Too brainy for it's own good! (HP 2000 C)

Member Name: GR-Design

Product:	HP 2000 C
Date:	11/08/01 (327 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy network installation, Very fast printing speeds

Disadvantages: Seems to have it's fair share of problems

I’ve just read another opinion on this printer by Technical Tobes and he seems to have had the same types of problems that I’ve had, except his seemed a bit worse!

Before I go on, I’ll tell you a little bit about the printer for those who want to know!

Now this printer is meant to be robust and work to your needs. It is actually supposed to be a business printer and not a home printer, so it’s made to work, not to sit around for weeks waiting for one of the kid’s to finally do their homework. They do work it at work aswell, it’s shared via 2 PC’s (more about that later) and they are both secretaries PC’s so it has to print a fair few letters each day!

It can print an impressive 15 pages per minute in black and 14 in colour, and yes, it really doe’s do that and for an inkjet printer, it really doe’s speed along! No problems here and I’m very impressed with the quality of the prints it supplies.

The printer is specifically designed for network use and setting it up is a breeze, well, kinda, if you had never done it before I guess you would get a little stuck what with the jet direct box and stuffs!, best to let the geeky one do it then! You don’t have to use it via a network though, it can just as easily be used by a standalone PC and it really is just a flick of a switch to choose between the 2 functions.

The printer itself is rather large, say at least double the size of your normal HP inkjet printers (640, 815, 930 etc) but this is to incorporate the ink system, which is supposed to be very economical, whether it is, I have yet to find out but it looks pretty technical. You’ve got your printer cartridges and then your print heads which both sit in different compartments to each other. This doe’s seem a little complicated and I suppose it is, but it works for me so that’s all I’m worried about. The print heads do require clean
ing manually with a soft cloth no and again but that’s not too much to ask surely? All of the printer cartridges come in singles, i.e you have black, cyan, magnetta and yellow cartridges. This way if you don’t ever use blue but use a lot of red in your documents, you only need to replace the magnetta therefore saving you quite a bit of dosh.

It also boasts a 10,000 page monthly duty cycle which is designed to meet the needs of small networks etc. What this mean’s I don’t know and the manual’s at work so I can’t tell you. I guess it is some sort of cleaning mechanism or something, but I honestly don’t know, sounds good though don’t it!

What I really would have liked to have seen in this printer was the facility to hold envelopes aswell as paper, but I suppose that’s asking a bit too much isn’t it, especially with it’s relatively cheap price tag.

So, sounds good doesn’t it, a robust, money saving printer that’s fast and also has individual ink cartridges. Well on to the problems I go!

We had only had the printer for 2 months and in the short space of time had already had a problem. You see the print heads that we got with the printer were naffed and we needed the printer. I rang the HP helpdesk (and anyone who ring’s computer help desk’s will know what they are like!) and eventually was told that if we bought ourselves a new set of print heads and sent the ones we got with the printer and the receipt for the ones we had bought, they would re-imburse us and send us a new set of print heads. That was fair enough, we get a set of print head’s free!

Everything worked fine until about a month later when all of a sudden everything stopped working and we were presented with an error message on the LCD screen. Back to the manual and looking at the troubleshooting section the error was not listed, so it was off to the HP website to see if
we could find the error there. Nope, no sign of that error, so the next day when it wasn’t time for me to go home I rang HP technical support who after about half an hour of me registering myself with them told me I would have to send the printer to them for it to be repaired by an engineer (we didn’t take out the on site cover as we have never had a problem with our other HP printers) so then it was off to another department to arrange a courier to pick the beast up.

I must just add here that I found it extremely difficult to pack what with it being a big printer, so do keep your printer boxe’s boy’s and girls! I ended up putting 2 boxe’s together in some sort of fashion and masking it all up with parcel type. I’m no good at this type of stuff either, I can’t even wrap a Christmas pressie, ask me girlfriend, she’s always’s got that job, she doe’s do it perfectly though so that’s my excuse!

Anyway, back to the printer, I got it all packaged up and put it in the reception area for the courier to pick it up later that day as was arranged. Did he ever turn up? No…so I rang them the next day, they had forgot to send the request to the courier firm, doh! He did pick it up later that day though. A week later, our printer was back with us in nice new working condition, or so I thought until it got to the bit where it initialises it’s cartridges and print heads! Once again, we had the print heads problem, this time though, all we needed to do was clean them with a soft cloth and we were back up and running again.

Now, it may not seem like much of a problem, but when your buying a printer because it say’s how robust it is and it’s just what you need, you don’t expect there to be 2 problems within the first 2 months, we don’t use it all that much anyway, about 1000 pages per month I should think.

It turned out that there was a mechanical p
roblem inside the printer, but me being me I rang the technical support again to see exactly what the problem was and all they could tell me was that a mechanical part had gone wrong, doh again!

Obviously all the printer’s don’t go wrong though otherwise they wouldn’t still be selling them, so because it’s such a good printer without the problems I’ve encountered with it, I’m going to give it 4 star’s out of 5.

Another thing I would be interested in is any comments on this. If you have a 2200 yourself, do you get a high pitched sound coming from it at times? It’s rather annoying at times and I spent an hour of my time trying to find where it was coming from! This might be another problem, I don’t know yet!

Thanks for reading!

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