Monday, February 16, 2009

Did I mention HP sucks?

OK. So I am in the position of managing a Dental Lab's IT dept. that was set up by the person who ran the place before me.
Anyway, the marketing dept. depends on an HP CLJ 3600 for creating all their monthly/weekly fliers and other mailers.
2 weeks ago, the printer went in to an endless calibration cycle. It kept up until, as per a forum post and the tech support agent on the phone with me, I pulled all the ink cartridges and the main board, booted up and waited for the error message and then replaced the components one by one. That got it printing again, but the colors were way off. Phone support was not able to help. Hours were spent with them updating firmware, replacing all the ink and doing cold resets one after another.
Finally, they scheduled a field tech to come out the next day. I was called on Thursday to be alerted the tech was not able to make it until Friday because some parts had not come in yet.
I expected the tech on Friday, and was not overjoyed when he never showed up. On Monday morning I got a call that the part was finally in and he would be there on Monday. nearly three hours of the field tech's efforts provided no improvement.
Tuesday saw more time on the phone, another 2 hours, discussing the issue with polite yet useless support folks with heavy accents.
I finally got message that 2 techs would be coming on Wednesday.
Sure enough, 2 techs worked for more than 2 hours and there was no improvement. The printer was still not printing colors correctly.
The following day, I was informed that 3 techs would be out on Monday to look at it. I argued for a replacement and was told it was not policy. We had even purchased the upgraded extended warranty from HP and they still refused to help up get back up and running in a timely fashion. I was transferred through 3 departments before I was finally told that they would process a replacement only if the techs on Monday could not fix the issue. Unfortunately, it would take 3-5 business days to get the printer. WTF? So, on Monday it turned out to be 4 techs and took almost 3 hours to finally fix it.
Now, not only was our marketing dept. down for more than a week, which cost us a lot, HP also wasted their own money. The printer in question only retails for about $500. Their cost to replace it would have been about $200. Instead, they sent a total of 4 techs out on 3 separate calls to replace almost every part in the printer while causing a customer to be down and unproductive for more than a week.
I warn all of you to stay away from HP and definitely stay away from their warranty service unless you get the 24hr replacement plan. Even then, it's more expensive than just buying a new printer.
Also, with the small laserjets, they don't work well with terminal services. Specifically, they don't redirect through remote desktop (RDP) connecting to WTS.
I switched out a couple HPs for Brother printers and the Brothers work fine.
After this very frustrating experience with HP, I can not recommend them in a business environment. It really hurt us to be down that long. I will be replacing our HPs this year. Sorry HP... You suck!

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Hear hear! I did a blog post about my experience yesterday with HP customer service on a chat:

http://albany-lawyer.blogspot.com/2009/03/hp-customer-service-by-chat.html

HP 5500 toner said...

I also had a printer with the verrry same problem. Except mine was malfunctioning dearly on the print itself. No matter what I did, whether it was changing the ink cartridge or cleaning it on the inside, it still kept insisting on Not working! Frustrated much, I took it down to my local near by electronic store where I then had the machine 'put to sleep' and got myself a Brand New HP Vivera Printer! Oh my what a beauty and boy does she print! :)

Unknown said...

Alright, I have read NUMEROUS complaints about HP and their lack of just plain caring. Lets get together and voice our opinions. Please send an email to me @ hpsuxs@gmail.com, and I will provide you with contact numbers and names of who we can contact. If they won't listen to us, let's just keep calling until they do!! We deserve to be heard, lets get together and MAKE ourselves heard!!
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heightworksllc.com said...

Same problem here. with the hp CLJ 3600n. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes before it finally decides to print anything. Customer support is non existant. HP has lost me as a customer for a long long long time.

Anonymous said...

I had an HP All-in-One printer which died on my within 13 months of my purchase. It was out of warranty and HP would not replace it. I remember the time HP products lasted for years.

My HP notebook hinges broke after 1 year of use. HP products are poor quality. Do not buy it.

I would much rather buy a Canon printer, Apple notebooks, or Sony notebooks.

Anonymous said...

Yes HP Printers do suck since all B&W and Color Laser printers are made by Canon. All the printer hardware is manufactured by Canon in China, all HP does is make the controller board and the firmware to run the printers. The paper paths have trouble feeding paper and they all seem to go into a calibration after printing a few pages. So you would be better off not buying any HP or Canon printer if you want one that works go with a Brother or Xerox.

Ex-HP Embedded Printer Firmware Engineer...