Customer Reviews

HP Deskjet F4280 All-in-One Printer (CB656A)

5 star:		(50)
4 star:		(42)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(52)

 

 

We bought two of these to replace two HP PSC 1610's three wks ago - so far so good. The PSC's worked for us for 3-4 yrs and by now they both sounded too tired and ready to die.
Ink cartridges: Buy the "XL" versions, stands for extra large I guess. Better price per page and less trips to the store.

Installation: A breeze. For the ones who had problems: FOLLOW THE EXACT DIRECTIONS, not what YOU think is the right way :-) BTW, if I thought the installation of the PSC 1610 was long...this one is REALLY long. Was it an hour? Or it seems it was.

The HP F4280 is a lot quieter than the PSC 1610 and reasonably fast. Except at the printing start: For some reason after you hit "Print" it takes 3-5 seconds of "Nothing is Happening". Can this silly problem be corrected?? I ended up with some duplicate documents, but now I know better.
Save ink and time: Set your default at "Fast Draft" - it makes a very respectable copy at that setting.

Scanning: I think it is a little faster than the PSC 1610 and at the default setting of 200dpi the results are very good. I tried the 600dpi, slight difference on the monitor, but I'm sure it makes a better printed copy.

OVERALL: A great printer for the price.

This All-in-One (AiO) was purchased for several reasons, the main one was compatibility with Windows Vista.
All was fine for a short period until scanning in greyscale was attempted. There is a bug in the hp scanning software. The AiO will scan in greyscale if another application is used to "import" from the scanner. This issue has been escalated to an engineering team for resolution.
The printer will also hang up the ink cartridges so they cannot move across the paper to print once in awhile.
This printer was selected over Canon, Kodak, Brother, etc. because it has the print heads on the ink supply and they get replaced with a new ink cartridge - that decision I stand by.
This is my 2nd hp AiO, the other is a 1350v which will never be Vista compatible.

The HP F4280 so far so good. It prints resonably fast in both black and color. It's not noisy and doesn't seem to use as much ink as others claimed. The replacement ink cartridges also don't seem to be excessively expensive. I would rate it as very good for the price.

The F4280 All-in-one is adequate for the home office that isn't going to do a lot of printouts. The scanning is slow but the results are good. The downside to this particular model is that it's very hard to insert the cartridges. I was ready to take a hammer to this machine by the time I got the cartridges in place. I dread having to replace them. Maybe that's why I don't do much printing with it.

Quality wise, it's a nice printer for the cost but if you have a lot to print, look for something else. The HP 60 cartridges are decently priced but for the cost of the special XL cartridges, I could buy another cheap printer. Not something I will do again.

I bought one of these for my mother-in-law -- her 5-year-old HP inkjet died unexpectedly, and she needed to print some stuff for work right away, so we picked up this printer at a local electronics chain.

I set up the printer for her, and couldn't get it to print the alignment page. The printer wasn't able to pick up the paper from the paper tray -- it kept giving me 'out of paper' errors.

I was starting to get concerned we would have to return the printer to the store, when I tried one last thing -- there was an option in the 'printer toolbox' to clean the paper path or something to that effect. It basically ran all the rollers for several minutes. This fixed the problem -- the rollers were now able to pick up paper from the paper tray and I was finally able to print.

So ... in addition to the poor initial quality, I also don't like that the F4280 doesn't have a tray for finished print-outs -- they just fall on top of the clean paper tray.

I like the LED display that shows the ink level, the one-touch cancel button, and the look of the printer. But given the problems with a unit fresh out of the box, I cannot recommend this printer.

It takes more than an HOUR to install printer drivers, with all the useless bells and whistles - or WITHOUT them. Yes, if you select Advanced setup and pick only absolutely necessary components, it still takes forever to install them.
The printer itself may choose to print just first half of a page in the middle of a multi-page document, and silently restart THE WHOLE JOB. Imagine if it happens when you are printing reverse sides of pages. The whole stack goes to wastebasket. Can I charge HP for all the paper and ink this printer wasted?
User interface of software is so inconsistent, it is almost brain-dead.
I never wrote a product review, but I have to warn other people: do not buy this "product"!

