Engineering your brand towards oblivion: The sad story of the HP 3820 inkjet printer

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Wow Paul, you sure wrote a mouthful! I wouldn't be so quick to dis all HP printers. My HP 932C was/is a great printer. It always delivered nice images. The trick was to limit the amount of software that the HP install disk places on your computer. HP printing software (what's beyond the drivers) wants to take over, viewing inkjet printers as gateways into your computer and as delivery channels for a wide range of HP products and services. But I bought my HP 2200 laser printer used on eBay and it's still doing well. On the other hand, I bought a Japanese Juki daisy wheel printer back in the 1980s. Juki was also a Japanese sewing machine company that went into printers. The Juki printer used a linear stepper motor (!) that served as the printer carriage and track. It was junk. Not mechanically rugged enough to stand up to even light use. On yet the third hand, my Canon MP530 multifunction printer is a dream. It prints, copies (in color or black and white), faxes, and has a really reasonable front panel. It's well designed, well built, and takes inexpensive OEM ink cartridges. A truly great machine.

Sad to say I gave up on HP printers after my 4M laserjet. It was a very low usage machine and the feed rollers screwed up like on a lot of laserjets-- some models they offered a free kit to fix it. How about just using good rubber? After that I was turned off by the constant driver problems with HP printers in all the companies I consulted for. I went from the frying pan to the fire when I bought a Tektronix Xerox Phaser 850n. A total piece of junk and a very expensive piece of junk-- all the light blue plastic parts in the printer break, and this is in a print system that does not generate ozone (hot wax). Oh, I forgot to mention the Lexmark laser junk machine I got after the HP 4m. That one made more squeaks, groans and noises when it fed paper than a colony of baboons on amphetamines. It would not feed paper well and the print quality sucked-- and I always used factory cartridges. I was trying to buy American since I am a Harley-driving guy. Stupid. Hondas are better engineered than a Harley and my latest Brother multifunction center is just a delight. I got it refurb for 269 at Amazon. It is the MFC-8820D model-- it is a real duplex printer. I spent 30 bucks to max out its memory and another 110 on eBay to get the network card. It warms up in seconds and works flawlessly. The servomotors in it make is sound more like a million dollar semiconductor machine than a 500 dollar printer. Brother, a company that knew there was no future in sewing machines, has my vote. Next up will be a tabloid size Epson ink-jet photo-quality color printer. I always thought that ink-jets were junk because the ink ran when it got wet. Then my buddy Dave explained that is only because dear old HP used water soluble ink-- the Epson ink is far more stable. As went the US auto business so goes the office machinery business, just play the same video over and over again.

Consider this: The printer "runs out of ink." You buy and install new cartridges and the printer immediately breaks down. Did you get your money's worth?

At $50 per printer, why buy ink cartridges? How long does the printer have to last before you have your moneys worth?

Lots of people apparently paid $100 and up for this printer. HP replaced them when they broke, until the end of 2005. I guess mine just didn't break soon enough.

Well, I would be suspicious of any printer costing only $50. The ink cartridges cost more than that.