Some things get better with age. To judge by the comments I often hear from readers, that seems to be particularly true of HP printers, because they just don't make 'em like they used to.
We all know, of course, that the printer market has changed a lot since the glory days of the HP Laserjet. Low-end printers are now virtually disposable, since it's really the consumables that printer manufacturers make their money on. Even so, many readers say that HP has fallen from the top of their list of suppliers because of quality issues.
"At one time I was the quintessential HP bigot," wrote one reader. "I was a member of the board of directors of a major HP user's group. At that time, HP could do no wrong. Four days ago I bought a new Epson wide format printer for over $3,000, mostly to produce wide format output. I know that I could have bought HP equipment to do the same task at far less expense. However, I did not even bother to look at possible HP equipment solutions because I have come to realize that recent HP equipment has all been designed to produce cash flow, not to serve the public. HP has taken lessons from GE and Sylvania (light bulbs) about how to engineer a product that is designed to fail after a specific number of hours. HP has taken lessons from General Motors and Ford about how to value engineer a product so that it moves out of the door and mostly holds up for the warranty period but is also engineered to quickly age and fail. HP has taken lessons from the bogus roof repair vultures that take your money for maintenance and service but then high tail when you discover that their service does not get done. I have an HP LaserJet 4 that I would like to continue to use because it is a superior product. However, neither HP nor Microsoft will produce the advanced driver necessary to power all the features of this great printer in anything past Windows 98. I have a great HP LaserJet 4100 that has given great service but I fear the day when anything significant goes wrong with it. When it fails, I will most certainly NOT choose another HP product. I may be a slow learner, but eventually even I learn to recognize a company that no longer values me as a customer."
Some readers are of the opinion that even HP's low-end printers used to be significantly better than they are now. "This goes back a couple of years but at one time I used to order HP color inkjet printers, albeit inexpensive ones, with every computer system I ordered for our company," wrote another reader. " I would stack them and use what I needed as they were needed. I had done this for years with inexpensive HP Deskjet printers and seen almost no problems. With the last batch I did this with, I got HP Deskjet 3550's. They felt cheap, looked cheap and we had more than 50% of them just plain not work right out of the box. The real kicker was that, because more than 90 days had passed since we ordered, most of them were out of warranty and it would have cost more to ship them and repair them than they were even originally worth! So we just gave it one try and pulled the ink cartridges from the ones that didn't work and used them as spare cartridges for the few that actually worked. What a bother! I haven't bought a 'cheap' HP Deskjet since."
And even high-end equipment is not immune to failure because of cheap parts. "Last week an HP 5000 large-format inkjet plotter (original cost - $10,000.00) I've had for four years had a failure that caused about 20 ounces of black ink to be ejected out of the plotter near the printhead and all over the plotter, floor, paper roll, etc.," wrote another reader. "A complete mess. A maintenance contract for this plotter is about $1,700 per year. A service call for a technician to come on-site is $1900 and that gets you a 3-month warranty. Not being one for warrantees, I [decided to] forgo that and figured, if it breaks down, our technicians could either fix it or then I would pay the repair fee. Well, four years later and I decide that I don't want to spend $1900 without having at least an idea of what went wrong so I took the printhead carrier apart. I found that a small rubber coupling that joins the ink hose to the tube the printhead plugs into cracked and this allowed the ink (under a little pressure) to get pumped out. Apparently the leak detector module had also quit because it pumped the ink cartridge dry. All because some <$1 part failed. To top it all off, HP only sells the entire ink tube kit for between $400 and $750 retail. At least this I could buy myself, but who is going to clean the darn thing up? You can't win. Even in this day of "high-quality" and "six-sigma" I guess the desire to produce something as fast and as inexpensively as possible has led to mostly disposable items like this. There's almost no reason that it should cost that much to fix or that parts that important are not even available."
Of course, all this raises an obvious question. If HP isn't the one making the printers that will stand the test of time now, which company is? Answer that question in the poll in the left-hand column of my webpage, post your comments, or write me directly at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
Read and post comments about this story and respond to the reader poll here.
12:58:42 AM 
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