HP Officejet J4680

Pros: Printing worked

Cons: Scanning didn't

Summary: I bought this printer for home for very low volume printing and scanning of basic office documents. As such, I didn't have any concerns about speed or how much ink this printer would use. My only concern was that I could accomplish these two basic tasks.

The problems started right away -- took me several hours to get the software installed, and I'm a systems consultant for a software company, and I'm used to installing far more complicated software than this.

Once the software was installed, and I was finally able to get the thing to work over the wireless connection, I was very pleased to see the option for scanning to pdf, which suited me perfectly.

However, the scanning function has both software and hardware issues. Firstly, pretty much every time my laptop goes to sleep, the connection to the printer drops, and i have to reboot both printer and laptop to get them to see each other again. The scanning options are set up from the computer, and these also disappear pretty much every day and have to be put back.

As if this wasn't bad enough, the basic scanning functions are completely unreliable. The HP software allows you to turn over the page and scan the other side, but this only works about 1 out of every 10 attempts -- mostly the software pops up an error saying that the printer is no longer connected as soon as you start to scan page 2. If by some miracle you manage to scan more than one page, there seems to be about a 50% chance that the device reports a paper jam, or simply fails to feed in the page, resulting in the scan job being cancelled.

The result of all of this is that having spent about 6 hours trying to scan a 6 page document (yes, thats colour scanning speed of 1 page per hour!!) and failing, this printer is going back to the shop.

If you care about anything other than basic printing, don't buy this printer.