Customer Reviews

HP Deskjet 5940 Photo Printer (C9017A#B1H)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

First off, I upgrade from a Epson Stylus Color 440 which didn't function right with current built system.

I purchased this printer from Costco Wholesale. They have a liberal return policy and I wanted to make sure I got a good printer. And I got a store rebate to boot.

I noticed right away that the printer was really quiet. I could not hear it print while the tv was on. I found the print quality was excellent. I printed test page using an entry from the thefreedictionary.com. There was no skipped lines in the color areas. Letters were finely printed. I printed a picture to standard paper and the printer did not print any lines in the graphic.

I did run into an problem though. Before each color page, it would print some sort of test page. I contacted HP support. They told me to unplug printer from computer. While HOLDing Power Botton, press Resume (aka Paper Feed) 4 times, and RELEASE Power Button. This will print a hardware test page with an errors. This fixed my problem and it didn't show any errors. 'Alexis' from HP Live Support at HP.com was the support technician.

I have purchased several HP printers over the past 12 years, been perfectly satisfied with all, but can say without a doubt that the HP Deskjet 5940 is an absolute piece of junk. I made the mistake of purchasing it directly from HP and they refuse to refund my money or send me a new printer. The best they could offer me was to send a refurbished version of the same model. The problem with accepting a refurbished unit, is that it doesn't address the problem that there is an engineering defect with the printer itself. The problem lies in the fact that the paper feeding mechanism fails to accept the paper no matter how many times you try. The only way to get the paper to cycle correctly through the feeding mechanism, is to press an arrow on the printer itself, after a warning window opens up on your desktop indicating that the paper is not loaded properly. I think that I know how to load paper properly, so the fact that no matter what I do, this printer fails to work properly is a pretty good indication that their is a design flaw in the model itself. Reading some of the other comments on Amazon, it becomes obvious that such a design flaw exists. When I called HP customer support, after being placed on hold for 40 minutes, I was finally connected to a representative from India. Now, while I wish that American companies would stop outsourcing customer service to India, I understand that in order to save money they simply have no choice. The problem with my call, was that after someone finally answered the phone, it was virtually impossible for me to understand what they were saying. Finally, after going through the route of switching from one person to another, they connected me with someone who spoke fluent English, and as mentioned the only thing they would offer to do is to send me the exact same model, only refurbished. Knowing that the refurbished unit would pose exactly the same problem, I told them that I would pass on their offer and now am stuck with a printer that I will likely end up throwing in the garbage. BUYER BEWARE, DO NOT BUY THIS PRINTER. IT IS A PIECE OF JUNK AND HAS AN ENGINEERING DEFECT! If you do go ahead and purchase the printer, you are asking for trouble and will undoubtedly end up discarding it, as I am about to do.

Update: HP finally offered to replace my printer with a new one. Ironically, the replacement printer was manufactured only a few weeks ago, while the original one that I had purchased directly from HP had been manufactured almost a year ago, or 8 months before I bought it. Apparently, HP has been made aware that the Deskjet 5940 had a faulty paper feeding mechanism and they have recently fixed the problem. My new one works just fine. My advice if purchasing this printer would be to make sure that the date of manufacture is after May 2006. You should have no problems if you purchase one made after that date. If you purchased one that was made prior to that date, and you are having problems with the paper feeding mechanism, call HP to arrange for them to replace it free of charge.

Let me start this review by saying that I am a fan of Canon Bubble jet printers. You can read my review of the Canon i960 if you're looking for a top drawer photo printer. That said, I bought this mighty little HP to "supplement" my i960. Why, you ask? Read on!

I'd been happily printing photo quality prints and text on my i960-UNTIL-I got bit in the a** by Mac OS X Tiger. "Ohhh, just upgrade your system to Tiger" purred the Mac Elitist. Not wanting to be left behind growling, I plunked down some money to upgrade my G4 Quicksilver to Tiger from OS X Panther. That was one of the stupidest upgrades moves I've ever made. Frankly, myself and a lot of other Mac users got mauled by Tiger. besides being slow as a pig, Tiger killed all of my canon print drivers. Worse than that, it will not allow you to re-install the canon OSX drivers! All you have to choose from are some crummy GIMP print drivers from 4 years back. They should take the entire "Tiger" OS X team and toss them into a cage with a hungry Big Cat!

So after 3 frustrating days I was out searching for an affordable inkjet photo printer that would work with this Mangy Feline now stuck on my 'puter. Enter the Deskjet 5940. Looks nice with the silver finish. Small footprint for my cramped cage. The ability to use photo inks, black only, or normal color tritone CMY inks is a huge plus. The canon i960 is a phenomenal photo printer, but blasts through Photo Cyan and Photo Magenta ink like mad. The HP promises to be much cheaper to operate for everyday work. HP kindly provides a USB cable, AND Mac instructions! Yee-Hah!

