black ink cartridges at about the same rate). For every two complete color cartridge cycles that the HP went through, the Epson would probably have gone through two-and-a-half to three color cartridges. One additional change at worse, but roughly 25-40% cheaper on consumables, which is not insignificant.

Another issue that cropped up early with the HP was its ability to handle a large queue of print jobs. In short, it didn't, at least not as well as the Epson (and its software) did, or certainly nothing like our old large format HP DesignJet 1055cm did (before it recently died, but that's another tale for some other time). The OfficeJet Pro would balk if the queue got too deep (roughly 6 or 7 print jobs would do it); the printer would complete the job that it was handling, and perhaps go on to the next one in the queue, but then would forget the remaining jobs, and would refuse to accept any subsequent new print jobs until a power reset was done. HP never could provide us was a clear answer on why this was happening, or whether it was something to be expected from this printer. In the end we just accepted this quirk, even if we weren't happy about it.

The more telling and irritating problem that we were confronted with was the HP's fatal paper jam, which of course happened outside of the K850dn's warranty period. The K850dn is prone to paper jams as often (or infrequent, depending on your point of view and whether you have to be one having to clean it out) as most any other inkjet I've ever used, both at work and at home. One particular 8 1/2 x 11 job caused this life-ending situation. It's believed that the wayward sheet of paper worked its way into the inkjet transport mechanism, where either the initial jam or the cleaning out of the paper likely damaged the transport to the point that all the printer would subsequently do was issue error codes. Because of the relative cost of the printer, it was determined that it would be cheaper to buy a new one than have HP repair the thing (which they'd probably just ship us a new one anyways). Not a good thing result, certainly for a $500 printer that barely saw a year's worth of usage before going T.U.

While I realize that...ahem...'stuff' happens, as a business there are expectations that products bought for business--particularly those marketed to business--are supposed not end up costing said business more time and wasted money than they were originally worth. The natural tendency for trying to salvage something so relatively new and young is strong (I never like the idea of wasting something that should still have servicable life to it), but the reality is that we probably spent twice to three times the price of the printer trying to make the bloody thing work again. Even if we had been sharp enough to just stop right away and buy another, there's still the unexpected downtime, and the time needed to get the new printer up and running. Part of the price of doing business? Perhaps, but I would hope that such expense would've happened at a rate longer than once a year.

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Summary: Have had this printer for almost a year and it works flawlessly for me everytime I use it. My only complaint is that occasionally one or more of the ink ...

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Summary: Have had this printer for almost a year and it works flawlessly for me everytime I use it. My only complaint is that occasionally one or more of the ink cartridges give wrong reading (shows less than full reading)even right after replacing it.

The duplexer is just great. The best wide format printer I have ever owned or worked with in 14 years in IT support. I highly recommend this printer.

Sahalu

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