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- Average user rating: 2.0 stars out of 16 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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3.0 stars
"A nice printer for occasional use. Handles small to very large paper. Software is a bit buggy."
Pros: Low-cost large format printer. Handles small stock, too.
Cons: Large footprint, small ink cartridges, toolbox software doesn't work.
Summary: I bought this because I had long needed something to do occasional 11x17 printing, and this one happened to be on sale for $239 at Office Depot.
I've printed about 800 pages with it in the past two months. It works very well on 11x17 in black or with a small to moderate amount of color. I printed a few 4x6 photos on it, and it did as good a job as my wife's PhotoSmart. I haven't tried it on large photos or on anything that would take a lot of ink. (The 3-color cartridge doesn't look like it would last very long in color-intensive applications.)
The printer overall, and the paper handling in particular, seem much more rugged than the usual HP home-oriented printers (of which I've owned five or six).
In spite of much conversation with HP, I haven't been able to get the Toolbox to work at all. They gave me a workaround that has the printer print a diagnostics page showing ink levels, which is most of what I want from the toolkit anyway. It's still rather tacky that the toolkit doesn't work. Also tacky is the fact that the paper tray's engraved orientation symbol for envelopes is backwards(!).
And speaking of envelopes, except for the few days when I need to print 11x17, I use this machine as a dedicated envelope printer. It feeds #10 envelopes well but not perfectly, and it holds ten of them in its paper tray. So instead of collecting dust 80% of the time, this specialized printer does some of my dog work.
Where to buy
HP Color DeskJet 9800:
$180.00 - $294.00
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
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$294.00 | Yes |
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EnterComputers.com
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$180.00 | Yes |
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