Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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137 of 138 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good machine for the price, some drawbacks, December 5, 2003
I bought this little fax/copy/scanner about a month ago for light-to-medium home/office use. I've been pretty happy with it, overall, with some reservations.
Pros:
1. Very good copy and print quality. (Haven't used the scanner)
2. Moderately fast print/copy speed.
3. Variety of print settings to allow you to print fast/draft, fast/normal, normal, best, and maximum dpi. You can also choose greyscale and "black cartridge only." Given the price of color cartridges, I use the latter setting most often.
4. Easy to learn. The manual is good, and use is pretty intuitive (mostly).
5. The size is great -- it fits on top of a small bookshelf, with all the features of much bigger units.
Cons:
1. While mostly intuitive, use is not COMPLETELY intuitive. To print some custom-size invitations, for example, I learned by trial and error that you need to change the settings in TWO places: in the document's printer properties settings (through Word, in my case) and through the printer's own settings, through the print manager. Very strange way to do it, I thought.
2. The in/out paper slot on the printer is the same. That is, it takes paper up, prints on it, and spits it out on top of the "in" tray. It doesn't re-use printed pages, but this isn't the most convenient arrangement for monitoring paper level or even grabbing finished documents.
3. The paper ejection is often too powerful, especially in Fast/Draft. This results in the finished document's being scattered all over the floor -- very annoying.
4. Cancelling print jobs often requires restarting the computer to clear the memory -- although this could be a Windows bug. I mean, an "undocumented feature."
5. Cartridges are pricey. The HP site (only place I looked) listed black cartridges for over $20 and color for more than $30.
Overall, it's a decent machine that could use some retooling to improve functionality. If you're just going for quality and price (and size!), and you have low to moderate volume print/copy requirements, you'll probably be very pleased. I'll probably live with the annoyances of this unit, given my light print/copy needs. If I printed/copied more often, I'd return this machine for something better engineered.
One special note: I purchased this printer through Amazon's partner program from Circuit City. When I went to pick it up, the store had lost the order, even though I had an order number. The staff was incredibly rude and unhelpful. I finally bought it off the floor and had to call to cancel the original order (for which I'd already been charged!). Given Amazon's own excellent customer service, free shipping, and fair return policy, I wish I'd just waited the week it would have taken for Amazon to ship it to me directly. I won't make that mistake again.
Update October 2008: This machine is still working fine, and I remain pleased with it (with the above caveats). I still haven't figured out how to stop it from spitting paper all over the floor, and I'd prefer a double-sided option -- but I'm happy it's still going five years later!
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67 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Small footprint, fine printing, right price, November 3, 2003
After getting sick and tired of all the streaked printing from a series of Epson printers--okay, it could have been me doing something wrong, but when I mentioned it at several stores, the clerks smiled and said, "What else is new?"--I decided to get my first HP. I wanted a multifunction unit because I have two kids in middle school and a bit of copying and scanning always comes in handy. I am more than pleased with the PSC 1350. It is remarkably small and attractive, and the black and white text printing is plenty fast, and color printing is terrific. I'm not using it to scan photographs, so you may not be happy with 36 bit scanning if that's your bag, but it is a wonderful sidekick at a very reasonable price.
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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Laptop Printer/Scanner/Copier, July 29, 2004
I got what I wanted -- Something to use with my laptop when on car trips. Plus, it's a good copier! It's small and lightweight and folds up into a tight little box, ready for travel. (But don't forget the power adapter and USB cable.) It accepts camera cards, including the Xd picture card, which I use.
The 1350 has an amazingly clever way of printing from camera cards without a computer. It prints a sheet of thumbnails. Then you blacken a little circle next to each picture you want printed. Then you put that form face-down on the glass, and it prints just the photos you selected. I have not tried this yet; I read about it in the user's guide.
During installation, there was a paper jam, which stopped the install. But you have to complete installation before you can search the online user's guide and read how to clear a paper jam! Clearing paper jams is not covered in the dinky little printed manual. I finally pulled the paper out with brute force. Later, I found out that I was supposed to open a door in the back.
The getting-started instructions warn that the software install will take a long time, and it does, and it takes up lots of hard disk space. This psc is not for older, slower, smaller systems. For a newer computer, the install speed and storage requirements are acceptable. I installed under Windows XP on a 2.8-gigahertz system with a 100-GB hard disk.
PRINTING: So far I've printed only a few web pages, and they came out fine. The output falls right on top of the input paper tray -- crude, but if you're just printing something small on the fly, no problem. I prefer it to my old Canon super-small portable because the HP uses full-size print cartridges, so I won't need to frequently change cartridges.
SCANNING: Mixed results. It is faster than my (very) old scanner, and where the paper is right up against the glass, it produces a beautifully clear image. However, if the paper is a little bit off the glass, as where a book's page curves up into the binding, it does not focus. I guess the technical words are, it has very little depth of field. My ancient scanner beats it in this department.
COPYING: A snap. Put the input on the tray, push a button, it makes a nice color copy. However, the depth-of-field limitation described under SCANNING applies here too.
FOUR MONTHS LATER: The 1350 is still performing well. The three-star rating may be a tad unfair. HP deserves another half star for combining so much functionality into such a compact box.
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