HP Deskjet 9800 Wide Format Color Printer (C8165A#A2L)

• Resolutions up to 1,200 x 1,200 dpi and 4800-optimized dpi color
• Print speeds up to 30 ppm black and 20 ppm color
• Duty cycle of 5,000 pages per month
• Print sizes from index cards to 13-by-19-inch posters, even borderless
• Parallel and USB ports; PC, Mac, Linux, UNIX compatible

Bought this for the wife to do some scrapbooking. Thought for sure the other reviewers must have been doing something wrong. Nope. This thing has a mind of it''s own...especially if you try to print anything larger than 8 1/2 X 11. HP has not perfected home user wide format printers yet.

I returned it for the Canon i9900 wide format printer which, granted, was $100 more but the quality is simply amazing. 91 positive reviews can''t be wrong. I was so impressed with the Canon quality that I scooped up a PIXMA 780 All-In-One for myself. Also a tremnedous number of positve reviews there as well. Much cheaper ink, better quality how did I miss these the first time. Live and learn from my experiences.

Buy HP Deskjet 9800 Wide Format Color Printer (C8165A#A2L) Now

I purchased the HP9800d with two tasks in mind: to do production printing of sales materials and to print digital photos in high resolution, large format. I am disappointed to conclude that the 9800 will do neither. In short this printer will not come close to doing what it is advertised to do. I have been the full distance with HP customer support and they also agree that it will not perform yet they did not respond to my request for a refund. I have spent enough time, money and wasted paper to have bought three of these things, or better yet one good printer. This does not include the cost of sales materials mailed late and of poor quality.

Lets start with printing photographs. The printer is advertised to print at a simulated 4800dpi at up to 13x19 inches borderless. One would assume (foolishly) that the printer will do both at the same time. I am a graphics professional using industry standard software, Photoshop CS2 and QuarkExpress 6.5, my computer is an Intel based graphics workstation running XP pro. Sometimes I can get the printer to print an 8x10 at maximum resolution; I have never gotten it to print larger unless I drop the resolution down to best. HP support responded that best and maximum are almost the same so don''t worry about it. If you want to print borderless in Quark, HP support will instruct you to use the old 9600 printer driver and set it to the default printer for that printing job. What a bogus solution when working in a networked environment, no one knows which driver is currently set and the printer tends to get confused along with us. If I send it an 8.5x11 from Quark with 4 full frame images it will only print 3 of them, leaving a hole in the layout. Thus we are forced to design our layouts around what the printer likes not our customers.

Now let''s look at production printing. The 9800 is rated by HP to print 5,000 pages a month. That is 10 reams of paper. One would assume that at this rate the 9800 could do small production runs of specialty sales materials, which is one of HPs advertising points. We have been trying to print a 20 page catalog using two sided printing. We are using HP bright white paper. Paper handling is very poor. Many times it will refuse to pick up paper from the tray, we have found that if you only put 50 or so sheets of paper in the tray it works a little better but is still unreliable. We will set a print job and come back to find that only 2 or three sheets out of 100 have printed, repeat this a dozen times and the schedule is now shot. The 9800 has a nasty habit of pulling several sheets at once from the tray resulting in blank pages in the document and blowing two sided print order. This means that we have to go through every catalog, by hand, and look at every page to make sure they are there and correct and then go back and print the pages that are missing. Do that 100 times and now check your schedule again. To top all this off, paper outfeed is unreliable also. Printed sheets being ejected from the printer will catch sheets already in the out tray pushing them off onto the floor in a big pile. Great way to get the day started to come in in the morning and find 100 sheets of catalog in a big pile on the floor, completely mixed up and out of order, and don''t forget some pages are missing and there are blank pages in there also. Now where did that sales schedule go?

If you connect the printer via USB and load the toolbox software you are in for a computer crash. The software attempts to establish bi-directional communications with the printer and cannot. It will continue to load copies of the toolbox and continually ping for the printer until it uses 100% of cpu time and grinds the machine to a halt. How many poor consumers are out there wondering why their computer hates them when they just bought it a new printer?

