Customer Reviews

HP LaserJet 3380 All-in-One

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I had high expectations for this newly-released unit, but I was ultimately disappointed. I unplugged my old but reliable (HP) laser printer, fax machine and scanner and started to assemble what I thought would be my one-stop office solution. The 3380 has a somewhat cheap feel, as though a lighter gauge plastic is used than in their sturdy laser printers. The paper tray does not snap in place cleanly and it wobbles around, and the side and front doors pop open too easily.

I installed the software and then tried to use the scanner, but only received error messages. I called HP tech support and was assisted by an extremely knowledgeable, polite and helpful technician. When our fixes failed, she had a newer software disk sent to me overnight (at no charge) and we began our efforts again the next day, to no avail. After a total of about 3 hours on the phone, we did get the scanner to work in an unintended manner, but with poor quality results. I am returning the unit for a refund.

Almost every printing device that I own is HP. Deskjets, OfficeJets, LaserJets. It was only natural when looking for an all-in-one that would be able to handle both volume and type of tasks that I had grown into, that I decided on an HP. It seemed to have it all. Crisp high speed laser printing. Copying. Scanning high resolution in color or black and white. Faxing with good input tray. If only they allowed me to run the machine for a few days, I would have discovered the deep dark truth - that it had not been beta tested by humanoid carbon life forms. It couldn't have been.

The primary issues surround the software. It's Internet Explorer based and although it is not tied to your internet connection, it can be extremely slow firing up. How slow? Try 10 to 20 seconds. And it ain't my CPU. Next, you can not import your phone book from a previous HP All-In-One product. Heeelllllooooohhh! If I'm upgrading to your higher priced product, don't penalize me by making me re-enter all my information. It's called backward compatibility, but I digress. Next, once your database is entered, it takes approximately 10 seconds for the address book to come up when you want it to appear when you fax. 10 seconds is not a long time unless, of course, you're dangling from a rope or having to get the address book multiple times a day. This an normal instant-on activity that takes so much time, you could start another hobby while it's coming up on screen.

BTW, the address book only has spots for name and fax number. You can enter a company when it goes to fax to that person, but will not store it so you don't have to enter it again.

Oh, and the box. While you're faxing using the software (by the way, it's much faster if you enter the number on the machine itself and fax it from there.), there is a box that appears on screen that tells you that it's faxing. Only problem is, you can't get rid of it. No way to minimize it. No way to delete it. You can move it, but it stays on top the entire time. If you do multiple faxes, it's there for the entire time.

I don't know who wrote the software, and I don't know who beta tested them. What I do know is that if I was Carly CEO of HP and found this, there would be a few people put to sleep in the software department before the next pay envelope.

I have been very happy with printing, faxing, and copying. Scanning, unfortunately, did not turn out well. It is not even covered in the printed manual (which is all about faxing), and pressing the "Start Scan" button simply results in the error "The ordinal 139 could not be located in the dynamic link library MAPI32.dll". Half an afternoon with "instant HP support chat" via my web browser did not clear this up. I thought the instant support system was rather slick, however, since one can work on other fronts while waiting for a chat response. I did learn from the knowledgeable support rep how to scan one page at a time from within MS Word, which was something, but the scanning is so slow that I cannot afford to use it if there is no way to scan all pages in the document feeder to a disk file unattended. At the moment, this seems to be the case. My other problem is that scanning preferences don't seem to be register anywhere that get used in the future. In other words, I have to laboriously set my preferences (resolution, paper size, black-and-white, etc.) before each scan, which doesn't seem right. The paper format defaults to legal letter size, which I found surprising.

UPDATE 10/13/04: Since my original review, I have encountered printing problems. A large percentage of PDF files will not print under Windows XP-SP2 ("printing error"). Copying the PDF file to my Linux machine and printing to a LaserJet 1220 from acroread has worked fine every time so far for the files that fail to print on my LaserJet 3380. I also could not print my taxes from Turbo Tax on the 3380 from Windows XP. This is very surprising since I am running nothing but up-to-date software.

My rating is now three stars, but I can't seem to change that.

I'm a home office user who needs a machine that can handle a moderate amount of printing, faxing, and copying along with the occasional scanning job, and this machine has been working extremely well for me. The quality produced by all of the functions is excellent, and the space savings of having one machine that does everything is incredible.

I would have given the machine 5 stars if it hadn't been for the software. Yes, I have to agree that the software provided is poorly written. The software will also not allow you to utilize the functions of the machine over a network, which is the biggest issue for me. Also, it took me a weekend of trial and error and then several hours on the phone with technical support to get the scan function working. But now that it works...wow!

If you are a home office user who needs a solid multi-function machine that can handle a moderate volume of work, I highly recommend this model. My only suggestion: If you run into a problem setting up the scan function, don't waste your time trying to fix the issue yourself. Call technical support - they are surprisingly helpful and knowledgeable and should be able to solve the problem for you. I was nervous about the company's technical support after reading reviews of other HP products but was pleasantly surprised when I actually made contact.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this LaserJet AiO based on the many negative reviews out there. However, I decided to bite the bullet and at least try it out to see if HP had worked out the bugs. I've had it about two weeks now and have had no problems, yet. It prints flawlessly, the software works well (it's connected via USB 2.0 to my laptop running Windows XP SP2). The scanner, copy, and fax functions all work just as expected, too. No problems at all. It's fairly quiet and it moves pretty fast...maybe not as fast as the $1,000 standalone laserjets, but only 5 or so seconds slower. The ADF feeder works great, too.

