Customer Reviews

HP PhotoSmart PSC 2510 All-in-One

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

This should be called the HP Photosmart POS 2510 instead, cause it's a serious POS. When looking at the reviews before i purchased, i read one fellow who said that it seems like 2 different companies made the software and hardware. I thought at the time "he's probably just not as PC savvy as i am, since i am afterall in the software industry." So i gave it a go. Boy was he right.

First off, the hardware and featureset is great. it had everything i wanted, and when i pulled it out of the box i was very impressed with how it looked and felt. getting it up on the wireless network was a breeze, which contradicted what some people said, so i'm starting to feel pretty pleased with my purchasing decision at this point. but then i installed the software .. it's 1.5 GB of pure crap. want to pick and choose which features to install? too bad! it's all (fax, scan, print) or nothing! so if you have another PC on the network that you only want to print from (which is likely if you're considering buying this unit) you can't just install a print driver. you have to install the whole 1.5 GB enchilada, which includes an application that's always running in the background (HP Director), which really bugs me because that sort of stuff always screws up your system. which brings me to ..

the software screwed up my system. now whenever i boot my PC, my system pretty much is locked up for 15 seconds as HP Director tries to figure something out. and whenever i shut my system down, HP Director never terminates itself properly so i have to kill the process myself. really annoying.

so then im playing with the features. i scan a picture at 2400 dpi .. and it takes a HALF HOUR. it takes 15 minutes to scan and then 15 minutes for the HP Photo application to open it. in the meantime my system is completely unusable. and i have a decent system! 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM. lower resolution scans are fine, but i suggest you go watch tv if you want to scan 2400 or above (i cant even imagine what it would do at 4800, 9600, or 19200 dpi.)

so i tell HP all this, and they arrange for a tech to call me, which is actually pretty cool. the tech guy tells me the 2510 must be on to avoid the system sluggishness at bootup/shutdown, and he says it was scanning slow because i'm on a wireless network (11Mb/s) and 2400dpi makes some pretty big files. well, i've been keeping the 2510 on 24/7 and i still have the boot/shutdown problems, and i've since moved it over to a wired 100Mb/s network and it's still just as slow.

i wish Canon had network interface options, because i would return this in a second if they did. unfortunately even with all its problems, this is still the best solution for my home network. curse you, HP.

** EDIT **
Couple more problems with this unit since i wrote this review ..
1. when I had it using my 802.11b network, i noticed that my other wireless devices would drop connection ocassionally. I didn't think a wireless client could possibly interfere with my wireless access point so I didnt think too much about it. But as soon as i moved the HP over to a wired connection, my wireless network magically stopped having problems.

2. when i set the network link speed on the HP to 100Mb/s Full Duplex, it only does half duplex. No matter what i try .. half duplex.

If you went to the trouble to have a secure wireless network as I have (multiple WEP keys, MAC filtering) then you'll find the installation procedure impossible. Also, the call back HP help appears to be overwhelmed, since I bought it over a week ago and they never returned my help request despite promises of a response within 3 days. Luckily, I was able to get it to work by 1) uninstalling everything and rebooting, 2) turning on the wireless radio through the LCD panel, 3) loading the embedded printer webserver (get http address from the network preferences printout you can obtain via the LCD panel -- see manual), 4) configuring everything correctly through the embedded webserver, with an ethernet connection between the access port and the printer, 5) install software -- it will find the printer through the access point, 6) disconnect the ethernet cable.

With that done, I was able to scan and print wirelessly without
any problems at all, from multiple machines.

Props to the hardware people at HP for a good piece of hardware, but the software/install/support side of this product is so bad that I would not recommend this for people who don't have experience with wireless networks.

I couldn't wait for this printer to come out. I had my wireless network running for a while and had been using an HP printer on a Linksys wireless print server. No problems.

I bought this printer and slowly worked through the problems. The software has been a nightmare. HP Director seems to lock-up at least once per session, given enough time. I've seen it lock-up even when I wasn't using the computer.

When I first turned my computer on you would have this frozen area on the screen. I'm assuming it was trying to access the card reader which I rarely used.

My biggest complaint was with the support. I can appreciate that this is a complicated piece of hardware. Given that you would think that HP would have taken the time to train its people.

I called HP the night I bought the printer and was told that a technician would call me back. Weeks went by and I kind of learned to live with its problems. Then, one night, I get a call from a Tech. He tried a couple of things that didn't help, then gave up and said he would call back. That was last December it is now April, no call.

I have downloaded the updated software from the site. It took over 30 minutes to download with my broadband connection. Things are better but still buggy.

I would wait.

