Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This was a replacement was a very old Lexmark 2300 series all-in-one. I plan to primarily use this for scanning, but, thanks to the HP Instant Ink program, especially the free level (15 pages per month for free), I might actually use this printer for occasional printing also. The printer was well packaged. Delivery was quick and prompt. The box contains the printer, a reference guide, a quick start guide, power cord, a black ink cartridge and a color cartridge. Had to remove some tape to open the printer, and remove some cardboard spacers from inside the printer. The guides are completely useless. The pictures don't make anything clear, and end up confusing you. Once the printer was unpacked and the power cord was connected, it was time to install the cartridges. This took several minutes because the picture explaining how to do this is completely useless and misleading. I had to look for some youtube videos, and surprisingly, there were none specific to this printer model. Ultimately, I did manage to make a good guess about how the cartridges should be aligned (hint: the writing on the cartridges should be visible after the cartridge is installed, and be correct side up). Even then it felt like forcing them into the slots, and until I printed out the alignment page, I did not know whether my installation was correct. I don't understand why printer cartridges have to be so difficult to install inside a printer. Once I started the setup of the printer, the troubles only kept coming. The printer's tiny screen asked me to go to 123.hp.com and download the android app for my phone and promised that the app would then guide me through the rest of the setup. But, at that time, my printer was not even connected to the internet, so obviously my phone could not find the printer. I then had to go into manual setup, and connect the printer to my home router. After that, things became a little clearer. I was able to finish setting up the printer pretty quickly after that. You have to put paper in the paper tray and allow the printer to print out an alignment page first. This is a series of bars of different colors on the paper. You then have to put this page on the flatbed scanner and allow the printer to scan this page. This aligns the printer heads correctly, rather than you having to look at the alignment page and interpret it correctly to make adjustments. You can also turn on Web Services on the printer (this allows you to "email" documents to the printer and it prints them out), and once that is done, another page prints out with a printer code and the printer's auto-generated "email address". The printer did not ask me about or allow me to set up an HP Instant Ink account during setup. I had to go by myself to the HP website and create an HP Connected account and then sign up for the Instant Ink program. You need the printer code printed above to complete this step. Once that is done, HP promised me they would send me "Instant Ink Compatible" printer cartridges to replace the ones I have now installed in my printer. When I check on the printer status, it says I already have such cartridges installed in my printer, so I am not sure why I am getting new cartridges. Again, this is a point of confusion that HP does nothing to clarify. The Instant Ink program itself is quite economical, whether you print rarely or run a business and print lots of documents. There are four levels to the program including the free level (subject to change without notice, of course), and the pages you pay for in the non-free levels roll over from month to month (upto the quota for a month. So, if your quota is 30 pages, you can save up that entire amount and have 60 pages for next month, but you can't roll over more than 30 pages from one month to another). The overage charges once you exceed your quota for the month are very reasonable, with the most expensive monthly plan requiring you to pay only 4 cents per page for pages above its monthly quota. The overage charge for the free plan is 10 cents per page, which is far less than what a commercial establishment like Fedex-Kinko's will charge. The print quality of the printer is decent. Alignment using the scanner after printing an alignment page is quite clever. But it is not a top of the line printer, so it would be wrong to expect top of the line print quality out of this printer. It can handle most kinds of media (envelopes, card stock, photo paper, etc., in addition to A4 paper, 8.5x11 inch paper, etc.). The maximum paper size it can print on is 8.5x14 inches. The paper tray can hold up to 100 sheets of normal paper (less if you use heavier paper, envelopes, cardstock, etc.). It can print borderless pages, which can be useful if you print photographs, especially on photo paper. The printer can also print on both sides of the paper (and you can control whether you want to flip the sheets with the binding on the left or the top). I am a lot more interested in the scanning capabilities of this all-in-one than in its printing capabilities. And here the verdict is again, mixed. You can scan from the flatbed of the printer (maximum size of 8.5x11 inches), or through the document feeder (maximum size of 8.5x14 inches). The scan dialog on the printer software, either on the computer or on the phone, does not have any kind of preview capability that allows you to set the scan area by scanning what is on the scanner bed. You can give it specific sizes of what to scan, or you can have the printer figure out where the edges of what you are scanning are. The latter can be tricky if your scan subject has white borders. You can scan directly from the printer by using the touchscreen, but I couldn't find any way for such a scan to go to anything other than my computer. There seems to be no way to send such a scan to my phone. The maximum scan quality is 1200x1200 dpi. I scanned a few different things, and the lack of a preview was quite bothersome to me since I was used to it. Also, the results are displayed in an extremely tiny window that I found no way to resize or zoom to look at scan quality before deciding whether to accept it or make adjustments. You can save the scan and then you can open it to check on the quality, but that is multiple additional steps. I am quite disappointed in the lack of a preview that allows me to adjust settings and rescan