Customer Reviews

HP PhotoSmart PSC 2610 All-in-One Printer

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

I have no complaints about the hardware. The most important part, the print quality is quite impressive.

The software, on the other hand, is a different story. I have Windows XP Service Pack 2 and the HP software has been a nightmare. I have twice uninstalled and reinstalled the software because it caused Windows Explorer to take about 45 seconds to open. Reinstalling the software works for a while and then when the HP software updates itself over the internet, things get bad again.

Lest you think this user error, I'm a software engineer and my computer is a late model with 1.2 GB of RAM. I cannot recommend this product because the software is huge and buggy and the self-updates make the problem worse.

This is a huge disappoitment after my troublefree experience with the HP LaserJet 1012 monochrome laser printer and its clean bug-free software.

I was discouraged at seeing some of the prices for all-in-one printers until I came upon this beauty. I am a student, and space and productivity is essential. I can do everything with this thing and I especially love the scanner. You can do so many things with a scanner that I never realized. All of my old pictures are now digital and archived on my computer! Copies and printing are a breeze. Let me tell you, 30 pages a minute is fantastic. I was also happy to find out that this printer wasn't a ink guzzler like my old cannon. It is indeed very efficient and was a great buy!

HP software is some of the most horrible in the world. I would say it is almost class-action-lawsuit bad in terms of how much time and grief it will cause users. The following are my experiences with it, and I consider myself to be an expert in software installation and maintenance. Maybe I just got unlucky because of particular features of my system, but I doubt it -- I suspect the software just blows.

First, installation was buggy and took many hours between the huge 700+ MB software and the fact that installation consisted of: try install, hang your computer, try unstall, hang your computer, repeat.

Second, if you don't have your computer behind a firewall, you are probably doomed. It takes only a few seconds hooked up to the Internet without a firewall for your computer to get infected with viruses. The HP Photosmart software SHUTS OFF YOUR WINDOWS FIREWALL AS IT STARTS UP, leaves the firewall down for a bit while it poops around, and only then starts back up your firewall. Unbelievable!

Third, the HP software causes problems with other software. HP software starts up sessions that drop me out of full-screen games, for example. This has happened to me at many critical times in on-line flight simulators, for example, causing me to crash -- after a long time of setup.

Fourth, if I don't have the printer turned on, booting up my computer takes about 10 times as long. Now I get to leave the printer on always.

Fifth, uninstall doesn't work. Don't like this crappy software having its inept claws into your operating system, making it slow and unreliable? Too bad. If I uninstall, I find that all kinds of HP crapware didn't get uninstalled and still starts up every time I reboot my computer.

HP makes great hardware . . . and some of the world's worst software. I knew this before trying this product but figured, "Hey, it's been years since I last tried HP products (and was screwed by their crappy software). Maybe they turned it around by now." Nope. This is bad enough that I probably won't buy HP computer products ever again, no matter how appealling they seem at a hardware level. I have to remind myself of this (and past) software horrors.

I have two PCs and a couple of other devices all connected to my home network along with the Photosmart printer.
I have a simple home network that's probably like everybody else's - a DSL modem and a consumer-grade Linksys firewall/router/wireless access point. Sometimes I could print and sometimes I couldn't. It was very confusing, because sometimes printing worked just fine.


I figured it out - when you installed the HP software on each PC, it writes the DHCP-assigned address of the printer (at the time of install) into etc/hosts.

The IP address of the device written into etc/hosts is the IP address at the time you run the HP install software, but of course because this was temporarily assigned by DHCP, this may no longer be the IP address of the printer the next time you turn on the printer!!

This means the DHCP server will assign the home computer(s) and printer with arbitrary addresses based on the order in which they are powered on. So it is inevitable that at some point the printer will obtain a DHCP-assigned address different than what it was assigned when you installed the HP software, and you won't be able to print!

I'm not a networking expert by any means, but it strikes me as **spectacularly stupid** for the install process to write a temporary, DHCP-assigned address into
etc/hosts, when the device will obtain a new IP address when the DHCP lease expires or the device is restarted!!!

Why does the HP install process *do* this?!?!

Given that the default setting of the printer when you take it out of the box and plug it in is to obtain it's IP address dynamically from a DHCP server, and that pretty much every home customer who buys one of these printers will plug it into a home Linksys or DLink router with a DHCP server, it is really dumb for the HP install process to write this temporarily obtained printer IP address into etc\hosts.

Gee, almost every home user who purchases this printer will connect it to standard home router like a Linksys, which will be configured with DHCP because that's the default for every home router box.

The Photosmart device is a great printer but the software and install appears that it wasn't developed by people who knew anything at all about what they were doing! It certainly wasn't tested in a representative home network.

Have owned the HP Photosmart 2610 for less than six months and have had nothing but problems. I agree with other reviewers that the software is a problem. Additionally, I get constant paper jams, even though I only use HP paper, and the printer does not print correctly, text is cut off or it just doesn't print.