My only complaint is that networking wasn't built-in to the machine, and HP requires you to buy their external JetDirect print server if you want to hook this up to a network. You'd definitely expect this to be a built-in function if you're paying $700 for this system.

I realize that I may have just lucked out and actually bought one of the few non-lemons, but this unit works great. Maybe it just took some time for HP to finally fix the errors, since many of the negative reviews on this were written about a year ago.

If you're going to buy this system, I recommend purchasing it at a reputable office chain store that will allow you to return it should the unit be troublesome. Yes, you could get it cheaper off of some random, obscure website, but most likely it will be a pain in the arse to return it should something go wrong. Pay the extra $40 at Staples, Office Depot, Office Max, just to be safe.

I have an office network with several Macintosh computers, 2 Win XP machines and the 3330 printer multifuntion machine that had been suggested to me back in late 2003. the 3330 is the precursor of the 3380. It is now a year and a half from the time that this was installed and the 3330 is getting very little use because of difficulties with several aspects of the printer.

Software - Based on this expereince, HP does not write very good programs for the Macintosh. It would not work well on the network and the support for the Mac was very poor. We were using the printer as a fax that would essentially capture a digital image then send the fax to the computer. It worked but the software was so intrusive and would be constantly invading the workspace on the desktop. there was no way to turn it off. Software was not intuitive. Tech support was clueless about the abilities of their printer. they did not even know that you could preview the fac on the computer before printing the contents. The essentially told us, "you shouldn't be able to do that". Scanning over the network was a joke. It took over 20 minutes at one time to scan over the network. Did not try that again.

In term sof printing capability, it was decent. I was relatively fast. Gave good quality prints. The copier function was also reliable. Scaning using USB was acceptable. The toner is more expensive than comparable toners from other brand but it includes the drum. I think this is still the case with the current model. the bad thing was the printer function started to deteriorate after about one year of use and about 15,000 sheets of paper. The prints were either smudged or had lines streaking down the paper. No amount of cleaning or changing of the toner cartridge would remedy this situation. By the time this happened, the warranty had run out (it has a one year warranty) and repair would have been in the $300-$400 range not including the shipping. This is why is sits in the back of the office basically collecting dust. I may still use it as a scanner since it has a sheet feeder. In summary, for Macintosh on a network, look elsewhere (currently use Brother which, IMHO, is superior, unless HP has made major leaps in their programing . In terms of the printer function, what can I say, it isn't printing well anymore after a year of use. Bad apple? I don't know what the experience of others are. Iknow that there are very few Mac users out there making networks, but I hope this helps them.

Others have focused on the operational characteristics of this rather expensive $700 machine. I have used HP laserjet office printers for years and have found them to be reliable, durable workhorses. I therefore opted for this rather odd looking piece of equipment, which came with an impressive list of features and was warmly recommended by the dealer. The machine seemed a bit flimsy, the way it was put together, but I was assured of the engineering excellence that was contained inside the cheesy plastic housing.

The laserjet 3380 indeed performed as promised, delivering sharp, crisp, in focus copies, faxing accurately and swiftly. It's memory was outstanding during the transmission of large documents. On the average, I used this machine two to three times daily, faxing or copying about 6-10 pages per day. Toner cartridge life seemed to be above average.

Everything was great, for the first 16 months. Then the machine quit. It was out of warranty, and today I was informed that the whole scanner assembly would need to be replaced at a cost of $375.00 I asked the technician if this was a common problem, to which he replied that he had seen "about 60 or 80" such machines with this problem. He further informed me that this issue had first developed with the earlier Laserjet 3330, and that the defective scanner technology used in that machine was then carried over through several other models, including the 3380. "HP never really got around to fixing this thing" he added helpfully. Really. Nice knowing that, after spending the going price on this piece.

I asked him if he thought the repair would be worth it. "Oh yes, I should think so" he added "you might get another 2 years out if it then". I don't think so. $700 on an all-in-one machine for 16 months of service life? And then nearly another $400 for another 2 years of opperation? No thanks. No more all-in-one products from HP for me. It's really ironic, and kind of pathetic, isn't it, that a company long known for its rugged and well made office printers would knowingly put out a piece of expensive junk, and then recycle the same defective concept over several different model runs, and expect consumers to fall for the same tired trick? Not this one. You know what they say... fool me once.....

I paid $700 including extra toner and tax so that I could have an all in one fax
office machine with a SCANNER. THe scanner NEVER worked and now the machine doesn't work. After paying out $39 for a tech call, I was told that it needed to be sent in or taken somewhere for repair. Don't buy this machine. My next fax will be a Canon.

The hardware is good, but don't expect the advanced functionality to work well. Boneheads at HP have refused to update the software for this printer. My printer was only a few months old when someone made the decision not to provide Vista drivers for the advance functions.

2 stars -- one for faxing and one for copying.

Don't look to this machine if you need any scanning capabilities though, esp. if using a Mac. Can't get it play nicely with Vuescan or Adobe Acrobat; i.e., neither program can detect the LJ 3800. So, that forces me to use the hp Scan program, which is clumsy to say the least.

1. I'm used to the 2-step Preview/Scan process that every other program uses, but it doesn't seem to work this way with the 3380. Not sure what's up with this.

2. Saving the scans also is a bear. After I save one scan, I expect the program to remember my destination folder instead of forcing me to set it every time I want to save a file. What a drag!