Refurb HP 5550: Yay or Nay

[Preferred Customer]

Tired of using my old laser printer, so I am considering buying a refurb
HP 5550 selling at Office Max for about the price of a Brother toner.
Anyway, my main uses are text and as a letter copier when used with a
scanner. I also have an older Deskjet 970 with prints fine, but copies
much too slowly for my tastes.

Questions:

1. Why do Office Max and other office supply stores have such a large
supply of refurbs? Was there a defective batch? Should I be concerned
about longevity? If they were simply returns by customers under a
store's satisfaction guarantee, I would be less concerned.

2. Are there any quality+cheaper source for 3rd party inks? Although
there are plenty of dealers, shipping and/or tax usually negates any
price advantage.

3. How fast does it take to print a text page at 300dpi if I use a
scanner and copier software combination? On a laser, the 6ppm printer
simply rolls the page out. On a Deskjet 970, pages crawl at about 3 or 4
minutes per page.


Thanks and any additional comments are welcomed and appreciated.

 

[Madonna]

Tired of using my old laser printer, so I am considering buying a refurb
HP 5550 selling at Office Max for about the price of a Brother toner.
Anyway, my main uses are text and as a letter copier when used with a
scanner. I also have an older Deskjet 970 with prints fine, but copies
much too slowly for my tastes.

Questions:

1. Why do Office Max and other office supply stores have such a large
supply of refurbs? Was there a defective batch? Should I be concerned
about longevity? If they were simply returns by customers under a
store's satisfaction guarantee, I would be less concerned.

Don't know. Maybe it's a marketing ploy. Seems to happen a lot.

2. Are there any quality+cheaper source for 3rd party inks? Although
there are plenty of dealers, shipping and/or tax usually negates any
price advantage.

If you're not printing pictures, you can try the Ko-Rec-Type inks that
they sell at Office Max.

3. How fast does it take to print a text page at 300dpi if I use a
scanner and copier software combination? On a laser, the 6ppm printer
simply rolls the page out. On a Deskjet 970, pages crawl at about 3 or 4
minutes per page.

I think your Deskjet 970 is badly set up. You should boot your computer
and go in the BIOS to make sure your parallel port is set up for ECP/EPP
don't use "normal" or "bi-directionnal" that's too slow, also assign a IRQ
to the port in the BIOS (how to this depends on your BIOS) then make sure
windows knows it's an ECP/EPP port. Or easier, just unplug the parallel
and plug the USB.

 

[rcm]

My opinion is that if a product has so many returned ones that they can be
refurbed and resold in a major chain like Office Max, Staples, Office
Deport, etc., then when first sold, it had tones of problems. Something in
the sale and use of the product pissed off so many buyers that they returned
them in massive quantities.

To me, the HP brand name today is crap in many lines. They have downgraded
the quality of their products to sell to the consumer public. This is
reflected in their warrantees. I was looking at buying a HP Scanner, low
end. I was astonished that they only offered 90 day warrantee on any of the
under $150 units. Epson and Canon had 1 year warrantees. If you cannot
back up your product for a year, then don't sell it. It is obvious that HP
knows that they will not last a year in a sufficient number and won't back
them up. Even a toaster has a one year warrantee!

A friend found a scanner at Staples on sale and called me up for my opinion.
He read the ad out to me (from a newspaper flyer) and when I heard
refurbished I was uncomfortable in recommending it. First the HP brand as
well as the 90 day warrantee coupled with refurbished just made me wince.

So while he was on the phone, I did a search for that HP model and the word
reviews. Well, the particular model came out a couple of years earlier and
there were so many bad consumer reviews (75% said they would never buy it
again or any HP product on one site). The unit had driver problems and HP
took a year + to release new drivers which did not resolve the problems. It
had poor HP support. I read off the one paragraph reviews to my friend on
the phone, after the 50th one, he didn't want it. Comments like "piece of
sh.t", "never buy HP again", repeated over and over again.

Magazine reviews and product comparisons are fine for getting an idea of new
products but they never really tell you what the product is like. A product
is never out there long enough today to get feedback from consumers before
the model is changed. Refer units are the exception, you can find out why
they were refurbed because of the numerous complaints out there.

Five years ago I bought a refurbed Mustek parallel port scanner from a
computer surplus store. It was all the drivers. No newer ones on the net.
The scanner would scan and loose the connection, etc. I returned and
received a replacement. Same thing.

But is buying refurbed a bad thing? IT has the advantage of telling you
something about the unit. So many returned that they could mass refurb it.
If you are lucky, they fixed the problem. You have the advantage that the
product was reviewed and consumers have had their chance to complain. Too
many complaints is an indicator of things to me.

I would suggest you do a google search on the model number and words like
review or rating and see what pops up.

 

[Jan]

Tired of using my old laser printer, so I am considering buying a refurb
HP 5550 selling at Office Max for about the price of a Brother toner.
Anyway, my main uses are text and as a letter copier when used with a
scanner. I also have an older Deskjet 970 with prints fine, but copies
much too slowly for my tastes.