Tried calling Customer Support...good luck to anyone trying. First, you need to keep asking them to repeat things because they cannot even speak proper English. Second, HP does not offer any options to service the malfunctioning printer other than they'll send a replacement which is nothing more than an old printer which has been refurbished. Sure, just what I want to inherit more problems. Called the Executive Offices, did not solve my problem. Bottom line, HP does not care about the consumer, or the quality of products it is putting out on the market. And, standing behind their products...does not exist. A word of advice to anyone contemplating buying a printer, stay clear of HP.

Never had a computer printer with so many software problems. My 30 days to return are almost up so I gotta get moving. Many of my other programs don't even work any more like paint shop pro and I get a dozen errors popping up.
Spoke with HP Rep barely could understand his english God help Malaysian made products bring em back to America!!!
After speaking with rep he talked me into holding onto it for one more day and downloading the latest drivers and software from HP. I Have road runner, Fast cable, its gonna take me 10 hours. They trying to save money by cutting there download speed by a third of everyone else??? My epson may have fried itself out after 3 years but at least it worked. HP please don't release hardware without proper software!!! If this don't work I'm gonna try Lexmark and read my Amazon reviews more often.

In the end, I only have myself to blame. I knew HP had lousy software the last time I tried using an HP inkjet printer back in 2000. Back then, HP tech support tried asking for so much free GDI memory that only a clean machine with no installed software could achieve those levels. But hope springs eternal, and I thought that 5 years would be enough for HP to hire some decent programmers. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

I wanted to have this printer to replace an aging scanner and be able to print out quality photos. Shouldn't be an issue in this day and age. Although I didn't scan much (enough to send a fax), the quality seemed pretty good for a multi-purpose device...better than I expected. I did print out a number of photos, and they did turn out first rate.

However, the initial innocent error regarding "volume" got worse in just a few days. Rebooting the computer resulted in "Windows could not load the installer for Volume". Soon Microsoft Automatic Updates started failing 10 to 20 times upon each reboot, and by the 3rd day Win32 services were having problems. Thinking that I had a virus despite plenty of firewall and anti-virus protection, I spent the better part of 2 days trying to isolate what was going wrong. Eventually I uninstalled the HP software (you have to download special software from their site and run it 4 times in a row to clean everything off). And that still wasn't enough...I had to reinstall windows. And I have a standard Dell PC; I shudder to think if I had a custom PC.

So, before installing HP drivers, my computer was fine. While the HP drivers were installed, 3 significant software failures occurred. Fully removing the HP drivers results in the computer operating fine again. Sorry HP, it was you causing the problems 5 years ago, and it is still you causing the problems today.

I just bought the Photosmart 2610xi and I have had 2 days worth of headaches trying to get the software installed. I've received one fatal error after another only to be told how to correct it by an HP technician THEN only to have MORE errors pop up. After spending an hour and a half on the phone w/ a technician again today and downloading updates, I was told to expect to spend another FOUR TO FIVE HOURS on the phone with a technician to install all of the downloads. I'm sorry, but I don't have time for this....HP you need to figure out how computers work b/c mine is a basic Dell. I am not sure that I'll ever buy HP again b/c of the software.

I chose the 2610 over the 2710 because the 2710 got so many bad reviews. It seemed like if I plugged the 2610 into our Linksys wireless router, I would be able to use my iBook with air port to print. And it worked!!! I will admit it took a long time for my iBook to "find" the printer over the wireless network --I even called the help line--but while I was on the help line, the computer found the printer. So now I can be anywhere in the house and print from my laptop. Also, the scanner works wirelessly too.

Next we installed the software on the PC. We were worried because it seemed like Mac users had fewer complaints about the software than PC users. Well everything works fine on the PC, too!

And a note about their customer support--I called during the weekend and got a live person immediately, who was American (some people complain about their calls being routed to India), and extremely helpful. A+

So far this printer is great and I can't wait to get rid of our fax, scanner, ink jet printer and laser printer!

Original review 12/04/04:
Needed a new all-in-one to replace old clunker EPSON. This model looked promising and had a great price tag. The machine itself is a work of art and the quality of scans, prints and copies are supurb (haven't faxed yet). It's very quick and quiet too.

The software setup on my home network (XP Home SP2/Netgear Wireless) was OK. The setup software does take a long time to run, but generally everything went well, with one exception. When booting the PC I get a message about "Data Execution Prevention on Generic Host". I emailed HP customer support, and within an hour they replied that this is a known issue with SP2 and they're working on a driver update. They suggested a temporary workaround. I subscribed to the email list to be notified when the new drivers are available.

All said and done.... I'm pretty darn happy with my new HP.

Update 12/05/04:
There was another minor bug in the HP Director software which HP Customer Service was able to help me fix. Their software may be buggy and untested w/ SP2, but their customer service has been wonderful.