HP Deskjet 9800 Wide Format Color Printer (C8165A#A2L)

 (61 customer reviews)

Bought this for the wife to do some scrapbooking. Thought for sure the other reviewers must have been doing something wrong. Nope. This thing has a mind of it's own...especially if you try to print anything larger than 8 1/2 X 11. HP has not perfected home user wide format printers yet.

I returned it for the Canon i9900 wide format printer which, granted, was $100 more but the quality is simply amazing. 91 positive reviews can't be wrong. I was so impressed with the Canon quality that I scooped up a PIXMA 780 All-In-One for myself. Also a tremnedous number of positve reviews there as well. Much cheaper ink, better quality - how did I miss these the first time. Live and learn from my experiences.

What I find puzzling is why HP continues to churn out new printers even before the latest models are put on display, making all sorts of changes, but ignoring completely the old problems that are handed down from generation to generation.

Like its predecessors, this fancy-shmancy printer promises much for people who need to create posters, flyers, banners and so on, but as usual fails to deliver the goods.

It works great for the ordinary stuff - printing letter sized documents from e-mail, Word, Excel etc. with all the settings on "normal", and even does pretty well printing high resolution pictures on photographic paper, but when it has to get down to anything more complicated, it shivers, balks and then goes into a blind panic, creating havoc and paper destruction with wild abandon.

Firstly, this one uses completely different ink cartridges to previous printers, and to add insult to injury, these are smaller than the old ones. Even though there's a...Read more

I purchased the HP9800d with two tasks in mind: to do production printing of sales materials and to print digital photos in high resolution, large format. I am disappointed to conclude that the 9800 will do neither. In short this printer will not come close to doing what it is advertised to do. I have been the full distance with HP customer support and they also agree that it will not perform yet they did not respond to my request for a refund. I have spent enough time, money and wasted paper to have bought three of these things, or better yet one good printer. This does not include the cost of sales materials mailed late and of poor quality.

Lets start with printing photographs. The printer is advertised to print at a simulated 4800dpi at up to 13x19 inches borderless. One would assume (foolishly) that the printer will do both at the same time. I am a graphics professional using industry standard software, Photoshop CS2 and QuarkExpress 6.5, my computer is an Intel based...Read more