My wireless setup went smoother than others had posted, but the software installation was awful. Talk about bloatware, it seems like they load the entire contents of the CD onto your hard drive. The installer tells you that the copying of the files will take 15-20 minutes! I didn't time it, but it definitely took awhile. I see absolutely no reason I should be loading that much crap onto my machine for a peripheral.

Worse than that, the software is horribly buggy. It crashes regularly. When it doesn't crash, it refuses to shutdown when I try to turn off my laptop. So I regularly have to kill the process manually. I am honestly amazed at how bad this software is.

I checked to the software update to see if they have a newer debugged version available and the software updater sends HP a complete list of every application loaded onto your computer! I didn't see any way to check for updated software without letting it send all this info to HP. It's so needlessly invasive. They give you some spiel like "to provide specialized feedback to ensure the best user experience" as an excuse for data mining your hard drive. Awful.

This is my first HP product and I am extremely underwhelmed. It feels like the hardware and software were done by two different companies: one competent, and one not so.

If you don't have a lot of patience with tech stuff, steer well clear of this product.

I purchased the PSC 2510 about a year primarily because of the built in networking capabiity to share it on my LAN. After countless reinstalls of the software due to lost connections and print failure, I am dumping the idea that the printer will ever work on the network.

I completey echo the comments of another reveiewer talking about Inda support. After the first few times of losing my network connection to the printer, I called HP tech support. After 3 hrs on the phone, they tried to get me going down the same path of uninstalling other software on my computer. I absolutely refused explaining this will not solve the problem. My LAN is flawless in all other connections and functions. They wanted my network (computers and router) to match the IP and gateway addresses of their machine (NOT!!!!). Last time I ever called them. The website is totally useless for support on networking issues.

Going to try a USB print server solution from IOGear as a last resort. Not sure this will work with multi-function printers yet but cannot find anything to the contrary. We'll see. It is definetely faster using USB on one computer.

Bottom line -- I've used HP printers for some time now and for the most part good machines. Not very good at WYSIWYG for photo printing. Photos printed with this machine are not very durable either (ink smears, fading, any water destroys immediately).

Scanning using anything other than the software HP supplies can be a challenge (ReadIRIS scans end up with a blueish tint where white should be, Adobe standard 7.0 requires 2-3 done to convince the printer software you really are done scanning)

DO NOT buy for the networking function

DO NOT plan to call tech support as they don't know anything when it gets beyond changing ink cartridges

25-Sep-05 - Followup on USB printer sharing solution mentioned above....

The IOGear USB peripherals sharing switch works great. It also provides 2-3X faster throughput than the wired or wireless connection I was using when shared on the LAN. Requires hard wire and manual switching (via software on each PC) but I haven't had a bit of trouble since dumping the network solution.

I was actually excited when I saw this product, I could sit in my den with my laptop and print (or fax) something wirelessly, very cool. After about a hour or so I was able to get the thing working perfectly, however it was what it did to my XP pro operating system that hurt. "My computer", "save as", "open" functions began to take 30-60 seconds to respond, and I noticed the computer accessing the wireless modem when I tried the open function (like in MS Word.) Then Explorer would take 30 seconds just to open...then when I clicked on "C" drive the computer crashed. That was it, so I uninstalled the program/printer and my computer worked perfectly again, just not the printer..

So I installed the "lite" driver from the HP website. use it with the USB cable, I would rather have my PC performing properly, thank you

Funny thing (well, not really,) I am using a high end HP laptop (1.7 centrino, 1 gig ram, etc) one would think HP would have made the software compatible with its own PCs

Great idea, HP, very poor implementation.

The PSC 2510 promises more than it delivers. The hardware is fine for printing, but don't expect to get the benefit of the full features supposedly available in the bundled software. The full PSC download (500 MB!) is a pig that dramatically slows down total system performance whether or not you are printing, even on a brand new high-speed machine with lots of available RAM. It took me weeks to isolate the problem until I discovered that HP PSC full install totally screws up system performance, though the "light" install without all the features works fine. HP techs will tirelessly point to anything (your machine, sunspots) to claim otherwise, but the reality is that HP software does not reliably deliver the scan, OCR and other neat features in the full download.

Have yet to get scanner to communicate...either in wired or wireless mode. Spent 2 hours w/ 'tech support', if you can call it that, last night. Downloaded latest drivers/software....all &^*^# GB of it....still get the 'error communicating with scanning device'....totally dead in the water and HP saying they don't have this problem with wireless, only with wired, and have a fix for that...hey they should read a few postings....like I SHOULD have....you have been warned....it's worthless!!

My husband got this 'thing' so he could do a couple of faxes for his father and replace a dead HP 3820 that had worked well but finally gave out. I tried to install the thing on my e-machine with xp-home and it would not let me proceed with the connection of the USB cable. We eventually got it installed on my daughter's xp-pro computer, but it did what it wanted, when it wanted and it would suddenly spit out printing jobs that we had cancelled days before because they never appeared. Needless to say we didn't get much use out of the thing, and it sometimes printed, sometimes didn't...........depending on its mood.

