HP Officejet Pro L7680 Color All-in-One Printer Save 18% off

• Robust, professional-grade all-in-one printer, fax, scanner, and copier
• High-quality scans at 2,400 dpi resolution
• Prints up to 35 pages per minute
• Windows and Mac compatible; built-in network card
• 1-Year limited manufacturer''s warranty

I''ve had the HP L7680 for slightly over three months. I''ve been a pretty heavy user, having printed (according to the self-test page) almost 4000 pages during that time. Unlike some of the others mentioned here, my unit has been completely reliable.

Print Quality Printing is very sharp and closely approaches laser quality...it''s certainly above the threshold for business correspondence and presentations. The color output is solid, with almost no visible banding. I have not used it to print many photos, but those that I have have been also acceptable, given the constraints of a four color ink system. If photography printing is your primary usage, you should buy a printer with more ink colors.

Ink consumption Over the span of 4000 pages, I went through the initial set of ink cartridges and am now on the third black cartridge...the second cartridge was a standard capacity one, while the third is the XL version. It''s still 2/3 full. A second set of color cartridges were also the standard capacity versions. They''re still 3/4 full. When they go empty, they''ll also be replaced with the XL versions. Most of my printing is obviously black with a minor amount of spot color.

Faxing It works. Faxes seem to get there.

Copying The internal memory is inadequate to allow more than 5-6 pages of a document to be scanned and stored for collated printing. This flaw was obviously anticipated by the printer''s firmware designers...the page

that causes the memory to overflow is returned to the scanning input tray so it can be scanned in the next five page batch. Unfortunately this flaw requires manual intervention...you have to remove the five printed pages from the output tray, set them aside and then place them on top of the next batch out. This is an absolute pain...The leader of the copier design team should be required to make fifteen copies of Tolstoy''s War and Peace as atonement.

Scanning The HP software works, but is awkward. I have yet to discover where the defaults are set...and the preset ones aren''t optimal for my office. I''d like to be able to set it to scan an 8x11.5 letter size by default, rather than have the software guess the paper size based upon the image. It''s NEVER guessed correctly. And, after scanning something into Adobe Acrobat, I need to click on "cancel" three more times before the image is finally transferred...it''s like a Japanese monster movie...The Software That Wouldn''t Die. There''s other annoyances. The bottom line, though, is that it works. It''s just doesn''t work nicely.

So...the copying and scanning issues dropped this printer from a strong five stars down to three. It prints great and if there was a socket where I could add in more memory, the copying problem would go away. But there isn''t. And while the scanning stuff is just annoying, the copying problem is a real time-waster.

Update: Since I''ve had the printer for a year and a half, I thought I''d add in a quick update and note that it''s still going strong. I''ve gone through 500cc of black ink, 50-60cc of cyan and yellow, and 36cc of magenta. There has been some drift in the alignment, resulting in some slight banding while printing, but I suspect that that could be calibrated out. The only major problem has been wear in the automatic page feed mechanism in the document feeder, which causes misfeeds while faxing or copying. Cleaning the rollers and pads helped, but they should be replaced. The purchase of a high speed scanner (Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner) has pretty much eliminated my use of the automatic document feeder, otherwise this problem would be a serious hassle.

Update 6/20/11 The price of ink cartridges for this printer has climbed to insane heights. While it used to be fairly economical to use, it''s now too expensive to keep. Although it bothers me to scrap something that''s still printing beautifully, out it goes...

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We set up the printer carefully and it seemed fine at first. A few days later, we tried printing, and the pages came out stained with ink. Opening up the printer revealed large black ink puddles in the area underneath where the print heads move. There was obviously an internal ink leak.

I''ve used many HP printers in the past, both at home and at work, so I was optimistic that HP would be helpful and efficient in fixing the problem. Little did I know, the frustrations were only beginning.

The HP representative spoke minimal English and insisted on having me do all kinds of silly things to try to "fix the problem". Nothing he suggested could possibly have cleaned up the ink leak, but I humored him. For more than two hours. By now, the moderate ink leak had turned into a giant horrible mess, with black ink spilling over the desk under the printer. The printer was now reporting that the black ink cartridge was empty -i.e., the entire contents of the cartridge had leaked out.

To be clear, this was not a case of a bad support agent. The guy was obviously working from a series of scripts whose sole objective was to prevent them from fixing an obvoiusly defective product. From a "bean-counter" perspective, this probably saves HP a few dollars, but it''s an incredible waste of time for customers. And it resulted in ink spilling everywhere. (Shouldn''t HP know that, if a customer calls with an ink leak, you don''t tell them to do things that will cause more ink to leak out?)

