HP Officejet H470 Mobile Printer user reviews

2.5 stars

"Okay, but a pain to set up for wireless networking." on May 15, 2009 by ClashBoredom

Pros: It's very portable, easy to configure for USB. The drivers for Vista 64 work great. The quality of printing is very nice and it's very fast over USB.

Cons: To set up over WIFI may require endless hours of tech support who insist the product is out of warranty. Wireless G is not supported even with their 802.11 b/g wireless printer adapter. You may have to change your PSK to something easier to hack.

Summary: The printer is great. However, it's easy to get paper to start loading crooked if it's ready to print and the paper isn't preloaded. The WIFI printer adapter accessory can be a pain to configure / install. I talked with over a dozen tech support people, all of who I had to pretty much argue with to get some support under my 1 year warrant from date of purchase. None of the support people were able to solve the issues. I spent hours on the phone with them while they jeapordised my security trying futile fixes that didn't do anything.

Suggestion #1...
If you buy an HP product, have someone who works at the store open the package so you can see the date on the serial number label... if it's been close to or over a year from when the manufactured it, don't buy it unless you are prepared to wait up to 72 hours while you prove you bought it recently should you have any issues with installing / configuring it.

I have always like HP products, and up to now I've not needed help installing any HP products, but going over wireless with this was the worst nightmare I've ever had with any electronic device.

I find it extremely unprofessional that they would label a wireless printer adaptor as being 802.11 b/g when G clearly is not supported as I had to lower the security of my router to use mixed mode as G only wasn't recognizing the printer over the network.

I find it extremely unprofessional that symbols like ^->~* and or a PSK of 20 characters does not allow it to save the settings to the wireless adapter. Especially when the dialog text says 8 to 165 characters long and any alphabetic, numerical, or symbols can be used.

And in the end, they blamed it on my router configuration... not the lack of protocol and standards they should have supported.

They lost a lot of credibility with me over this device.

To summarize, beautiful printing... poor WIFI support... poor customer service.