Mac users know to be careful when purchasing other than Mac hardware/software. I chose this printer as Apple's HP Driver Update 1.1 included a new driver for this printer. All I had to do was install the HP software from the enclosed CD (OS X 10.5 included), select Software Update from the Apple Menu, let the HP Driver Update 1.1 install, and then repair permissions. As this printer was replacing a 5 year old HP printer, the printing speed improvement was dramatic. This printer does not work with the OS X Image Capture program, but the included HP software Pro Scan works just fine. Save the output to the desktop; then import into iPhoto.
You should know iPhoto not only does great with your pictures, it does a good job on scanned documents. I ordered this printer from Amazon, and being an Amazon Prime customer, next day shipping was just $4. One of the best shopping decisions I have made is getting into Amazon Prime. Recommend this printer for Mac users and Amazon Prime to all Amazon shoppers.

Jan 2010 update:
Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) has drivers for this printer that let you print and scan without the enclosed HP software. Plug it in and turn it on. Your Snow Leopard mac will do the rest.

This purchase was a nightmare. When I went to install the software I was prompted to do the Easy Install (recommended) or Advanced. As an IT professional I usually choose the latter because a lot of installation packages will put on a lot of unnecessary junk. But I thought to myself, "this is a printer/scanner, what could it possibly install besides drivers?" BIG MISTAKE. I think it was like 500MB of junk. But besides that, after the install my Picasa program was rendered useless. And as you can imagine, not being able to access personal photos of my family and friends was nerve-wracking to say the least.

I uninstalled both packages and tried the Advanced install, with the plan of installing the drivers only. The minimum install was 250MB! That's ridiculous!!! Anyway, it resulted in the same issue, and a lot more time wasted time uninstalling and reinstalling my software.

My final effort was to Google this issue and sure enough I saw others describing the same imcompatibility. Such a shame, but I'm sorry, Picasa is the best photo management program out there and I'm not sacrificing that for a printer/scanner.

UPDATE

I returned the item and got the equivalent scanner/printer from Canon. The Canon Pixma MP470 Photo All-In-One Inkjet Printer. It's been excellent and exactly what I hoped for in a printer/scanner. No conflicts with my other software and the install was easy.

If you use Picasa, don't buy this HP printer. And if you don't use Picasa, don't buy it anyway.

The first thing to say is that this machine is not for heavy use printing/copying. It is designed for occasional and brief use. Also, if you do not set it up correctly then you will have problems with it.

I've used it for small use since I bought it a few days ago and so far it operates properly. It scans a brilliant image of even smaller images and makes them transferrable to the internet as jpeg type files, or just about any other type of file that you want to save.

The printing time is slow but the actual print is nice and functional for the black and white. I haven't tried to print in color yet but I'd bet that it is even slower. That's fine for me, though, because I don't plan to use that function of this unit all that often or very much when I do use it.

Remember that when you buy a product to think carefully about why you are purchasing that product. Machines aren't all alike and if you count on $500 quality for $80 then you will not meet your expectations most of the time. That's not the manufacturer's fault. But, consider this product for the sake of the kind of use to which I will put it.

This is a good machine. It's nicely setup physically with intuitive controls. The software takes a bit of time to load onto the computer, but otherwise I see no problems developing from this machine in the foreseable future. The only thing I'm actually angry about is having to buy my own separate USB cable to hook it to the computer (it does not come with one). Otherwise, I am fully satisfied with this product.

If you are interested in finding a workhorse printer I suggest that you go with an inexpensive laser type. But, if you want multi-functionality for a good price that you won't overwork then this is your machine. I have two printers now. This one for the occasional scan, copy, or color print, and a laser for the harder work of punching out multiple pages of documents.

For the price you cannot beat this HP F4280.

Works and looks great. Only complaint is that someone told me these newer printer cartridges don't hold as much ink as the older ones, so guess that could get expensive over time. For now I'm very satisfied.