It wasn't that long ago that HP had the absolute worst OSX drivers of any major peripheral developer. Their scanners barely worked, their printers sort of worked, the software they loaded was pretty shamefully buggy, flaky... they just sucked.
So, imagine my surprise when -- after a recent Mac purchase at the Apple Store -- I decided to get a "free" HP C6180 all-in-one printer
The thing is well designed, has good drivers, built-in networking, even scans and faxes over the network -- pushing or pulling to multiple "associated" Macs. It's not perfect but what the hell? It's like someone is writing these drivers who actually uses a Mac!
When did that happen? Doesn't HP know they're supposed to have crappy Mac products?
And after that good experience, and reading a number of great reviews, I grabbed an HP B9180 Photosmart Pro Printer
This is HP -- "we generate huge dots with expensive ink and our photos look like crap" HP. And -- not.
Wow. I don't know what's going on at HP, but they should definitely keep it up.
15 Mar 2007 at 11:40 am | #
At the beginning of the year I remember reading the blog post of a ‘new’ Mac app developer who’s been around for 15 years (can’t remember which one, sorry), and he wrote that he’d been a driver consultant for HP around 2005. So, looks like HP has and continues to get people who get the Mac to support it.
15 Mar 2007 at 02:57 pm | #
Do either of those printers help you with manual duplexing? I’ve got a LaserJet 1012 that works pretty well for what it cost, but the manual duplexing support pales in comparison to Windows. The Windows driver lets you select duplex mode, knows to print out the even pages then shows you to reinsert the paper to print the odd pages. It also correctly handles the case of blank pages.
On the Mac, I need to print half the pages (usually odd), flip the paper, and print the even pages, remembering to remove any blanks in order to keep the pages lined up.
It’s not the end of the world, but the Windows version works much nicer.
15 Mar 2007 at 03:06 pm | #
It’s a good question, Eric: I’ve actually never used either printer for manual duplexing. The C6180 can accept an automatic duplexer—the B9180 doesn’t really make sense for duplexing, given it’s a large format photo printer.
I also have a regular HP Laser Printer (Postscript—easy driver!) and it’s got a built-in duplexer that works just great. (Automatic duplexers rock.)
The limiting factor here might be more with CUPS than with the printer driver, though I don’t know…
15 Mar 2007 at 04:58 pm | #
Their phone support for Mac users is also shockingly good. Should you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to call HP support, mention that you are using a Mac as early and as often as possible so that they transfer you to the Mac support group.
My experience was singularly positive: they asked intelligent questions, quickly realized that I had already correctly assessed the problem with my printer, and suggested a free workaround via GIMP drivers instead of telling me to buy an additional $50 networking dongle.
Their Mac support seems to exist in some parallel awesome universe. Unfortunately it doesn’t make their ink any cheaper…
15 Mar 2007 at 05:28 pm | #
Hey, nice. I’m fortunate in that I haven’t had to call for support, but it’s nice to know they’re hiring good people there too.
Yeah, nothing’s perfect—ink that start force-expiring on the shelf is particularly evil. But all things considered, somebody has added something to the water, and it’s good.
15 Mar 2007 at 06:00 pm | #
I’ve found HP’s Mac software to perform poorly and is “un-Mac-like” but it is slowly improving. Unfortunately, it is not improved enough.
I bought an expensive Scanjet 8250 with a duplex feeder, specifically for duplex scanning. After my initial irritation at not getting my $150 rebate (grrr) it’s been all downhill since then. The feeder would consistently jam on the second side of double-sided scans. HP replaced the feeder, it still jammed. Then a new software version came out, suddenly it stopped jamming on the second side. BUT.. now it has a new duplexing bug. If I try to scan both sides of a double-fold document (you know, a letter size page folded twice in thirds to fit in a regular envelope) the fold just happens to fall in a spot that the rollers can’t grab it. If the fold is in any other place, the duplex scan works fine, it is just these double-fold letter size sheets that jam. And that just happens to be specifically the type of documents I want to scan.
So.. I am forced to manually feed documents into the scanner, one side at a time. I grab the page from the document tray, and quickly insert it into the feeder with the other side up. Oh but there’s another bug. If I put the page in just a split second too soon, the document is scanned, but the scan never appears in my output file. That took me a while to figure out.
I am convinced these are all software bugs, even the hardware jams. I couldn’t believe that the software drivers could cause hardware jams, but the HP techs assured me that there was a problem with communications that caused the feeder status data to stop reporting to the software, and it lost track of what it was doing. It appears that the new drivers are slightly improved but still are far short of usability. I didn’t pay $900 for a scanner this flaky.
15 Mar 2007 at 06:03 pm | #
I ran into some HP folks at a Mac development event earlier this year. When they said they worked in the printer department, I couldn’t resist asking (nicely) why their drivers sucked so badly. They admitted the problems, and claimed that the driver work had been outsourced (contracted) for the last few years, and HP was trying to “get the code back.” I doubt it was really held for ransom, but whatever that comment meant, if it means better drivers for HP printers, I’m all on board. It’s been too many years that I’ve had to advise Mac clients to avoid anything with the HP logo on it.
