Rating: Summary: GREAT BUY Review: I shopped for a MF machine for months. My old HP printer was starting to go bad, and the scanner stopped scanning. We just purchased a digital camera and it was time to replace the old. The HP officejet 145 was the greatest purchase! Not only did it replace my scanner, printer, and fax, I know can copy color documents rather fast with great reproduction. The software that is included is awesome. I can now take different photos and place them on one sheet of photo paper. This alone saves money in wasted photo paper. There are many options for photo layout and it becomes very hard to tell them from film. This product has all the things rolled into one. For a home business, it really fits the bill.If I had one complaint it would the motor that drives the scanner. It sounds like HP used the least expensive one they could find. It's kinda loud.
Rating: Summary: Great multifunction, but below average print & scan Review: I shopped long and hard before I settled on the HP d145 as the multifunction solution for my home office. Compared to the other affordable ... all-in-one machines, this one was the best. Although it was the most expensive, it's not perfect by any means. PROS: Fast plain paper prints and copies. EXCELLENT, mind-boggling plain paper copy quality. In fact, I printed some photos for a friend, and after printing 4 or 5 copies on photo paper, she preferred the plain paper copy over them all. Double-sided prints are a nice convenience, and the paper feeder is nice when you need to copy something that's double-sided and/or multiple pages. A big time saver over scanning the pages one at a time, figuring out how to place the front side in the feeder to copy on the reverse, etc... This feature alone makes the machine worth the price. The card reader works great, and although I usually just download my images to my PC and pick them for printing from there, the few times I've used the index feature (for when I just took a bunch of photos and wanted to show them to somebody right away), the speed and ease of it was very nice. The onboard LCD is comprehensive, easy to learn and use, and my 9 year old son figured out how to make copies on his own in about 10 seconds. So why didn't I rate this machine 5 stars? CONS: Put simply, photo printing. I own a cheap (less than one hundred dollars) Epson color printer that embarrasses the d145 when it comes to photo printing. Why would HP put a PHOTO CARD READER on this machine, and then offer such lousy photo printing quality?! You can't print anything borderless without using a paper cutter or scissors after the fact. My Epson machine will print beautiful borderless 8.5 x 11 photos that are much sharper and photo-like at a fraction of the cost. Now I see that HP has a new model, the d155, that comes with an onboard print server, but appears that everything else is the same as the d145. SCANNING: Not impressive. The spec sheet would lead you to believe that this machine can do some quality scanning, but I was very unsuccessful in that area. I have an older, SCSI HP Scanjet 5p that won't work with Windows XP, so I wanted something newer that would take it's place... The d145 scans were full of static and noise, as if it was running some sort of sharpen filter by default. I spent 30 minutes reading the manual and going through the settings trying to fix this problem with no luck. If you are content to scan at lower resolutions for web use, then the scanner is probably fine... but if you want high resolution scans for printing, I have some reservations about this machine. Also, it gives you the ability to "Scan to..." a few different applications, like Outlook, Word, and HP Scanning software... but I couldn't find a way to scan to my program of choice, Photoshop. I had to scan, then cut and paste to get the images into a graphics program for editing... which they needed desperately for touch-up because of the noisy scan. CONCLUSION: If plain paper printing and copies, ease of use, speed, and saving space are your priorities, then this machine is PERFECT. However, if you want to print nice, frameable photos, I suggest you do what I did and buy a dedictated photo printer ... You might also want a dedicated scanner as well.... which sort of defeats the point of an All-in-one doesn't it?
Rating: Summary: Ink RipOff Review: I should have done more research into HP printer cartridges before I invested in this MFC. I run a small business and need a reliable, cost-effective printer. In order to save a significant amount of money, I use refilled cartridges. HP has put a time bomb in its cartidges by setting an expiration date on the cartidge. Even if the cartridge is still full! It totally stops working with no override available (there is an override for the ink level for refilled cartridges). Thier explanation for this is to protect us from degraded ink...The real reason is to force you to purchase expensive new ink cartidges at regular intervals whether you need them or not. It is interesting that they only do this on business oriented machines and not on the cheaper consumer models. The cheap machines must not need the "protection" from a degraded ink. I guess if ink costs per page is not an issue and having a ready supply of recently purchased ink cartriges on hand is within your budget, then this is the unit for you. This thing is history!
