HP OfficeJet 5110 All-in-One Multifunction

Rating:
Summary: Known gear jam problem
Review: There is a well known hardware failure problem with these printers called the "carriage jam" issue. The print cartridge carrier gets stuck to the right due to what HP calls a defective gear assembly. HP has been replacing these units outside the standard warranty, though not recalling them.
Our company has a few hundred of these and the number of units failing at 13 months is astounding. If you own one and are having this problem you may be able to get HP to replace it outside the warranty period.

Rating:
Summary: Best inkjet I've ever used (and then some)
Review: When our last home office fax machine died I went looking for another. I already had a laser printer at home and an Epson Stylus Color 900, so what I was really looking for was a fax machine. The price of the 5100 all-in-one was perfect and I had never owned an HP so I got it and brought it home and hooked it up to my G4 Power Mac running OS X.

The Officejet functions perfectly as a relatively low throuput fax machine - at least as good as the the last one (Panasonic) that I had - and the images sent and received are very sharp and clear. The fax software was easy to use and so was the unit. so I was happy.

Then I tried the printer. I was shocked. Using regular paper, on the fastest Draft setting, the output was very, very good - easily better than the normal setting on the Epson. Then I started playing around with really good paper (Kodak Picture Perfect Premium) and printing photos and I was really amazed. The results are very near photo quality. It's a bit slow in the super hi res mode, but the results are worth it.

And it copies too! It's not a flatbed so you have to separate the pages and they must lie flat, but the copies are as good as anything I will ever need.

All this from a printer that costs less than $200. I call that a bargain. I have had absolutely none of the problems that some of the other reviewers mentioned, and I have used many different types of media of all sorts of thickness. The only thing I can think of is perhaps they somehow got stuck with a lemon, but in reality I suspect that it is operator error. I like everything about this printer and would buy another one in a second. At under $200, I think this is the best bang for the buck of all the computer/audio visual/tech toys that I own.