A quick rant about HP products!
Aug/27/2008 13:14 Filed in: Work
For the last week or so, my boss has been asking me
about his printer issues. Namely, he has an older
HP OfficeJet 6310 all-in-one printer on his desk,
and a newer OfficeJet Pro L7600 series at home. In
both cases, he's struggling with problems telling
them to make enlarged copies of newspaper clippings
he places on the scanner flatbed.
When I started playing around with the printers myself, I started to see what he was talking about. In the case of the 6310, one of the scan options says "full page", but choosing it seems to print a copy where nothing has been enlarged to fill the page at all. Another choice says "fit to page", and this actually DID enlarge the copy to fill the paper, except it tended to chop off a couple sentences at the very top or bottom of the clippings. So it was apparently enlarging the originals a little bit too much. The only reliable solution I found was selecting "custom size", following by punching in a percentage. This was trial and error, but something around 220% was usually what did the trick.
In the case of the L7600 series? He claims it's inconsistent! If you select "fit to page" on it, it does actually work correctly, WHEN it works. This morning, he claims he chose the same option and repeated the exact same process 8 times before it finally decided to enlarge his copy! The other 7 times, it just spit out a non enlarged copy that printed on about 1/4th. of the piece of paper. He's had similar problems going the route of keying in custom enlargement percentages.
Oddly, I can't find a single reference to these issues on the Internet anyplace. (There are PLENTY of problems with computers suddenly saying they can't find the printer/scanner device .. but that's another issue completely. The problems we're seeing here have to be bugs in the printer firmware itself, since you can do these copies and enlargements even with the PC turned off or disconnected from the printer completely.) As I've done tech support for more and more people with HP all-in-one products, I've seen nothing but quirks and bugs like this, so I'm starting to think ALL of these are best avoided until HP starts taking bug-fixes more seriously!
When I started playing around with the printers myself, I started to see what he was talking about. In the case of the 6310, one of the scan options says "full page", but choosing it seems to print a copy where nothing has been enlarged to fill the page at all. Another choice says "fit to page", and this actually DID enlarge the copy to fill the paper, except it tended to chop off a couple sentences at the very top or bottom of the clippings. So it was apparently enlarging the originals a little bit too much. The only reliable solution I found was selecting "custom size", following by punching in a percentage. This was trial and error, but something around 220% was usually what did the trick.
In the case of the L7600 series? He claims it's inconsistent! If you select "fit to page" on it, it does actually work correctly, WHEN it works. This morning, he claims he chose the same option and repeated the exact same process 8 times before it finally decided to enlarge his copy! The other 7 times, it just spit out a non enlarged copy that printed on about 1/4th. of the piece of paper. He's had similar problems going the route of keying in custom enlargement percentages.
Oddly, I can't find a single reference to these issues on the Internet anyplace. (There are PLENTY of problems with computers suddenly saying they can't find the printer/scanner device .. but that's another issue completely. The problems we're seeing here have to be bugs in the printer firmware itself, since you can do these copies and enlargements even with the PC turned off or disconnected from the printer completely.) As I've done tech support for more and more people with HP all-in-one products, I've seen nothing but quirks and bugs like this, so I'm starting to think ALL of these are best avoided until HP starts taking bug-fixes more seriously!