Rating: Summary: Somewhat Overrated, plus Fax problems Review: I was planning to get the D135, because I viewed the card reader as a gimmick (I've already got one). I found the D145 at a decent price, so I got it instead. The card reader actually turns out to be a very neat feature. When you put a card in, it asks if you would like to download the pictures! The proof sheets were cool. The double sided printing and copying is nice. Onto the negatives: I was disappointed with the photo quality - compared to my old Canon s800, the image was blurry. Print speed was adequate. When I tested the color copying, I found that a cyan colored patch in the original had been printed a greenish tint. Other colors were fine. The color calibration didn't fix the problem. The D145 would also slightly smear copies on one corner. THe D145 is somewhat large. All of that I could live with, except that the damn thing WOULD NOT SEND A FAX! It could recieve a fax just fine, but not send. My old cheap panasonic fax machine had no problems whatsoever. HP Support was useless - they would keep responding with the same sequence (test the line, try using a phone on the line to see if you could place/receive a call, is DSL on the line? and so on). While they were decent tips, it became tiresome the third time they asked you to do it.
Rating: Summary: Constant support needed Review: If you have a network be aware that this can be a nightmare to keep the manager working. On one of my computers I gave up the manager and used the scanner from other software which works. Be aware not to use Tweak-XP it will attach to your printer files and try to load each time you try to print. A nightmare at best. I do like the features but like others I have 3 other printers on a jetdirect hp and this dosen't work. They have more work to do on this one.
Rating: Summary: "Out of Box Failure" Review: If you look at features, this is the multi-function of choice. It's got it all, 33.6 multi-sheet fed fax, full duplex copying, legal sze flatbed scanner and hi-res printing, all in color or B&W. I had read about potential reliability and other problems. But I figured if it works, it'll work great. Today I brought one home from. All told, I put 4 hours into buying it, trying to get it to work and then returning it. It could not align the print heads and print a test sheet. Twice I loaded the print heads and ink jet cartridges. The ref. manual and website had no recomendations for this specific problem. The printer would try to align and then spit out a blank sheet of paper(off the table and onto the floor no less, kind of like a toaster). Since my first HP printer (5L) turned out to be a pile of junk, I had no patience to again suffer through HP tech support (on my dime) just to get the stupid thing working for the first time. I am through with HP. Canon will most likely get my business. Check out the upcoming F60 and F80 (on website but not in stores yet). Roy PS. Market price (retail) for this item is($$$).
Rating: Summary: Great multifunction device Review: My husband & I really, really wanted a copier & scanner - this product does the trick. I bought it based on CNet's rating & amazon customer reviews. We were a little worried that the ink would bleed when touched & that the output wouldn't be great. However, to date, we have been very satisfied with this product's performance - printing & copying. Its well worth the price & i'm glad i didn't fork out the extra dollars for a laser multifunction. The set-up was just a little bit weird. I needed to cold boot before the product starting working. This product will be useful if: - you copy stuff once every week or so - don't insist on laser quality printing - you intend to print photos - upto 5 people need to use it - you don't want a superfast printer.
Rating: Summary: Great multifunction device Review: My husband & I really, really wanted a copier & scanner - this product does the trick. I bought it based on CNet's rating & amazon customer reviews. We were a little worried that the ink would bleed when touched & that the output wouldn't be great. However, to date, we have been very satisfied with this product's performance - printing & copying. Its well worth the price & i'm glad i didn't fork out the extra dollars for a laser multifunction. The set-up was just a little bit weird. I needed to cold boot before the product starting working. This product will be useful if: - you copy stuff once every week or so - don't insist on laser quality printing - you intend to print photos - upto 5 people need to use it - you don't want a superfast printer.
Rating: Summary: Good experience so far Review: Own the printer for about a year now; I drive it with Windows 2K Server sharing it to my home network; Works very nice; A little slow to print pictures at high quality (as expected), but does a very good job. Only Thing I don't like (and that's why I don't give it 5 stars) is that there's not a manual-load tray, or input slot; I miss that when I want to print just a page in some sort of different paper or letterhead; You got to load the paper in the only tray there is and it is a little cumbersome when you try to load just one page or two. Besides that, it is vey snappy, and love all the duplexing features it has, like copying from two-to-two one-to-two, and other combinations. Faxing is very sharp (receiving and sending), the software is adequate; I recommend it to run it in a powerful machine (it could be slow on old processors) I think I got my money's worth.
Rating: Summary: Ink RipOff Review: Performance from this multifunction Officejet is inconsistent. Maybe its just me but it tends to mangle envelopes when attempting to print, is a temperamental fax machine and it requires rebooting (shut down the unit, wait 10 seconds and boot back up)once or twice a month. Unit is also extremely noisy. On the upside, Unit prints and copies consistently well and the plug-in flash card feature for printing photos is quite handy. I suggest demoing competitive models before deciding on this Officejet model.
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