brassed off!

[result]

After the last hp printer I bought I vowed never again to purchase one as it was temperamental, ink greedy and costly to run.

Ok so my new HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus which I've now had almost 2 months seems to be better ink wise although I have noticed if you cancel a print job and then resend that you get a messed up printout of smudged ink on the page and no image recognisable to the print job sent.  The scanning function seems rather poorly implemented too as the scan options on the printer dont reflect any of the customisation that you can do with the PC app.  It also seems poor that the scanner can't recognise the original image size and retain this in its' output.  No scan preview on the printer either, although it does exist in the copier mode.

My main gripes with hp;

• Your web sites stink in terms of being able to navigate and find stuff, in fact finding the eprint center was easier via Google.  Your site content seems greater than your navigation to access it which leaves me feeling lost and nauseous.
• eprint center content doesn't seem to be geographically managed properly.  If I set my location to UK then I don't see hardly any of the articles.  I also experienced this when I thought this would be the place to find out about mobile apps for eprint but this also doesn't show up if your location is set to UK.
• adding a comment to an article doesn't appear to work at all, when signed in I couldn't post a comment to the article about hp smart print by Eric_Foster on April 6, 2011.
• On the subject of hp smart print why on earth develop something that is proprietary to IE, without having a corresponding version for other browsers?
• eprint center submitting new ideas says that the best will be posted to the eprint center for others to see and respond to, but I don't see any, anywhere?  Having taken the time to respond would it not be less annoying to those that have taken the time to contribute for all feedback to be shown, providing it doesn't contain foul language of course.
• I would rather see all print apps when signed in with some way of highlighting those that are available for my printer.  It would also be helpful to show for each app which printers and locations the app is available for so a user can see whether it is not yet supported on their printer at all or just not in their country.  Perhaps some app release notes such as version, release date, last updated date, somehow flag an app as "of interested" so that you are alerted if it becomes updated or available for your printer.
• It seems as though apps are currently designated by the developer to specific models and countries but is there not a better way to do this so that newer models are not left wanting and waiting for developers to amend their apps to include newer models?  i.e. targeting hardware specs rather than models
• I know my printer is not specifically aimed at being a photo printer but come on it has been ages since this model was first announced and still none of the photo apps are available for it, in the UK if that makes a difference!

It's not so much the printer I have a problem with but the whole experience has seemed nothing but disjointed from the word go and left me feeling I am dealing with yet another faceless organisation that is of a size and set up that feels totally impersonal.  I'm refering in particular to the lack of some sort of welcome to your new device, you can create a hp account here and join eprint center, snapfish, register your product, get mobile apps just needs something to pull everything together.

I really think hp with however many thousands of employees could do better!