I have been a faithful customer of HP products for 15 years, But I will never buy another HP product.

The "date code" on HP ink jet cartriges is an unfair marketing scheme, the likes of which I have never seen in the USA before. Shame on HP. I will do every hing in my power to seek revenge.

There's a reason Kodak's message is appealing. If consumers weren't bothered by their inkjet experiences, the message would fall on deaf ears. Considering the issues with printer drivers that are not resolved, and the overwhelming response to Kodak's marketing affordable ink, I think HP would do well to pay attention and revamp their products and marketing strategy than explain away someone else's [rather effective and appealing] marketing.

I read your comments, in no way did you state your ink prices are competitive. My experience is that HP printer software consumes tremendous resourses on a home computer. I have instructed all my students and clients to be aware of your processing overhead, high prices for supplies, and your printer quality is low. No wonder HP is called Hipe.

great review.

Robert Resendez

htttp://www.computerbros.com

Hi Angela,

Did you see the new page at HP.com which discusses the Kodak advertising campaign for their inkjet printers?  I'm an employee of HP, but I think most people will find it to be a solid response.

Bret Bottger, HP

HP 02 XL packs vs Photo Value Packs vs Combo Packs vs Single Cartidges

I have a C6180 and love it.  It prints amazing photos and is a great printer, but I really get frustrated at the ink games HP seems to play.

Can you please explain the differences between the different cartridges?  At face value the photo value packs seem to be a drop dead obvious better value (I have so many 4x6 sheets of photo paper that I could care less about the paper), but generally the Photo Value Pack which comes with each of the 5 color and 1 black cartridge + 150 photo sheets is generally $35.  The combo pack is generally about $60.  The only difference appears to be that one is nearly 2x the price and doesn't include photo paper.  

The guy at Office Depot told me that the photo packs have less ink in them.  Is that true?  How can you tell?

HP should really make is easier to tell the truth about this.  I was curious, so rather than doing my normal $35 photo value pack purchase, I bought the combo pack.  I can't tell any difference in the cartriges, they look exactly the same to me.  I feel like the Office Depot guy scammed me at this point.

Some boxes (most) don't show any ink capacity at all.

Some boxes show the ml of ink in each cartridge.

Some boxes show the # of pages you are supposedly going to get from that cartidge.

Why can't HP put the ml of ink for each thing so you can get a true comparsion of the cartridges and figure out for yourself what the real best value is?  If you don't want to print it on the box, you should at least make this information available in the online product descriptions.

Can you please tell us what the actual ink capacity in ml is for each of the cartridges in the photo value pack, in the combo-pack, in the individual cartridges, and in the XL pack?

I have seen the XL cartridges only at Sams (which I don't have a membership).  Why can't you get the XL cartriges elsewhere?

If you can sell a photo value pack for $35 that has 6 cartridges in it, why does one cartidge cost $10.  I understand volume discounts, but you are basically giving more than a 50% discount for buying 6 cartridges.  I use the dark colors Black, Magenta, and Cyan more than any.  In fact I have about 5 extra yellow, light magenta and light cyan cartridges.  What I would like is to be able to buy 3 cyan and 3 magenta cartriges for $35 so I can catch up with the extra light colors that I have.

Thanks!

My 2 cents on HP printers is that you build some really great printers, but you also work equally hard at alienating customers especially with the ink jet printers. During my career I have specified a few hundred printers and have over a dozen printers in my office today, everything from an HP8150 w/2000 sheet feeder down to a small ink jet.

A typical example of HP's errors is that our consulting office bought 7 HP3100s several years back. They are a great example of what HP can do. About a year later we purchased a couple of your color ink jet printers. As we went to integrate them into our office environment we found out that they would not work with the 3100s. Eventually we found the problem was that HP had used the same dll names for both printers. HP's answer was that we should toss out the printers and buy color laser printers which didn't meet our requirements.

To solve the problem we had to isolate the ink jets to specific workstations. These were also the same printers which HP chose to put expiration dates on both the ink cartridge and print heads. Since we only needed them to occasionally print specific reports we ended up going out and buying new ink and heads each time. While you maintain that ink gets old not a single rep or engineer could explain why a new head would go bad if not used within a short period. We just tossed the printers and the $1000 they represented out the door.

We never again purchased or specified an HP ink jet printer. When we did the cost/benefit analysis for our customers, the HP name and customer support, didn't carry the added cost of consumables and your malicious expiration dates.

Thanks for the response.  I bookmarked this page so I'd remember to check back for a response and was pleasantly surprised to see a reply.

I'll see how long these new cartridges last, hopefully much longer.

As I said, I love my HP PhotoSmart C6180 and have been directly responsible for 2 others purchasing similar (more recent) models.  The only thing that I wish could be fixed is the processes that don't close properly with the XP drivers.  If you do a lot of printing and scanning, you'll end up with tons of instances of HPBOID.exe and various other HP exes.  These don't take up much memory, but when you have 100 of them they add up and you have to either manually kill them or reboot.

Anyway, thanks for the reply.

David R.

The response regarding the cost of consumables is disappointing at best.   I like the sizzle, but will pass on the steak accepting a burger.  For most day to day work, almost every printer on the market produces acceptable results.  Thus, constant comparison benchmarks aren't overly useful for today's desktop office, kids school work and home needs.   However, ink cost is at the heart of it.   HP's attitude "of we make the best, don't you want that?" is simply out of touch with many consumers.   How about more useful benchmarks in today's economy?  I'm tired of high ink cost - period.

Try googling "HP Printer Driver Problems" if you want a true measure of the appallingly bad service, the bloated and error ridden drivers and the shoddy construction currently provided by HP.

In my case I have an 18 month old Officejet Pro 7580 (which has printed a grand total of 3940 pages while consumming 3 XL Black cartridges and two each of every colour cart); when I installed a driver update I immediately lost the ability to scan, copy or fax. There are dozens of accounts of identical problems on various threads. No one has had any luck with HP in resolving the issue and, no matter how many times I have uninstalled the existing drivers (including using levels 1,2,3 and 4 uninstall, and ccleaner) and reinstalled the old drivers, I have an all-in-one which has only one function.

You simply lose credibility when you try to deny that HP is an ink company (not a printer company) or pretend that you do not have a serious problem with your drivers (including apparently insoluble problems with Vista) which you are unwilling to resolve. To add iinsult to injury your "service" techs operate from a script from which they refuse to depart. Even when told, in response to their suggestion that you have already done the check, they insist on simply proceeding by rote and, in my case, when nothing that they suggested worked, they signed off with " I'm glad we could help you solve your problem" which clearly was not the case.

You should assume that this rant is representative of thousands of other completely disgruntled customers.

I should note that the HP financial calculator I bought in 1978 continued to work flawlessly into the 90's and its replacement which I bought in 1986  (simply because the original was now clunky by comparison) is still functioning perfectly (and on its original battery). It is unfortunate that HP is no longer the kind of company it started out to be.