The big question was, would the HP printer drivers tame Tiger? The hookup was easy. I'm not used to the front loading paper stash, but it works easily enough. WARNING: If you print on premium photo paper like Ilford Galerie, the HP needs you to load the print side face down! Once I established this, it was OK. So does it work with the Mangy Mac Tiger OS? Yes! Not only that, HP's driver gives you lots of options for paper surfaces and dithering....surprisingly even more than Canon.
I'm a photographer by trade and by nature. So when I ran a high quality photo print on Somerset Enhanced Velvet, I was very impressed with HP 5940's performance. Clean whites, no bleeding, great color fidelity, and superb contrast. And this is only with the normal CMY ink set. The Vivera Photo ink promises to work even better.
My major complaint with the HP driver is that under "Paper Type" it is weighted to anything with the HP label on it. What the Heck IS "HP Photo Everyday" anyway? No matter, with a bit of guessing, you can print beautifully on just about any photo paper out there.

So now I have a printer that works with OS X Tiger and actually will be cheaper to operate than my canon i960 (which now resides on an iMac DV running-OS X PANTHER).
The HP was my first ever product from a company I used to deride. Now I'm singing the praises of this cheap but superb little Swiss Army Knife printer. That is when I'm not cursing the pinheads in Cupertino CA......

The paper feed is a nightmare. When it runs out of paper, it takes multiple attempts to get it to start feeding paper correctly again. It won't pick up the paper or it feeds multiple sheets at once. It jams constantly. I'd like to do an "Office Space" to it.

They don't have a -5 or even zero star rating so 1 is all I can stand.

Obviously HP has marketing types posing as 6th graders trying to keep thier review #'s up by posing as such. The first review was unbelievable (my companies marketing guys could have hidden it better and they are morons!). The second review was just plain goofy..."I'm reviewing my brother's printer":p

Even 6th graders have a better way to spend their time.

The HP printer is barely worth the ink cartridge that comes with it. Which is the most expensive part. That aside, it wouldn't have bothered me that much cause you get what you pay for. What bothers me most is the amount of DRIVER SPAM that you MUST install with the driver.

Installing the driver took about 20 minutes. Give me a flippin break. The standard USB driver for a printer should fit on a floppy disk. Heck, for this amount of money it should use class drivers. In addition to taking forever, it created a HPPP(D:) drive that consumes 500MB of disk space. Good thing I had all of 1G left...now I don't and my machine is crawling along. Ironically the first button you see when you double click it is "Install more software". Egads, are these guys into the hard drive business as well as the INK business.

Bill Hewlett and David Packard would be sad to see how far their company has fallen.

HP beware. I can no longer suffer fools lightly. If you sell me something (which is highly unlikely unless you bring back good calculators and test equipment) that is useless junk I will review it to the end.

I had an older model HP Deskjet that I haven't used in a few years, I needed to print out some homework and found that I had no ink left. I went to the store to price the ink and they were out, but I figured why buy $30 ink for a slow, old printer when I could probably spend $50 bucks more and get a newer, faster printer with ink included.

I shopped around at a few stores and found this printer at Costco for a great price (with a rebate as well) and it's print speeds were higher than the other printers I had looked at.

The software installation was a bit of a pain, the installer froze a few times (on a Sony Vaio 3.5 ghz), but I was able to get it installed on the 3rd try. I would've preferred if you could unselect all of the other bundled imaging software and just install the drivers, but that wasn't an option so I went with the absolute minimum.

Print quality was good, speed was not quite as fast as the box claims, but still quick. Overall I'm happy with this printer.

I'm extrememly dissappointed with this printer. I have owned a number of HP ink jet printers before and always liked them for their reliability and performance. This printer however is a piece of junk. It worked fine for 6 months, but now I'm getting the same paper feed problems that everybody else seems to have which makes printing virtually impossible. I have to manually feed paper multiple times to get a single sheet printed.

I bought the HP 5940 because it was touted as a good printer for someone who doesn't do a lot of printing. I was told it was a "really good all-around printer." Well, it's not. This printer has never printed anything on the first try. It cannot grab one piece of paper and print on it. It grabs 15 or 20. And forget printing envelopes. Paper jams are a constant annoyance. They should call this the HP Jammer. Save yourself some money and sanity. Don't buy this piece of junk.

I agree with those who say that this printer is a joke. It is without question the worst printer I have ever owned. I am now in the process of trying to get a refund from HP. The print feeder is simply abominable. If I had to use this printer for the rest of my life, I would go back to typewriters. HP should be ashamed to sell such a defective product.

1 month after I bought this printer, I got a problem of paper feeding. I tried to solve this problem in many ways, but I couldn't. Now, I know that there is a technical defect in this printer after reading all the reviews from other customers.

Do Not Buy This Model, And I will not buy HP product anymore.