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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

HP C7280 Photosmart All-in-One Printer (CC567A#ABA)

HP C7280 Photosmart All-in-One Printer (CC567A#ABA)

Printer, scanner, copier, fax, ADF, duplexer, color LED information display, USB, wired Ethernet, 802.11B/G wireless, memory card reader (CF, SD/MMC, XD, MS/Duo). The HP C7280 is a marvelous dream machine. Has a photo paper tray and a red eye removal button too. My unit (French) came with OCR scanning software. Haven't tried it though. The unit is surprisingly modest in size.

Documentation and software is very good. Be patient with software installation. It is not a quick process. All my computers are Windows Vista Premium. Before installing, disable anti-virus software, possibly firewall, file sync, and backup software. The software warned about this. I ignored the warnings and the installation process failed until I disabled them. An end user should never have to be concerned about this -- but I digress.

I'm using the printer to print documentation (mono), usually two-up and double sided. Print quality seems fine although I'm not looking with a critical eye. My printer is networked wirelessly to the router. First page out is very fast on my Ethernet wired computer but somewhat slow on my wireless notebook. The slowness is probably inherent to the notebook-to-router-to-printer wireless networking as opposed to the C7280. Making one of the links wired seems to make a speed difference. If you find this to be an issue, consider putting the printer on an AC power line network such as the well reviewed Panasonic BL-PA100KTA HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptor.

With so many functions, this machine is a modern marvel. I'm really suprised at how well this newly produced machine works. There's a lot of difficult technology packed into this box. Great work HP!

I have three minor issues. First, the installation software shouldn't ask me to disable software to install new software. The software industry needs to sort this out. Second, give me an option to disable the balloon popup that says something like "Printer HP C7280 is disconnected from network". It appears often and intermittently. I'm not sure if this is a wireless network issue or an HP issue. Regardless, I want to opt to not see the message. Just an icon change is sufficient. Third, I haven't found an option to print pages in reverse order.

Update 22-Sep-2007: Wireless printing performance was improved when I changed the router's wireless channel to a lesser used channel. I used a WiFi finder device to show all wireless networks and their channel numbers. There's software that can do that too. I then picked a less noisy channel. I also changed the printer's IP address to a static IP. It seemed that the router was assigning new IP addresses when the connection got flaky. This was particularly a problem since three computer's were using the printer. The static IP assignment will lock the printer's IP to a fixed address thus ending the IP roulette issue.

Update 11-Nov-2007: Flaky wireless problems have been resolved by upgrading to a D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router. Fine product. Recommended. YMMV.

Update 21-Mar-2008: Update software available! I found their new software, filename 100_228_PS_AIO_02_Full_Net_enu.exe available at HP's website, to be a much more pleasant install and a bit better usability. I installed using the "custom" mode, selected manual update, deselected checkboxes for update, supplies and web printing. Be sure you have a C: drive though. One of my three computers has no C: drive which causes the install to abort. I'll have to change the drive letter to C:

Update 24-Mar-2008: New software didn't recognize duplexer unit. Asked me to manually flip paper. Solution is to set Printer Properties->Device Settings->Duplex Unit to Installed. Why doesn't the software automatically detect the duplex unit? Argh.

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