Dell Photo All-in-One Printer 944

When I purchased my Dell Computer the sales person said they would "up grade" me with this printer. I thought, FANTASTIC, it proved to be a big disappointment. Fax mode takes 3 to 4 minutes to send out the scanned sheets. The inks ran out in the printer and when I replaced them with their expensive ink the system totally went down with no prints and the unit telling me that there was no ink in the new and functioning ink cartridges. When I called the DELL Service (or lack of Service) number, their representitive (from a place he could not tell me where) told me to go and buy a new printer as they could not help me and then thanked me for using DELL''s service line. No follow up on my call was ever acknowledged. Junk from DELL IS HELL!

For a little while i guess this printer does an OK job. It''s a little slow but I can live with that. The scanning and copying isn''t too bad. But it''s been a little less than a year and this printer is the worst part of my life. It takes me over half an hour to print a 3 page report. It jams all the time. I can''t even put multiple sheets of paper in the tray, I have to feed it paper one at a time for it to print. And I have to mention again, it jams like crazy. Just now I got so mad at it I punched my table and have an aching hand. I will never buy a printer from Dell again and I highly recommend no one does either.

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I got this printer free with my Dell laptop in 2007, and it''s worked ok for the basic print jobs I give it, but it''s finally started to crap out to the point where I need to upgrade.

Ink is about $20/cartridge at Wal-mart, and I need to replace it every 2-3 months with moderate use (~10 pages/week).

It prints fairly fast for black and white, but much slower for color pictures. Photos tend to contain little white lines through them regardless of how much I run the cleaning cycle. It only connects through a USB cable (provided), so I need to drag my laptop over to the printer whenever I need something done.

Scan time is about 30 seconds for a high-quality picture, and seems to provide accurate scans. I''ve only used the copy feature for sheet music and textbooks, which are both a pain to align in the scanner bed and you have to squish it down just right. However, after a little fiddling, everything comes out ok.

Problems: I don''t know whether it would have always done this, or if it''s just wearing out, but when my color ink cartridge ran out this past time, I didn''t bother to replace it due to insufficient funds (lol) and a lack of need. However, now whenever I turn my printer on, it insists on automatically running the alignment process, without consulting my computer, and I have to hit Cancel quickly or risk wasting a bunch of ink. The first couple times this happened, I humored it and printed it out, but I soon caught on to its game, and I resent the ink I spent printing out useless little blocks.

The other major problem is that it tends to jam up. A LOT. Sometimes it works perfectly, but often (and especially lately) it refuses to suck in the paper and then claims it jammed and I should restart my print job. Every. Damn. Page. Alternately, what used to happen most of the time was it would get greedy and try to eat 3-5 pages at a time, then get indigestion. It would print over a "fan" of multiple papers.. Now what happens often is it will have trouble getting the paper in, then start printing so I can hear, which makes me think everything is fine. Surprise! It managed to print half a page before actually getting any on the paper, so I have a useless half-blank page and a bunch of smeared ink on my next pages. As a college student to tends to push every task until the last moment possible, you can see where this would pose a problem. I''m trying to run around and get ready, while Mr. Printer alternates between having to be reset every page and printing them off the paper.

Also: In the past few months, the Power button has stopped working. Sometimes it won''t turn on when I tell it to, and sometimes I''ll go to force a shutdown because it''s frozen, and wind up having to unplug the whole setup (which includes my modem and router).

However, my cats do enjoy watching the paper come jerkily out of the end of it, and will even come running to watch it print. They get up on their little hind legs, and sometimes even stick their paws up it to see what''s going on. So it does make a good cat toy.

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My 944 is still going strong after all these years and it is fast. Our Kodak 7200 series is a joke, so I brought the 944 back out and so far it is working like a dream. It gets good mileage on the ink, and has a nice interface for printing options. It''s no high end Epson but it gets the job done without all the extra software, which I find annoying.

Getting this used right now would be a decent decision. Mine is ancient compared to the stuff that''s out there now, but at least it works right.

I''ll admit it does some funky stuff sometimes like eat more than one sheet of paper from the tray at a time. This is my second one.

But, hey, it works. And the ink right now is a steal!! The Kodak printers that boast $10 ink are a joke. The ink runs out in a week from LIGHT usage. In comparison, what have you got to lose, really?

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This is the most frustrating piece of crap equipment that I have ever owned in my life, without exception. The thing gobbles ink at a rate of 4-5x what it promises. You''re lucky to get 150 pages of black ink out of it. Of course, you may not have the patience to print that much because every other page causes a "paper jam" that freezes up the whole process--there''s nothing stuck in there, the machine just won''t pull the paper out of the tray and it prints the entire page over and over itself on one line--then you have to cancel the print and send it again for the machine to work. And no, Dell, it doesn''t matter what kind of paper I use--I''ve tried a dozen varieties. And then there is this thing where it doesn''t recognize that you''ve replaced the cartridge--before every print job it warns me that the "reserve tank" is almost empty. It''s not. Now, the final straw: it refuses to align the cartridge, telling me that I haven''t "removed all the tape" from the new cartridge (which, yes, it says is empty). So the machine prints gibberish. Hooray. I would have replaced it long ago, but I''m cheap and hopeful, but now I have an excuse and I''m not going to content myself with recycling the thing. I''m going to smash the son-of-husky into little tiny bits with an aluminum baseball bat.