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I have found it to be buggy and difficult to use. I received this printer free with the purchase of an iMac desktop computer.
Living with this printer basically means everything you print looks fuzzy and unprofessional.The printer has several other annoying quirks. I regularly go to kinkos if I need more than one or two pages because refilling the ink all the time is expensive and annoying. I hand write things like directions or other small things, as opposed to printing them for the same reason.People may think I am exaggerating, but I've kept a notepad on my desk over the last two ink cartridges to write down exactly what I print.Second to the astronomical cost is the poor quality of the prints. Like many people I got this printer free with my mac. The buttons don't work well, and sometimes when I push "off" it just blinks stupidly at me for awhile. The black alone cost about $17 and the combo pack is about $30. Since it's not sold new on Amazon anymore I'll keep this short.The most important and detrimental fact about this printer is the cost of ink. You LITERALLY only get one to two dozen pages out of them depending on what exactly you are printing.It prints less than ten pages of pictures, and at most thirty pages of text, if the text is not too dense.
I'm writing this review about the Mac because it's what I have, but I've read people who had Windows computers complaining about similar bizarre problems. Since it was a software problem, I reinstalled the drivers from HP. It'll cheerily send them through the printer, making lots of noise, only to spit them out unchanged. Nothing would print, or a quarter of the page would or just the color sections would print.
I have no idea why this works, and in any case, you might just get one page before the printer is on the fritz again. Again, I only had intermittent success. Of course HP support has no relevant information. And let me emphasize: as crazy as this problem is, I've read other people asking for help about it. At this point, the only thing that seems to work is uninstalling the drivers, repairing permissions, and then reinstalling the drivers (up to a 15 minute process). This printer has stopped printing anything except blank pages.
Worse, my girlfriend's computer also ran into these problems with the printer, and Google confirmed that other people have had this printer have had the same problem. 2 stars because the printer worked for awhile before it went totally kaput. For a while, it was working fine, but after a year or so (the exact time is vague because I'd been using free printing at my university), it stopped working. I knew the problem wasn't a lack of ink, because it had never gone through the period where it'll print pale images, and when parts of pages would print, they didn't have that look that you get from an empty printer cartridge.
I love how you can plug in your cameras SD Card right into it and download your pictures to the computer. I am going to make this short and sweet seeing how many people before me covered a lot of the Pros & Cons already. So, I am sad to see it go, but I need a bigger capacity printer, scanner, copier for my Senior Class Projects." I have done so much work and creative things with this printer its crazy. "The only reason I am selling my HP C3180 is because I am an Interior Design Student that has taken on senior studio classes that has a bigger work format, I need to upgrade to an 11x17 scanner, which this doesn't have. Other than that I love my printer, scanner, copier and it has done everything I needed it to do plus.
Paper jams, sucking in multiple pages,and printing non requested test sheets, are the reason I stopped usingafter 4 months and went out and bought a laser printer. Printer has many problems,the worst of which is how it consumes ink.Cost over 35 cents a page for black. I never tried color as I have adedicated photo printer.
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