In summary, the 9800 might serve a snapshot photographer where demand and expectations are low. It is no where near satisfying a professional graphics artist. The 9800 might serve a very small office that does occasional printed mailings of low resolution and they have the time to baby sit the printer and double check it''s output. The 9800 is definitely not the printer that HP would lead you to believe and I would not recommend for demanding professionals. The 9800 is a consumer printer, at best, that is posing as a professional machine. I have worn out piles of HP printers over the years and have been a very loyal customer. When it comes to the 9800 I feel that I was grossly mislead by HP and then left to hang when they could (would) not address the issues. Any equity or good will that HP had built with me over the years (and there was a lot) they cashed in when they sold me this printer. Rather than just going out and buying HP I will shop the field.

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What I find puzzling is why HP continues to churn out new printers even before the latest models are put on display, making all sorts of changes, but ignoring completely the old problems that are handed down from generation to generation.

Like its predecessors, this fancy-shmancy printer promises much for people who need to create posters, flyers, banners and so on, but as usual fails to deliver the goods.

It works great for the ordinary stuff printing letter sized documents from e-mail, Word, Excel etc. with all the settings on "normal", and even does pretty well printing high resolution pictures on photographic paper, but when it has to get down to anything more complicated, it shivers, balks and then goes into a blind panic, creating havoc and paper destruction with wild abandon.

Firstly, this one uses completely different ink cartridges to previous printers, and to add insult to injury, these are smaller than the old ones. Even though there''s a very helpful feature that tells you how much ink you have left, it only serves to annoy you when you see that you are just two days away from shelling out more money for new cartridges.

Secondly, my previous HP printer allowed me to create a letter-sized document and then enlarge it to 11" x 17" with a couple of clicks. If this one has that feature it''s too well hidden for me to find it, and I gave up trying. If you need a flyer done, and were thinking of blowing it up to make a matching poster the least irritating way is to change the paper size settings and just enlarge everything manually. If you only need a poster, make sure you set the size first. On the subject of size, this printer assumes you know the dimensions of paper with the codes A3, A4 and so on, and only by "Googling" did I confirm that 11 x 17 goes by the alias "tabloid".

If you need to print a bundle of flyers, and planned to print them in the economy fast mode, don''t even consider setting it to 25 and going for coffee. Even if you fan the paper until your co-workers complain about the chill, the printer will work itself up into a frenzy, and begin printing your document in random pieces on multiple sheets of paper, and spitting the results at you with almost religious fervor. You also have to remember to indicate that you don''t need the two-sided printing, or you''ll get a bunch of blank pages in the middle of the pile of 150 sheets it used to print your 25 flyers, most of which look like bits of a jigsaw puzzle.

The "Cancel Print" button still doesn''t work properly, and you''ll have a lot of wasted paper if you need to stop a print job. The control buttons have now been moved from the right hand side like every other printer I''ve ever owned, and are now on the left hand side, so that I have to do yoga stretches over the desk to get to them.

On the good side, it prints regular documents quickly and with good quality, and once you have your paper sizes set up correctly, it prints 11 x 17 and 13 x 19 posters. Time will tell whether the rollers have been improved on this model, as the last one refused to pick up cardboard or large paper sizes after a few months.

I''m beginning to think that the printer''s devil has split its soul into multiple parts, and is using HP printers as horcruxes. Only by destroying them all will we be saved. Can anyone spare a trustworthy Defense against the Dark Arts printer designer?

Amanda Richards, August 6, 2005

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I wish I''d seen these reviews before I bought our 9800. We''re a branding/graphic design firm and so we need a printer that will print high quality prints on A3 for our customer to sign off.

We have no end of problems with it doing it''s own thing, picking up several pieces of paper at once, or spitting out thin card fed through the back without printing anything, it also adds strange squares like watermarks when printing images, the worst problem is that it prints everything skewed. We sent it back to have it fixed. It came back unfixed and covered in scratches.

The best quality we can coax out of it never reflects the design and quality of artwork which are present on the A4 Epson colour laser printer. The colours are always flat and often accompanied by the run lines where the print heads have been, even on the highest quality settings.

We have an HP9800, we have a sledgehammer , once the print cartridges run out we''ll be introducing them to each other...

My business ordered this printer specifically to print out 11" x 17" PDFs for architectural plans. Yeah, good luck with that, because all it did was give the printer a stroke, even at a relatively small filesize. The largest file we could print out at those dimensions was a JPG blown up in size. The instructions are sparse, and HP''s website offers no more help in the Troubleshooting section than "Make sure the printer is plugged in and connected to the computer." I would warn anyone away from this printer. If you need large-dimension printing, it''s useless, and if you need ordinary size, there are cheaper, more reliable printers.