HP Designjet Z3100 24-inch Photo Printer (Q5669A)

• The new HP 12-ink Designjet with HP Vivera pigment inks and the first-ever embedded spectrophotometer
• Delivers exquisite quality, breakthrough color accuracy across a variety of papers, and truly reliable printing while keeping costs down
• Prints letter to 24-in wide sheets, 18- to 24-in wide rolls at prepress quality
• Complete coverage of SWOP, ISO, GRACOL, EUROSCALE, TOYO, and FOGRA gamuts for color accuracy
• Eliminate trial and error with real-time layout and orientation preview

If you are looking for service on this printer, be prepared to suffer. Even with their promise of next day service, they will require you to go through hoops in attempting to resolve the proplem, even if it means staying on the phone for hours on end.

And if you are not agile or well enough to do all they require, forget getting service since you will not be able to do all they want you to do in fact you may make things worse.

And they don''t care.

Harris

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This printer makes the highest quality prints I have yet seen. The printer drivers installed on my Mac easily. The tech on the support line hemmed and hawed about hooking the printer up directly by USB and I had buffer overflows until I switched to Fast Ethernet. No problems since. The Luminous Landscapes site has a very good knowledge center for this printer and that is how I found out about the USB bug. If you get this printer you should check it out. Or better yet, check it before you get the printer.

With a colorimeter to calibrate my screen I now get prints that look amazingly like what I am seeing on the screen with very little fiddling. The tonal range when printing with this printer are nothing short of amazing. Subtle details of shading in shots taken difficult lighting that were not there with other printers are much in evidence. The printer does take some time to learn and understand. Calibrating to the paper is essential too.

Eleven pigment based inks and the gloss enhancer offer the nicest prints I have yet seen. My previous nine ink printer was pretty darn good, but not this good. I don''t have to worry that someone will have a better print when I do a show. These fine arts prints are as good as it gets.

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I bought this printer to replace a 10-year old HP DesignJet 5500 for color accurate wide format printing. The printer was purchased mainly to produce prints for design approval.

Unfortunately, it is nowhere close to color accurate. At all. I purchased the extra eye-2-eye software package (an additional $1k), and installed it, repeatedly using every trick I could think of. I can''t get prints even remotely close to color-accurate. It doesn''t even stay consistent from print to print.

The HP customer support has been a total nightmare. My salesperson just dumped me off to a customer support number, where I was hung up on, transferred to the wrong department, kept on hold for 47 minutes -pretty much every bad thing that happens when you call customer support has happened during this process.

After a few weeks (really, weeks), an additional payment of $429 and several hours on the phone with people in India and Central America (note, I am in SAN FRANCISCO HP headquarters are 25 miles away), I have an appointment for an HP tech to come here and try to get the printer to work.

I will come back and edit this review if HP tech shows up for scheduled appointment and fixes the printer but I warn anyone looking at this printer to think twice.

UPDATE the tech who came out was very nice, BUT he was not trained on the software aspect of the printer at all. He could only confirm that the printer was networked and set up correctly. He did give me another phone number to call (in Boise, ID). The color management team there did give me some information about how to set up the software to get the printer to manage color. It requires a multi-step process that must be done for each individual piece of artwork. It took many hours over several weeks for me to figure it out. Now I am the only person in the office who knows how to get this printer to work, which is not OK.

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HP service center called and worked with me for two weeks replacing parts and uploading software to fix my printer. Thanks Cesar from HP

I''m spending another hour trying to load paper into my HP printer, every day it rejects the paper loaded. The process of reloading takes an hour because the printer continues to reject paper rolls. Sheet loaded media is worse. I can''t believe HP would sell a product that doesn''t work. My frustration with this printer runs so deep I will never buy another HP product of any kind. Dave Jenkins Midwest Photo Pro.