HP Officejet J6480: first impressions

OK, now that the hatred is off of my chest… I gotta say that this printer – so far – rocks. It’s not the fastest, it’s not the sleekest, it’s not the most bestest ever I’m sure at a lot of things. But it’s wireless. Built-in wireless. Which means that the drivers for it are designed specifically for it. This may not make as much sense to you, so let me back up a minute:

We’ve been printing wirelessly for many years now. But it’s been a hack more than anything. We’ve basically just been running a standard USB printer to an Apple Airport Express Base Station, which for the most part bridged the gap between our wired/wireless world. But it wasn’t all 100% hunky-dory. Scanning wouldn’t work wirelessly, so we had to kludge up a wire system to plug in the computers when we needed to scan stuff. Also, the ink notification systems & head cleaning and – well, pretty much every other printer utility – would not work through the APEBS either. Basically, basic printing worked OK, everything else did not.

So now I can do it all wirelessly, which is hella-cool, as all the cool kids are saying these days. Print, fax, scan, it’s all there, even the utilities and maintenance stuff, all wirelessly. And it’s got some OCR stuff built-in as well, and it runs smoother than about any other OCR software/scanning system I’ve used before. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition; it basically allows you to scan in a document and then it “reads” the letters/words and puts that into a text document for you that you can edit and use. It’s also pretty cool.

So. Yeah. I like the printer and I like the scanning system as well. I just happen to distinctly hate their: 1) setup process, 2) 10,000 add-on programs that I don’t want, 3) desire to turn my Apple MacBook into a/an “HP officejet workcenter photo machine” and put like 20 icons to SH!T I’LL NEVER USE AND DIDN’T WANT all over my dock, 4) lack of documentation (like for instance, when you scan things it creates a folder in the Documents folder titled Scanner Output. This would be nice to know, so that people who wouldn’t think about these things would know about them. Hell at 4-7MB per scanned image those could add up fast and eat up a hard drive).

We’ll keep it, I guess. ;-)