HP LaserJet 3015 All-in-One

reply on August 18, 2005 by

There was an excellent thread here a while back on multifunction laser printers. I was interested in it because I had been considering an HP 3015 multifunction printer as a replacement for our aging HP 1100 with the bwscanner/copier for some time and had evaluated the hardware aspects extensively. (see http://h50025.www5.hp.com/hpcom/au_en/10_40_90_2466_Q2669A.html)<br><br>In short, from the hardware perspective, it was excellent choice... very small footprint, a high page rate, low cost ($275 at Sams) complete internal fax (connects directly to the telephone line) document feeder for the fax/copier/scanner, parallel and usb connect options, 32meg memory and more...<br><br>...but<br><br>Bought one and after a week of working with it, I finally (with sadness of an excellent piece of hardware ruined by it's software) returned it. I wish that HP would provide the option of evaluating the printer/scanner software before purchase. It was a disaster to use and seemed to miss several simple options that would have made it a very powerful office tool.<br><br>To begin with, the software was bloated and slow. The config/toobox was written in Java, limited in scope and dog slow even on a fast machine.<br><br>The "Scan to File" only offered two formats (jpeg and tiff) with only a couple of setting options that would ultimately require me to scan and then reprocess all of the output to meet my needs<br><br>The key software for my needs was the twain interface and while I didn't think HP twain interfaces could get worse, they did. <br><br>There is no way to reset scanner defaults and the factory default results in a 14meg per page output. The twain interface starts scanning as soon as the interface opens with _no_ stop or pause options to allow configuration of the scanner settings. The only option that I found was to not load the document and allow it to "error out" until I could reset the scan settings or load a different saved profile.<br><br>The ability to save a profile containing revised settings was there, but there was no way to set a custom profile as the scanner default.<br><br>Where the tiny HP 1100 printer's scanner handled items as small as business cards the 3015 scanner wouldn't handle anything smaller than a postcard. In our case, one important job is to scan checks after Rebecca's shows so their addresses are available after deposits are made... ability not there with the 3015. <br><br>The printer/scanner software also insisted on installing multiple modules in memory that had a significant negative performance impact on a 2ghz/640meg (otherwise clean) system. Even killing these modules from memory during periods when the printer/scanner was not needed resulted in the printer printing a cryptic 20 character error message (which tech support knew nothing about) every 20-30 minutes until the paper tray was empty.<br><br>This printer has 32megs of memory and the capability to store incoming faxes, but it's only option after fax receipt is to print them out on paper... no way of saving them to disk unless the PC is configured to work as an incoming fax at the time of the transmission. This is something that would have been so simple and valuable to impliment.<br><br>I know that the HP hardware people are probably acutely aware of the "software problem" but I can't understand how after decades of imposing horrible inflexible software on users that has to be reconfigured on every use for over a decade is still acceptable to HP Management... I guess it's because they know that since it can't be evaluated until after purchase they can "get away with it."