Customer Reviews

HP Color LaserJet 2840 All-in-One Printer/Copier/Scanner/Fax (Q3950A#ABA)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(44)

 

 

I am impressed with the print quality and the features. I have only two complaints: (1) The software installation is horrendous. Instead of using the normal windows installer, HP had to write their own cludgy dohickey. It almost never can find the printer on the network the first time (even if you can ping and load the HTTP interface), requires a reboot, and takes forever farting around doing who-knows-what. Printer driver software should not take 40 minutes to install. (2) It makes startling and disturbing noises. After printing, about 2-3 minutes later when it is nice and quiet, it lets out a gasp like someone who is startled in fright. Also, 3-4 times a day it runs through the initialization process and spends a good 3-4 minutes clattering around noisily. Then a little later it gasps in fright again. This device is not for the jumpy consumer. Combines poorly with heavy caffeine intake.

HP traditionally has been a hardware company and it still shows in lack of attention for their software and drivers: a total nightmare.

I have worked in IT for 20 years and have come to love the quality and durability of HP printers, but when they try to make software for a more complex product such as this multifunction printer they miserably fail, as they have many times before with software and to a lesser extent drivers.

I have had the printer for nearly a year and had to try and set it up several times, it still don't work fully despite various driver and software upgrades and patches.

My impressions listed:
Quality of printing and copying once you get the unit to go is good, but you can't get the scanner to go and software installation is a nightmare:
1. It takes about an hour to install the software off the CD;
2. The full set of software is a close to 500 meg download (if you want to download an update), it is bloated but I don't know with what (it certainly does not function like a 500 meg piece of software);
3. Various items are installed including a so-called HP Toolbox which is designed in a strange way and which pops up at various times triggered by unknown events;
4. The scanner cannot be setup (I've never succeeded, despite downloading the "scanner fix" patch off the website and trying a number of times), so the printer functions as printer, copier, fax and data card reader but not as a scanner;
5. The software installation requires one or two reboots depending on choices; under Windows XP, this should not be required and is a nuisance after all the time taken to setup;
6. An "HP Update" tool installs as part of the setup that is supposed to download updates automatically at regular intervals. This typically starts to download updates, succeeds to get a few, then hangs midway and never gets anywhere. I have had this on several machines. This despite the fact that the tool successfully downloads an updated version of itself first;
7. The printer calibrates frequently and noisily even if it has been idle and not used. There is a setting in HP Toolbox to manage the calibration, however it cannot be switched off or made to be triggered by events.

The bottom line: HP should buy a software development company, or outsource its software design and development, partner with a company that understands software and the way people interact with software, or if design and development is presently outsourced, insource it.

But until they publicly announce a major change in the way they deal with their software, I won't buy this type of product from HP anymore.

The hardware is pretty good, print quality is great, speed is above average. The only real downsides to me on the hardware are the amount of toner I burn through and the noise, the rotating toner cartridges mixed with the constant initialization routine make this a noisy beast.

But the software, it's just awful. There's no excuse for it. I have 35 computers hooked up to this computer, and there are about a half dozen on which the printer is completely unusable because one of the monitoring packages decides to randomly gobble up 100% of the CPU (why do all 35 computers run monitoring software for a networked printer, no idea).

And the installer, what the heck are they thinking? This is a networked printer, I have 35 installations... some went smooth, those only took 15 minutes with 1 restart. Some took over an hour because the installer would hang in the middle of the process (and there's no good way to kill it) and had to be restarted... the record was 7 installs before it actually installed the printer. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to just click "add printer" and add the printing components of this printer, they went overboard on the installer and failed miserably.

I couldn't be happier with my HP Color LaserJet 2840. I've had it for several weeks now and am still thrilled with its performance.

As the president of an IT firm, I've worked with most every brand of printer, but still cannot find any reason to recommend anything but HP printers. This Color LaserJet 2840 that I bought for my own personal use just continues that trend.

Firstly, ALL the features are usable over the network connection. This was important to me since I want everyone in my home to have access to all the features, and it's connected to my network. Scanning, faxing, printing, etc, all work great. (I knew printing would work, but was skeptical about the rest, especially the scanning).

The automatic document feeder works like a dream - I'll put 40+ pages in it and have scan them all into a PDF right from Adobe Acrobat 7. The scans come out crisp enough that Adobe's OCR gets most all the text on the page. Pictures scan nicely too.

The color output is fairly fast for an all-in-one, and warmup times are basically none. I use it for printing family photos, as the cost-per-page is a tiny fraction of an inkjet. If you want to use it for photos, I recommend using a good coated stock. It doesn't necessarily have to be HP brand. Color accuracy is good - much improved over the Color LaserJet 8550. I believe this is the same color engine as used in the Color LaserJet 9500. Even skin tones look good - especially after a bit of color correction in Photoshop.

I do have one minor complaint - it's a bit noiser than printing that you'd expect. Nothing that will stop a phone converstation or anything, but the four-toner-catridges-in-a-carousel mechanism is a little rattly when it's turning. I suppose nothing's perfect. :)

After running this device for 3 weeks, I am still impressed with the performance and thrilled to own it. It is fast, reliable, easy to use and does exactly what it says it will do. The color printing of photos exceeded all expectations (fantastic for laser, but still not as good as a quality ink-jet).

