Nov 24, 2001, 1:55pm

Hewlett Packard... how low can you go...

I used to be a big fan of HP. When I went through a litany of other printers in my computer life (from Epson, Canon, NEC, Brother), HP printers were always rock solid, high quality, trouble free printing, where the others had quirks, issues, and circumstances to deal with.

But this isn't the case with HP these days. If anything, the pendulum has swung 180 (is that the right terminology?) and where Epson, Canon and others are working hard to give you the product you expect, HP is degenerating.

Case in point: my most recent home printer is a Hewlett Packard Professional Series 882C DeskJet. I bought it about 1.5 years ago. I bought it when Win 2000 had just come out. It didn't have any Win2K drivers on the install disks - just Windows 98, Windows 95, and Windows NT. No problem, I was running Win98SE at the time on my desktop system.

I bought the printer for several reasons. Mainly for the increased photo printing ability but also because of the banner printing features, the double sided ability (albeit manual flipping) and the enlargement / reduction abilities - I especially liked the ability to print 4 web pages on one sheet.

Within 3 months of buying it, I upgraded my desktop computer to Windows 2K. I was tired of all the crashes Win98SE was giving me every day. Win2K recognized the USB printer, and loaded drivers. Cool. But when I went to go print out a 4 up web page printout, I noticed the feature wasn't in the driver!! I visited the HP website, and they said something to the effect of:

NOTE: There is no need to download a driver from the Web. The most current driver is already integrated into Windows 2000 and is available to be installed.

Hrmm. Then a bit lower on their drivers page, I found this:

Below is a list of features that are not supported in the basic printer driver included in Windows 2000. Some driver features may or may not be available in the driver on other operating systems.

• Manual two-sided printing
  
• Poster printing
  
• Mirror printing
  
• Zoom Smart
  
• Enhancement of lower quality images
  
• Tool Box
  
  

WTF?

I emailed HP, saying I found this kind of support unacceptable for a printer that was only 3 months old. I got a drone automated response saying in effect, sorry, but deal with it.

Now with Windows XP freshly loaded on my desktop computer, I hoped that the "basic" driver would include some of these new features or that HP would smarten up and release the proper full featured drivers. Instead I still have basic, no frills, and a visit to the HP site reveals a carbon copy of the above messages, substitute XP for 2000.

I find this completely unacceptable. I bought the printer based partially on the features listed on the side of the box. Why does HP think it is perfectly fine to market the products one way, but then fail to support those features within 3 months of its release? I feel almost as if the company lied to me, gave me some features that, as soon as technology moves on, were yanked away, forgotten, and filed away for ever. It's as if I bought a video card and ran it at 1200x1024, only to find out later, after an operating system upgrade, I could only max it out at 800x600.

It used to be that HP was the company that stood for quality in both their products and support. The quality is still there, for the most part, in the products. But the levels of support and after sales service are nearly completely gone.

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Mixelania

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