Meanwhile, the agent was still refusing to fix the printer and was insisting that I needed to get a new ink cartridge. Of course, adding more ink would just have caused more ink to leak out. (Also, the ink leak was on the right side of the printer and the cartridges on the left, so this could not conceivably have fixed the problem.) He was steadfastly refusing to replace the printer.

Finally, I told the agent that I was going to post a description of what happened to Amazon, and he should tell this to his manager. A long time elapsed. Finally, he came back and said they would replace the printer after all.

Another hour elapsed of trying to get the agent to enter the credit card information correctly. (HP neededs "collateral" before they''ll honor their warranty obligations, and the combination of a balky credit card approval system and an agent with awful typing and English skills meant the process took forever.)

In summary:

-HP product quality is not what it used to be.

-HP support is the worst I''ve ever experienced ever.

-HP will refuse to honor its warranty obligations unless you threaten to post your experiences.

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I''ve had this machine for about 5 days and so far so good. I had trouble installing it on one of my desktop computers and made the mistake of calling HP. Tech support answered right away, but the lady who was trying to help me didn''t understand english very well and I had touble understanding her because of a thick accent. She suggested making some changes to my startup file and if I had followed her instructions, I don''t think my computer would have re-booted.

Instead, I tried installing it on my laptop and it installed quite easily. I then installed it on another laptop and a different desktop and it is working fine on all machines. The printer is plugged into my router and I''ve had no trouble accessing it from the wired desktop, or wirelessly on the laptops through my wireless access point.

I am not a technical expert, but to me the print quality looks very good. The printer is very fast. I purposely handled one of the dried printouts with damp hands, and the ink did not smear.

I have not had a chance to set up the fax yet so I can''t comment on that. My only complaint is the amount of software that HP installs. I might uninstall it and then re-install it with the "customize" option. Right now Zone Alarm is constantly reporting attempts by the software to access the internet, even if I''m not doing anything with the printer. I don''t know why the price is showing up on Amazon at $414. I''ve seen this everywhere for $399; and Staples has a $50 off coupon too.

UPDATE 3/18/07

I used the fax wizard and set up the fax machine quickly, with no problems. The printer is faster than I expected. In draft mode, the quality is very good, and the L7680 is faster than my laser printer.

Scanning is problem free. I like the having the option of scanning directly to a portable USB device. I''m hoping it has a "preview mode" for scanning. I haven''t been able to find it yet.

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Let me start by saying that I own an HP computer that I''m very happy with, and I have owned several HP printers in the past that have been reliable long term performers (the last being an Officejet G85). This printer is a piece of junk. With the first L7680 I had to jump through many hoops dealing with HP support (not very helpful and they wanted to charge me to get it to work out of the box!). Finally, I had to download an update to my BIOS so that I could turn on my HP computer with the L7680 turned on. Also, had an issue with color printing (didn''t print red) so the support told me to take out the cartridge and shake it. This worked temporarily. Fast forward a week and only blue prints for a while, and then nothing worked colorwise and they told me I needed new printheads. I took it back to the store and got another L7680. This one wouldn''t load paper to print without jamming.

Went back and got an older and cheaper model (that they are phasing out) Officejet 7310 (it feels more substantial and well put together than the newer model) and am so far happy with it (my fingers are crossed). This new Vivera print ink system (3 separate color cartridges) is getting a lot of hype, but if my experience is representative, they need to go back to the old more reliable single Tricolor cartridge setup. Save yourself stress and money and don''t buy this printer until they get their design and/or manufacturing issues sorted out.

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I just purchased this printer as a replacement for a 5 year old HP ink jet that died. I use this printer in my home networked between a half a dozen computers, including a Mac notebook, a vista desktop, and a couple XP machines. Installation was a breeze in all operating systems although full Vista software support is still pending.

I originally intended to buy a laser because of the lower cost per print, and the generally higher black print quality. However after reading about these new HP ink jet printers I opted for this one. It''s as cheap per print or cheaper than laser, generally has better color printing than laser (as do most ink jets) and has acceptable black text printing (If I was printing professional documents for a business it would not do nor would any ink jet but for my home is fine)and it is as fast or faster than a laster to boot. This thing really cranks out the pages.

It is easy to set up as previously mentioned, prints dramatically faster than my previous HP ink jet, and supposedly should be cheaper to run than the older generation ink jets. So don''t write of ink jet printers just yet, for the home I could not find a comparable all-in-one laser color printer for anything near this price, and they were noisy and unreliable and generally the size of a small car.

In my opinion, office or all black text printing=laser.

Home all-in-ones=these new ink jets.

I give it 4 stars because of the lack of a fully featured Vista driver (come on HP, how long has the vista beta been in your hands, and fully released for 2 months now, and you are still shipping product without a full vista driver???? Someone should get FIRED for this gross incompetence!) Otherwise very happy.