Cheap HP 3330MFP LaserJet All-in-One with Auto Document Feeder (Electronics) (Windows NT 5, Windows NT 4, Windows NT 3.5, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows NT) Price

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Customer Reviews of HP 3330MFP LaserJet All-in-One with Auto Document Feeder

faxing problems/design flaws
I am using this product with a JetDirect print server. It scans, faxes, and prints over my network with no problems.BUT, the scanner carriage wastes time traveling to the opposite side for ADF scanning. It wasted even more time when the carriage would doulble pass per page using the ADF until I upgraded to the lastest firmware. The scanner carriage has a nervous twitching habit for no apparent reason. For faxing, this product is snobby when it come to socializing with other(COMM ERROR 321)fax machines, whereas the competitive products talk just fine to all fax machines using my same senario. YES...I have a clean phone line. YES...I've tried all possible combinations of V.34 and ECM being either on or off. I've been into the Developer's Menu. Have no clue on solving the fax issue in here. PRINTING IS FLAWLESS. If this poduct could digest some attention deficit disorder medication, then it would have some potential.

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Good for home business, not so good for pure home use
I have had my HP Laserjet 3330 for a couple of years now. Despite its fairly bulky size, I enjoy being able to get my separate printer, scanner, and fax machine off my desk, so I save a lot of space. The flatbed scanner was a must-have feature, and I love the automatic document feeder. Print quality is consistently speedy and high quality and I save bundles compared to an inkjet-based multifunction. (Those may cost less initially, but you'll pay for it in those overpriced ink cartridges!).

My primary use for this device is as a printer, my main complaint is the paper tray is very cheap and poorly designed. Try to remove the tray without removing the paper first and you have a big mess on your hands.

As a fax machine, this is a huge step up from my old dedicated fax machine, since I can fax directly from my computer, with the flatbed scanner, or with the automatic document feeder. I do have a couple of gripes with the fax software, though (see list of gripes below).

As a scanner, I love having both the automatic document feeder and the flatbed scanner for scanning oddly-shaped documents. When I first purchased it, the ADF was horribly slow because the scan head would have to go all the way over to the left edge to reach the adf, then returned all the way to the right edge between each page. It made it slow and tedious. HP fixed that bug with a BIOS update available on their web site in early 2003. Otherwise, I love its ability to put a big stack of documents in and walk away. I have scanned thousands of black-and-white documents and the speed is adequate and the ADF rarely misfeeds. Do NOT, however, purchase this scanner for its ability to scan photographs. Color scans are of dissapointingly poor quality. (pretty much unusable for high quality scanning of photos).

I have great success networking this printer in a peer-to-peer environment. I think there was some comment about being able to use the scanner and fax functions from networked computers, but I have never attempted this.

Gripes:

I had hoped to clear up my desk with a multifunction that could do everything I wanted to do with a printer, fax, and scanner. Now it appears that I need to purchase a scanner for scanning my color photographs since the quality is so poor. I get streaking lines through all darkly-colored sections of a photo. The scanner is fairly slow, and the maximum DPI is 600 dpi. There is no available transparency adapter for this scanner if you wanted to scan negatives, although with the color scanning quality problems and low scan resolution you wouldn't want to try.

The software that ships with this, and all HP products, IMHO is of very poor quality. My third-party scan drivers that work with most TWAIN-based scanners won't work with this scanner, either. The fax software is fine if you want to send pages from all one application, but it lacks the ability to temporarily store pages if you want to fax some sheets from, say, Excel, with a cover page from Word. You have to print some of them out and put them in the ADF, which seems kind of wasteful, but I don't fax a huge volume so it hasn't affected me as much as it might affect others.

Overall

At the time I purchased this unit, I felt it was the best laser-based multifunction on the market. When you purchase a multifunction, you are sacrificing your ability to get the best of each product; fax, scanner, and printer. Of course, you don't have to have three pieces of equipment on your desk, either. In this case, recognize that the scanner is probably the weakest link in this product and I would emphasize that if you are purchasing this product for scanning black-and-white documents, you will probably be happy with it. If you have hopes of digitizing your photo albums, keep looking.

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Great For Home Office --- But....
I've had the 3330 for about 6 weeks and am very happy so far. Two concerns so far, one is with using odd sized paper, and the other is the scanner function. If scanning is an important function, you will want a different machine, I've never had a dedicated scanner that was so very slow. Making copies and sending faxes goes well, not sure why the scanner is so slow.

I use Windows XP Home and had some trouble with using odd size paper, e.g. small envelopes, 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" paper, etc. HP Service wasn't very helpful, just suggesting that I reinstall the drivers. Did get it working by defining custom paper sizes in my MS Office suite, so now it works fine with any paper I want to use.

Except for the paper problem, and the slow scanning I would have given it 5 stars