Questions:

1. Why do Office Max and other office supply stores have such a large
supply of refurbs? Was there a defective batch? Should I be concerned
about longevity? If they were simply returns by customers under a
store's satisfaction guarantee, I would be less concerned.

Don't know. Maybe it's a marketing ploy. Seems to happen a lot.

2. Are there any quality+cheaper source for 3rd party inks? Although
there are plenty of dealers, shipping and/or tax usually negates any
price advantage.

If you're not printing pictures, you can try the Ko-Rec-Type inks that
they sell at Office Max.

3. How fast does it take to print a text page at 300dpi if I use a
scanner and copier software combination? On a laser, the 6ppm printer
simply rolls the page out. On a Deskjet 970, pages crawl at about 3 or 4
minutes per page.

I think your Deskjet 970 is badly set up. You should boot your computer
and go in the BIOS to make sure your parallel port is set up for ECP/EPP
don't use "normal" or "bi-directionnal" that's too slow, also assign a IRQ
to the port in the BIOS (how to this depends on your BIOS) then make sure
windows knows it's an ECP/EPP port. Or easier, just unplug the parallel
and plug the USB.

I bought a so-called refurbished 750XI (it looks like it has never been out of the box before
for $99.00. It has a one year warranty on it. I have had no problems at all and quite happy
with it.

 

[Michael Grey]

HP had a bad batch(rom problems) systems would not recognize them.
They intentionally sold them to retailers knowing fullwell they were bad
and waited for the returns from sustomers.
How sad!!!
HP got there money and waited for the guinea pigs(consumers ) to report
them.They must have made a bunch of money this way.

 

[Madonna]

Do you have anything to back up this bizarre accusation? It cost much more to
ship a bad product and have to deal with the warranty than to fix it before
shipping. I think you are totally out to lunch on this one. What you suggest
makes no sense at all.

Making money out of a bad batch depends on the rate of returns. Just
look at those mail-in rebates, a lot of people don't bother sending them.

OTOH a massive return is probably not intentional, since HP will make
more money selling the ink cartridges than the printers.

 

[magpie]

Do you have anything to back up this bizarre accusation? It cost much more to
ship a bad product and have to deal with the warranty than to fix it before
shipping. I think you are totally out to lunch on this one. What you suggest
makes no sense at all.

- Bob Headrick, not speaking for my employer HP

Bob, don't take it personal. I'm forever amazed at the amount of
missinformation and outright lies I run across in newsgroups. Some
bozo in Timbuctoo has a bad experiance, 90% of which is Idiot Operator
(I/O Error) fault, with a particular model of something or another
and then totaly trashes the manufacturer and all of their products.
Then to make matters worse, they continue to trash the manufacturer
for years afterwards. It doesn't matter to these people that the
corporate world is extremely happy with the products of the
manufacturer and will continue to pay the premuim for a high quality
product that will last for years. What is even more amazing is that
the average joe, who really knows squat about the products, actually
believes these fools and will then spend their hard earned dollars on
an inferior product which won't last them more than a year or two. As
a service technician and owner of a printer service company who BTW,
does not sell printers (conflict of interest in my opinion) I have
never hesitated in recomending MOST of the HP and Lexmark printer
product lines as they are the best value for money on the market
today, as they have been for decades.

Frank

 

[Harm]

Bob,

You are certainly correct, these allegations are bizarre.

But something does seem to be happening with the quality of HP products,
given the large amounts of "refurbished" merchandise I have seen in the
stores. I assume these are just items people have returned because they
don't like them for some reason.

HP used to be a benchmark for printer quality (and maybe it still is), and I
have owned several unbreakable HP models in the past. But for my most
recent purchase I went to Canon, since I no longer have the perception that
HP makes a product that is superior to the rest. (All the discussion about
small, expensive ink cartridges didn't help either)

Do you have anything to back up this bizarre accusation?>

Bob

 

[VH]

Go for it. I bought one a couple of days ago mainly for the
ink cartridge. At $29 after rebate, it is cheaper than the
color cartridge alone, and the printer come with full
cartridge rather than "starter" one. I used to have one but
swapped with my mother's because I got tire of repeatedly
trying to unclog her Epson 880. The 5550 is a very good
printer for her which works reliably without muss or fuss,
reasonably fast and quiet. Good text and photo (even
without the photo cartridge), a little bulky but low profile
which can slide under shelf.

The printer I got from Office Max looks exactly as if you
bought a new printer. The only thing that it did not have
that a non-refurbished one would have is the pack of sample
photo paper (I just installed 4 at work).

The Deskjet 970 is usually a very good printer but on some
computers it takes forever to start printing. The fix for
this is to use Windows (2K & XP) driver rather than HP.
This tricks works with the 950/930 series as well as the
photosmarts of that generation.

Another trick to get it to start printing faster is to
change the paper type from automatic to plain.