Addressing negatives mentioned in other reviews:

Noise. Yes, it is noisier than a standard single-toner laser printer, but it is only as noisy as a bad ink-jet. I sit next to it and have no problems when my wife prints to it.

Network Driver Installation. This was just horrific. I am an IT Professional of 15-years and this is the worst HP driver setup I have ever come across. It took me multiple attempts to install the drivers on each machine because the software installer failed multiple times. It picked-up where it left off, but come on! Configuring the IP address was NON-intuitive. You think you can change the IP during the install, but you can't. You must use the random, auto-assigned IP during the installation and then use the web UI to change it (be sure to write it down during the install, because you can't find the web-based configuration screen without it!).

There was a wonderful video of how to physically set up the device, but the user was left entirely alone on the driver installation. The software is complete crud and HP should be ashamed.

Total installation time (box opening to printing test page): 2 hours

Now that the device is set up, I love it and would buy it again. You can't beat the quality and performance for the price.

No real issues with the hardware. (where it gets the stars)
Software is an unmitigated disaster. Works or not at a whim. Or stops working in the middle of an operation. USB or networked, does not matter. Fails reliably on several models of laptops, then works again. Exasperating. Can't run a business with this thing. Have three of these boat anchors, provides full time employment for tech. About as desirable as bird flu.
Was strongly pro HP... but with the LJ3015, LJ3050 bloatware and now this, we're considering a major change.

After reading reviews of this laser printer in the computer press, I was intrigued by the idea that I could buy not only a printer that reportedly did a very good job with pictures and graphics, but would also scan, fax, and make copies. The fact this unit was priced under $1,000 made up my mind to bring one into our new office, so that we could create and print our own professional-looking marketing materials. Considering that color prints go for up to $1 per page at the copy shops, this seemed like a worthy investment. I was pleased when I printed out a full-page color flyer designed for us by a graphics professional. Even on regular white paper, the colors were true to the original file and output was picture-perfect. The only way to improve on the output would have been to ship the file to a top-level print shop, which of course would have been much more expensive. As far as the everyday needs of a small home office, the quality is more than sufficient for our purposes. There are only two cautionary notes. First, printing a full-color page is slow, about one minute per first page. (I chose excellent quality over speed in my purchase decision.) However, printing regular text outputs at 20 pages per minute, as advertised. Second, replacement toner cartridges cost up to $100 apiece. It is probably fair to say that manufacturers do loss-leader marketing on the initial hardware sale in hopes of creating long-term cash flow on consumables, but this is nothing new: you can buy an inkjet printer for less than $50. However, comparing consumable costs to time spent driving to the print shop, plus per-page costs there, makes this printer a great value. Finally, the utilities included with the printer are excellent, and an inquiry to tech support resulted in a quick and detailed response. (The tech support email helped me diagnose a problem that turned out to be how I set up the printer, and at the same time taught me how to manage the hardware more effectively.) Considering the total package of price, quality, convenience, and technical support, I strongly recommend this product for all small office/home office professionals who are looking to create and print their own attention-getting marketing materials.

I've owned HP printers for 15 years and this will probably be the last HP printer that I buy. The printer is slow, in fact it's slower than my old HP 5M. I only seem to get about 3 PPM on some jobs I frequently send to it (printing image based PDFs). Only in special cases will it approach the suggested speed of 20 ppm. Also, the software needed on the PC to configure and support the scan functionality is clunky and unreliable. Further, I bought it believing that it had scan to email functionality, as suggested by the literature. In fact it only has scan to PC which can imitate scan to email only with HP software plus an email client (e.g. Outlook) running on the PC. Fine if you want to dedicate a PC as a print server.

I'm a Linux user and wanted a color laser all-in-one. The HP 2840 comes with Windows drivers only, not surprisingly, but is fully supported in Linux. It worked out of the box with cups, using hplip or foomatic drivers. I accessed the CD's only to obtain the configuration documentation, All configuration can be done over http. The printer registered with my dns server automatically as soon as I plugged in into the net. So all functions work in Linux without any need for Windows at all.

I also installed the printer on my wife's Windows machine. It works there too of course, but actually took longer and more steps to install than on Linux!

The print quality is solid. It's a bit slow to print the first sheet, but overall performance is fine. Color copying/scanning also work well.

I'm a happy user.

I really like some features about this printer but it is a hog when it comes to extra toner cartridges, etc. The cartridges cost about $75.00 each and you will need 3 colors plus black. The imaging drum is about $170.00.

It will not scan or copy in black & white, everything must be done in color - VERY EXPENSIVE. Now I am getting an error that there is a problem with the fuser. The replacement part is $250.00. I have had this printer less than 2 years and have replaced the color cartridges and the imaging drum many times. I do not print a lot of things, less than 15 pages per day.

Today, I called tech support and got a person with a heavy foreign accent. I wasted so much time trying to get the person to understand my issues. And she kept repeating what I had just told her. I finally gave up.

Think twice about purchasing this printer.