HP Photosmart C4795 All-in-One Printer vs. Kodak ESP-5250

Recently netromic was called to setup a customers new HP Photosmart C4795 All-in-One Printer. Normally a new printer can be set up in no time at all, but this was not the case for this model.

The unit was purchased from a local computer retail store and seemed to promise all the bells and whistles anyone could ever want out of a home printer. Color photos, copier, networking with wireless!

Upon opening the unit we found ourselves greeted by a promise of all these features in a slick package. The setup was fairly straight forward, but extremely slow. The software CD that was provided took almost an hour to complete the setup and installed unneeded "tools" such as a Yahoo! web toolbar. Most installs that include such added programs give you the option to NOT install these annoyances. Unfortunately the HP forced this with the install of the required software.

Besides the slow installation the unit came with explicit warnings to not connect the USB cable until you were instructed to do so. Understandably this can cause issues as Windows will try to find the best software driver before the CD software is installed. One can't help but wonder why manufactures couldn't override the default drivers durring the instalation of their software.

The setup was, as I said, fairly straight forward. You simply read the instructions and followed along. Most people could do this even if they had limited computer experience. But the setup procedure took a very long time to transfer files and configure. Far beyond the amount of time one would expect to spend setting up such a device.

Finally we came to the much needed feature to print via a wireless network connection. All seemed to move slowly, but surely to a satisfactory completion. The software was able to find the wireless connection key from the computer and automatically transfer it to the printer. Finally the time came to test the wireless print feature. I clicked continue and the printer began to purr. The paper loaded and the print heads moved to position and... ... ... nothing.

The printer froze up. Talking with the very helpful HP support personnel did little more than confirm that the unite could not be reset at all and was essentially "bricked." They advised we try to replace it at the place of purchase, so we did. We got the new one set up and had the same problem.

Upon returning the second unit we were informed that this had happened to other people.

Given our current rate of success we decided it was best to try a different brand. Kodak.

The Kodak ESP-5250 was a very nice all-in-one printer at only a slightly higher cost. The setup was easy and the software installed very fast with minimal extras. Unlike the HP the USB cable was not included, but in a wireless environment configuration went smoothly.

In about 20 minutes the new Kodak was up and running. With a few tweaks to the computer firewall we were finally able to print, copy, and scan.

While testing the scan over the wireless we were suprised to see that if you selected "Scan Photo" the printer would scan the full document and auto detect any photos on it. This made it easy to scan the whole thing or just the parts you wanted!

With this experience I personally, as a netromic representative, would recommend staying away from HP for the time being and choose a Kodak printer. Not only was it easy to use and feature rich, the replacement ink cartridges are more fairly well priced. This lift-ime cost adjustment makes it well worth the few extra bucks.

-Dave

Software for Windows v.1

Here is a sort list of neat software tools for all of us point and clickers.
This is a very rough draft of some of the tools I use in no real order. The links are too the parent home page or a download page.

The end all awesome place to find open source projects and downloads:
Source Forge

Windows configuration:
nLite - nLite is a tool for pre-installation Windows configuration and component removal at your choice. Optional bootable image ready for burning on media or testing in virtual machines.
CCleaner - CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool.
SIW - SIW is an advanced System Information for Windows tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner.
Unlocker - How often have you tried to delete or rename a file or folder and got
"Cannot delete xxx: It is being used by another person or program."? Unlocker is a tool which will help you overcoming this scandalous Windows bug.

Text & code:
Notepad++

Image editing
Paint.net - Stop pirating Photoshop! Paint.net adds what I would consider basic image editing to what basically looks like MS Paint.

Arrchiever:
7-Zip - An anything archive related must.

Network and Security
AngryIP Scanner - A fast and easy network host scanner. Basic info and, as I said, fast.
Metasploit
Cain (& Able) - The network scanner/sniffer/cracker, password recovery tool for windows. Constently updating and very well made.
nmap, zenmap, umit - nmap is a very comprehensive port and host scanner. Maybe not the fastest, but the best for information. Zenmap is a GUI front end for nmap. umit is much the same as zenmap, but I've grown to like it.
WinSCP - WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Legacy SCP protocol is also supported. Its main function is safe copying of files between a local and a remote computer.
PuTTY - PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Windows and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.
Wireshark - Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows.
Win32whois - find out more about a domain with out all those annoying pop-ups web based WhoIs services have.
SoftPerfectNetScanner - Multi-threaded IP, SNMP and NetBIOS scanner for Windows with a modern interface and several advanced features.

Mulimedia:
VLC - The everything player.
Boxee - Nice iTunes/MediaCenter replacement. Still young, but lots of promise.

Other:
Maltego - Internet data miner.
PowerToys - PowerToys add fun and functionality to the Windows experience. By Microsoft.

This is just a start. I encourage you to comment and help me improve this list.