without having to waste time saving inferior scans just to check for quality. That being said, the items I scanned, the scan quality was quite good even with default settings, and should only improve if I choose a higher resolution scan. There are ways to adjust the contrast, brightness and color saturation of scans, rotate the scans, etc., before saving them. The printer is a lot bigger in footprint than 8.5x11 inches, so I am very disappointed that the scan area is limited to 8.5x11 inches. There is glass over 8.5x11 inches, and the rest of the scanner bed area is black plastic. Moreover, I don't see any way to remove or raise the scanner cover so that it is easier to scan thicker materials like bound books. So, it is designed primarly to scan flat, thin things, nothing else. The printer cannot automatically scan both sides of a sheet, so you have to do it manually if you want to. Also, no way to scan film negatives or slides. You can scan only documents and photographs. On the plus side, the scans can be saved in the form of pictures (JPG) or PDF documents. You can have it save the results to the computer (or on your phone if you use the app on your phone to scan), or you can have the scan emailed to an email address. Also, you can add multiple pages to the same PDF to create a multi-page document before you save it. This is useful for scanning multi-page documents and having the results readily available as a single file instead of having to hunt for them among multiple files. Also, scans be full color, black and white, or grayscale. If you use the document feeder to scan, you can have the scanner scan both sides of the sheet automatically. I have not used the copier function of this printer. Since the copier is simply a reprint of a scan, it should be reasonably good given that the scan quality and print quality are reasonably good. You can also copy from the touchscreen of the printer. Bottomline: it is a good low-end all-in-one with decent performance in printing and scanning. Setup can be confusing and tricky, but once you get past that, the ability to interact with this printer from your computer and/or your phone without having to connect the printer to anything using an USB cord is very useful. Instant Ink is a big plus for HP, especially because of the free level in the program. Whether it works as advertised (counts printed pages correctly, sends me the correct replacement ink at the correct times, etc.) is an open question that will be answered in the next few months. I will post an update to this review if there are surprises and gotchas that I discover over that time period. Update on 8/29/2018: The print quality is quite good, and I was getting quite happy about the printer. So, in true HP fashion, the printer decided to show me just how bad it can be. God forbid a print job should fail for any reason. The printer gets stuck in a state from which you can't recover without drastic measures. The HP driver software could not cancel the stuck job, there is no way to cancel a print job from the printer's own screen. The HP website mentions some diagnostic software, but that did not even start up properly on my very powerful work computer with gobs of RAM and hard disk space running the latest updated operating system. Switching off the printer, even completely disconnecting it from the power and reconnecting it did not work. Ultimately, I had to turn the printer off, reboot my computer, and then the stuck job somehow came unfreed, and the printer started working again. I am reducing my rating to 3 stars based on this flakiness. If you can't design a printer that the owner can take control of when something wrong happens and cancel what it was doing so that you can continue working with it, that is a serious flaw in the printer. Update on 8/23/2019: After intermittent problems on and off, the printer has finally decided that it will not communicate with any other device wirelessly. I have reset my router, reset the printer multiple times, turned web services on the printer on and off multiple times, and nothing helps. It is connected to my router with a valid IP address, and the blue light that indicates wireless connectivity is lit and steady, but no other device (neither my laptops, nor my cell phone) can see the printer on the network. Which also means they can't print or scan wirelessly from the printer. Multiple chats with HP tech support were completely useless at resolving the issue. I am still holding on to the printer and it still prints when connected to my computer by USB cable. But I think this printer is a piece of junk overall, and I would not recommend it under any circumstances. I have reduced my rating to 1 star based on this assessment. I wish I could give it zero stars. Update on 09/28/2019: Spent a frustrating few hours trying to print some photos on photo paper. The photos came out with streaks and bad colors, and no settings changes improved the print quality. Chatted with customer service, and they fedexed me a new color cartridge to replace the one in my printer (that was not much used at this point - most of my previous prints have been in black and white). With the new cartridge, the photos printed out fine. By the way, as mentioned in my last update, all my printing nowadays is done with the printer connected to my computer using a USB cable. Two takeaways: HP customer service is pretty good (or maybe I lucked out). If you call them with simple problems like this, they are very generous with sending out replacement supplies, crediting you for the pages you printed out of your instant ink quota, etc. If you call with technical issues (like the printer not showing up on your network), good luck! Secondly, it is best to put the cartridges through their paces every now and then by cleaning and aligning the print heads on a regular basis. I print only occasionally (I am signed up for the free 15 pages a month level on Instant Ink and most months, I don't even print 15 pages), and this causes the cartridges and ink to become lower quality over time, leading to poor quality prints. A good cleaning and aligning of the print heads every week should keep things in better working order. And don't worry, pages you print for cleaning and aligning the print heads don't come out of your Instant Ink quota (but you do have to be willing to use a couple of sheets of paper to do this every time).