HP Deskjet 3420

kept breaking down and refusing to print, and the constant reminders to buy their ink on line were a pain. have ditched them for epson which is a whole new world.

My HP Deskjet 3420 Inkjet printer worked fine for a while, then it started to come up with error messages e.g. cradle cannot move, cartridge error etc... There appeared to be no problem with any of these things. I suspect that the sensors got disturbed easily. I tried rebooting, and reinstallation etc... but the problems still persist and make the printer unusable.

I went to the local Comet store to get replacement cartridges for my Epson and saw the HP Deskjet 3420 printer on sale for £28. I bought it and dumped the Epson and have been delighted with it so far. I find it very fast and the print quality is good enough for my needs. The downside is replacement cartridges are very expensive even the non HP ones.

This replaced our thirsty and noisy old Epson stylus 600. Its very cheap £40 if you shop around but you'll use more ink due to the small cartridge size. As such its better for small print runs - if you are a heavier user stay away!

Print quality is very good and we have no grumbles with it at all. The paper feeds in slightly crooked though for some reason but this doesnt affect the printed output.

I have had some problems printing from a laptop to the printer (which is attached to the desktop computer). XP on the laptop can find the printer and drags through the drivers from the desktop (dont try and install the printer on further computers using their CD ) but loses it after a few days. I do not know whether this is XP or the way I have set it up but we didnt have this problem with the Epson.

The help file does say that the deskject cannot be networked. I do hope that HP havent crippled the software as that would really annoy me.

Anyway, its a good budget printer which is more than adequate for text printing and OK for pictures. If you are printing a lot of images try a different printer as you will spend a lot on ink.