Our daughter moved out with her computer and we brought the thing upstairs.......I was to install it.........I was saying that it failed to install before and I grumped and tried again.......install error at 12%. I uninstalled and tried again, same thing. I went to HP and D/L the install program from there and the security patch......you guessed it!!! 12% was tha failure mark. I finally got the HP site install to load but the install set up would not let me proceed where it indicates you connect the USB cable.........I could only go back or proceed without the connection...........tried that........didn't work.

So I write HP and tell them blow by blow, what has been done. They write back and tell me to do the things I have already done, but hey, I do them again. I write back after they email again saying they are committed to getting the problem resolved. I wait........because you have to disable everything and sit there for a few hours with no firewall.......not a pleasant thing to anticipate. So I write back and tell them that no, the suggestions are not working. They write back and say it is my USBs and they are faulty and I should uninstall them, reinstall them. I then write back and tell them I have spent more time that I never wanted to with this piece of garbage and that I have had it. They reply with an 800 number, admitting defeat via email.

So my husband calls. He gets a tech in India named 'Lincoln'. Lincoln manages to suggest over an almost 4 hour stretch, the uninstall of my router driver, my USBs and ultimately has my computer where it can only be started in safe mode. I am livid. My computer has crashed, the 2510 is not installed and I have no internet, and my install wizard will not save settings because my computer cannot shut down and goes into a restart loop. This goes on until about 10:30 PM. We shut the computer off and eat takeout and discuss the whole debacle. So were are 1000% worse than when we started...........no computer.......no router............great.

I started out less than pleased about a week ago.......you can imagine what mood I was in at this point. So we call HP again at 2 AM, it's late........but not in India, so what the hey? We get another tech and we tell him the long story and he says it's netgear's fault and instigates a 3 way with a netgear guy.......also from India!!! After about 45 minutes, the netgear guy says it is HP's problem..........well we knew that!!.......and he hangs up during mid conversation. The HP tech then asks what kind of computer we have and we tell him: an e-machine. He acts like he has never heard of it and that may be why the installation failed. I am getting overly perturbed at this point, because there are millions of e-machines and all computers have mostly the same stuff in them and I know that 'Lincoln' had no idea what he was talking about and I am having bad thoughts related to outsourcing and hard to understand Indian guys who have never heard about e-machines, like they are some sort of computer cobbled in a barn out of horseshoes and old nails and baling twine.

So no fix. No install. Just a computer crash. I go to bed, it is about 5 AM at this point. I am not happy. I awaken and my husband says he got in touch with e-machines and they were wonderful and he gladly paid the $20 to get our computer back on track. The e-machines tech was knowledgeable and had had experience with the 2510 before and she said the software was bad, almost never worked with xp-home effectively and was marginally better with xp-pro.

The software is bad. It is a huge file and it gets to the point where it seems like the all in one 'thing' is wanting to tell the computer what to do, rather than the other way around. The tech support is less savvy than I am, and I am no computer geek and they wanted to blame my computer and unrelated peripherals for their messed up software.

All my computer products are Apple, but since Apple does not manufacture printers, I had to get an HP one. Many people have told me HP's products are not user friendly and are actually poor quality, so I plonked for this printer which is more expensive and hopefully performs better.

Well I was wrong. Compared to setting up Apple products, setting up this PSC 2510 took hours. We followed the instructions scrupulously, but they made no sense to our home network setting (it seems designed more for office networks). Following the instructions to the T will not get you anywhere. We did trial and error and finally got some semblance of the product functioning.

Printing, faxing, and photocopying works fine. Photocopying is very slow - you do one page at a time, and unlike a conventional copier, this one scans 1/8 of the paper, prints out that portion, then scans another 1/8th, then prints. So it takes a long time to print one whole page. This is a problem if you are copying more than one page.

It's the scanning that is the real nuisance. The software jams up my Apple Powerbook G4 and interferes with my wireless network settings. I had to install and reinstall the software many times.

Now, I have reached an impasse: although all settings are up and running, the printer recognizes my computer one minute, then drops the wireless signal in the next. No satisfactory explanation. Poltergeist?

If I have to spend 30 minutes rebooting, rescanning, resetting everything each time I want to scan a photo, I will shoot myself.

I agree with other reviewers who say this is a POS. I am considering returning this product and I am very very very annoyed with HP. There is simply no excuse for this kind of poor quality. It's a real rip to sell people products that don't work. HP targets housewives and collage artists and amateur photographers with their ad campaign - but the user friendly image is a complete illusion. Even the computer savvy can't figure their products out.