HP Deskjet 3820 Inkjet Printer

Rating:
Summary: don't buy this printer!!!
Review: hewlett packard sells it knowing it will become defective within a short period of time. they should market it as a "disposable printer" because that's what it is. they even tried to sell me a $30 warranty when i called for support. the warranty, it turns out, is for only two weeks, and doesn't cover parts or service. basically, they knew the printer was f!?*&d and wanted to milk me for a two week offer for phone support. what a bad company!

Rating:
Summary: It's great until 90 days later!
Review: Okay, so when I bought the printer I was thinking HP is good, this is middle of the line, it must be pretty good. And the printer did its job for the first year, despite the loud noises it makes. Then, one day, all of a sudden, the cradle went completely to the right and got stuck. It would not come back! I called up the HP Hotline and they told me "to pull as hard as possible" to get the thing back to the middle. I tried pulling and basically nothing happened except that I pulled off the white strip. They then informed me that the cradle sticking tends to "happen a lot" and that I should just go out and buy a new printer since my 90 day warranty was up. I think you can decide for yourself, but if you plan on using a printer more than 90 days, I would reccomend a different model.

Rating:
Summary: Buyer Beware
Review: This printer has been finicky from day one, and now it has quit entirely on me, with a sudden error reading of "Incompatible black ink cartridge". Not only have I always used the proper HP ink cartridges, this error came up out of the blue, without me so much as touching the cartridge, much less changing it. After searching HP's web site, nothing came up for this particular problem, and, the final blow, I just learned that free phone support is no longer offered for this product (at least not with a Mac operating system), rendering it a big, 2-year old heap of junk.

Rating:
Summary: A Big Disappointment
Review: Bought this printer because it wasn't bottom of the range and would seem to have the capability and pedigree to produce good quality prints over a reasonably long life.

Initially set up with parallel cable and worked fine, if slow. Got USB cable (not included) and plugged it in to PC - fried the USB on the motherboard (needed to be replaced), my USB scanner, USB hub and my USB cordless mouse. Would have got Digital Camera too had it been plugged in. After much wrangling with HP, they sent out a new (read reconditioned, actually had the bit which was jamming the carriage, supposedly a common fault, broken off) unit in exchange, under the 12 month warranty. This worked fine for a period of several months. Until recently. For no apparent reason, it started printing images and text diagonally, trapezoidally if you want to be exact. So the top line of a print starts at one side of the page and the print stretches over, line by line, until it finishes at the opposite side of the paper. Started on Win 98SE, now on XP Pro, same problem. Its going in the bin and I'll be buying a "cheap" model in which I will have more faith.

By the way, the prints, when it was working, were excellent and I was more than happy with that.

Rating:
Summary: First printer I've ever had that broke
Review: As with others, I bought the 3820 after Consumer Reports rated it a "Best Buy." Worked fine for about 1.5 years, now it is down with a "carriage stall." Repair flat rate is about the cost of a new printer. Since I have several ink cartridges left over, I was looking around to see if there was another one for sale. Unfortunately (or fortunately, I guess) I ran across these mediocre reviews. Now I guess I'll buy something else.

This is my first disapointment with HP products, I certainly feel a broken and unrepairable printer after just a year and a half is unacceptable.

Other than the fact that it was noisy and slow, for the price, text printing was very good and color printing was good. Oh, yeah, my back door broke off too. Clear shipping tape fixes that.

HP tech support and chat was very good walking me through the troubleshooting. Unfortunately, this was a fatal problem.