15 Mar 2007 at 06:26 pm | #
Charles --
Sorry to hear about your scanner problems. The scanner with the C6180 is non-duplexing, but the “fold” issue sounds more like a roller design problem than software. Hard to say.
I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap that I think is great (I’ve written about it here before), but even that occasionally misfeeds. Usually, two pages get stuck together and I have to re-scan. But, mostly, it works.
The C6180’s scanner seems to work, too—though it’s likely a much simpler design.
I had a bad experience some time ago with an older HP scanner (in fact, it’s the unit that made me decide that HP just had no clue). It was a duplexing unit as well, and the way it duplexed just made no sense.
The ScanSnap scans both sides of the paper at the same time. It doesn’t have to wrap-and-curl-and-refeed. It’s a bit more expensive to “make”, but it seems to make a lot more sense.
John --
Yeah, I think totally different people are working on at least part of the drivers at this point. Outsourcing doesn’t mean “bad”, though in this case they clearly picked the wrong guys…
16 Mar 2007 at 12:12 pm | #
I too am a believer in HP since I started using a C5180 in the last month or so. Comparing the user experience of the C5180 with that of my older Deskjet 1180 and no longer used Photosmart 7150 is like night and day. Its as if someone at HP finally decided to switch on the lights in the room marked Mac OSX.
Indeed its very much more a joy to use the new HP machines that those older machines. I don’t really know how good the other new HP machines are but I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of the new HP all-in-ones to fellow macusers.
16 Mar 2007 at 12:34 pm | #
I used to have an Officejet printer (with the self destructing ink cartridges) and boy did the Mac software for that suck. I tried my best to help them by contacting them each time a new version came out to report a new set of bugs, which seemed to help the first few times but I gave up on that practice when they tried to make the support call a chargeable call (even though I was not looking for help, merely to report a bug).
However overall I have to rate HP’s support as excellent, even better than Apple’s! This is based on experiences getting printers, computers and network switches repaired.
I currently have a LaserJet 3392 and with my past bad experiences have up until now have been using the Mac OS X built-in 1320n driver (the nearest built-in equivalent) rather than risk their driver (I am hoping that Leopard will include an up to date set of HP drivers).
16 Mar 2007 at 12:41 pm | #
In general, the “laser” drives are quite simple—especially if the printer is postscript compatible. But I haven’t used the 3392 myself, so I can’t vouch!
16 Mar 2007 at 12:59 pm | #
The question is, have the updated the drivers for those of us who already have systems? I have an all-in-one that I got with my eMac 3 years ago, and it has always sucked - lucky to get the scanner working, lucky to get it to print, etc. I recently downloaded the newest drivers/software - and so far it seems to work everytime I have used it. I just thought I was being lucky.
But why is their driver/software so freaking big!!!!??? I don’t want their photomanagement and all that junk - I want drivers and software to control the features of my machine - nothing more, nothing less. Maybe if they dropped all that other junk they could get the basics right everytime.
16 Mar 2007 at 01:09 pm | #
But it’s “Added Value”, Eric!
16 Mar 2007 at 03:28 pm | #
At work, we have a HP Scanjet (5590 I guess) that I needed to use, but the drivers hadn’t been installed on the scanning PC. I was hesitating between the pain of installing the drivers on the PC, followed by the pain squared of scanning on the PC, and polluting my PowerBook with HP drivers I’d only use once.
I chose the latter and it went surprisingly well. I could scan an article, several pages front and back from the document feeder to a single PDF file.
Then some days later I tried doing the same on the PC, which had had the drivers installed in the meantime. But even knowing how I had just done it on the Mac, it took me a long while to figure out how to do the same on the PC. Turns out the Mac drivers are better that the Windows ones. What a surprise.
17 Mar 2007 at 11:01 am | #
Well, I hope they have improved. We’ve had several OfficeJet-class AIOs in the office lately, and all of them have had unfortunate aspects to their drivers.
First, you can’t configure them directly from Printer Setup Utility. You can to look for More Printers when you choose to Add a printer queue to the system. Well, to be clear, I have manually set up the printer in Printer Setup Utility, but I couldn’t actually print to it from across a subnet boundary. This makes them needlessly complex to set up from a systems administration perspective, and I haven’t even tried to script it.
Then, once you get into the setup, you can either browse for the printer locally via Bonjour, or enter an IP address to find the printer. There’s no choice to enter a hostname, which would be exceedingly helpful for networks with working dynamic DNS and DHCP.
17 Mar 2007 at 03:37 pm | #
Ölbaum—that is rather a surprise: better drivers on the Mac? Who’d have thought that?
Histrionic—this sounds like more of a problem with OSX’s printing system than the HP drivers. Does it work better with other printers?