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We have bought this MFP for our small office (10 people) in January 2009 and are regretting this purchase since.

We actually don’t have many complaints about the printer side of this MFP. The quality is good and setting up the drivers on Windows wasn’t anything special even if a bit lengthy (at least half an hour per machine). Installing on Linux is quick and easy — hplip finds the printer on the network and installs the drivers, in a process which takes less than a minute.

The main issue we have with this MFP is the scanner. Our intention initially was to install the scanner drivers on our server (Windows 2003) but our IT guy failed to achieve that and when he spoke to HP they said that the scanner software does not work with Windows Server OS. The product page on HP’s website clearly lists Windows Serer 2003 as supported, without any comments or conditions, while they know it does not fully work on Windows Server 2003.

Following HP’s advice, we set up a dedicated Windows XP PC to handle the scanner drivers. Fortunately we had a spare PC, but it’s not something HP can expect people to have. Unfortunately, this solution was not satisfactory either. The scanner software ended up being too much for this PC: scanning a 1 page document would take at least 90 seconds, going up to several minutes, or even crashing the PC (this happened 2 – 3 times a day).

HP’s next suggestion was to roll out the drivers to all PCs in the office. We have tested that with one PC for a week and scanning for this PC was faster and didn’t crash, so we had our IT guy installing the driver on all Windows PCs. This brought up the next problem. The scanner unfortunately is now having difficulties communicating with so many Pcs so the printer itself crashes every 2 – 3 days and restarts itself which creates another problem — the scanner loses the list of workstations when it reboots and requires PC to reboot so they can register themselves again with the scanner. This is very inconvenient as people have to stop everything they’re doing and reboot their PC or else they are unable to scan.

On my Linux PC the situation is better but not perfect. The scanner can be used using the Sane scanning library and Xscan (or any other front end for Sane) after installing the hplip and hplip-data packages. This means that you initiate scanning from the PC rather than on the MFP which is not very convenient. My home HP MFP (L7680) allows you to set a folder on PCs to which it scans to which is a better implementation.

All these issues meant that our very competent IT guy had to spend about 15 hours installing and troubleshooting this MFP. Since we are charged per hour this has effectively doubled the price of the MFP for us and it’s still not working as it should.

HP have so far refused to take any responsibility and claim the problems are with the drivers installation, although our IT guy has spent hours with them on the phone trying until the drivers ran on all Windows PCs and despite their marketing of the MFP as network capable.

If you are planning to use this MFP connected directly to one machine then you are probably not going to have any problems with it, but if you need network scanning capabilities then this MFP is going to be a waste of your money and I’d recommend you avoid buying it.
Rating: 1 / 5