HP Business Inkjet 2800dtn

1/10 Rubbish printer, poor reliability, poor print quality and support

nkassis - 09/10/09  (Edited: 09/10/09)

We are a small engineering business in sydney australia, and have a number of large format printers. We chose the HP2800dtn, because it had built in networking, dual trays, and the cost of the ink is supposed to be reasonable, plus it is HP, it must be good, right!. That said the HP 2800dtn is by far the worst printer we have ever experienced and we have had quite a few. It was purchased to replace our canon BIJ2300 after 3 years of service and one of its print heads failed. What a wonderful printer that was (quality, speed, paper handling etc), pitty canon dont make it anymore, otherwise that would have been a no brainer. The 2800 print driver has the worst printer driver ever, using it to do autocad proof prints, the thickness of the lines is disgraceful and makes the drawing unlegible. wasted a bit of time and found a workaround from other helpful people on the net, it was to use the canon CP1700 driver which is an old printer that is no longer in production. Next dilemma. after about 1 months of use approximately 200-300 prints later, the quality of the prints started to get washed out on one corner of the page. Luckily we had purchased 3 year extended warranty with next day replacement, so we thought, spent few hours with HP support on the phone in india, and they organised a replacement via courier. Same print quality issues remained, as HP support does not replace the print heads or ink, we were advised to go back to reseller, and ask them to replace the print heads and ink cartridges as per HP supports recommendation. They were not happy about it and you could tell, they advised us to send in the print heads and ink cartridges, and they will send us replacements. ofcourse there was no stock available for 2 weeks, and they warned us to stop using the printer or we will voiding the warranty, what morons are we dealing with here. We said we will take the risk of that, and wait for the stock of the heads and ink to come in, and then send in the suspect heads and ink cartridges for exchange, so our downtime is minimised. Anyway 2 weeks later the supplier advised that they recieved stock, and so we sent the stuff in via express courier, only for them to advise that all the stock has disappeared and it will be at least 1 month before next stock of HP ink arrives, and that there has been high demand on the HP 2800 ink, as there are issues (does that not put you off). We are without a printer for the next 4-6 weeks, and have wasted more time on this piece of junk than any other equipment for the last 5 years. And we still have doubts that the heads and ink will fix the issue, but we will have to wait and see. Dont buy this printer unless you enjoy pain, look on the net, seems that this printer has a lot of issues, look under the autocad forums youll see the same thing. Generally Iam a big HP fan, we use all their servers, ups's, desktops, notebooks etc and other printer models. But this one is a real lemon, steer clear of it. Given a second chance i would choose a canon/epson A3 photo printer with external print server.