» HP Photosmart Pro B9180 Printer

HP Photosmart Pro B9180 Printer Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Poor reliability and mechanical design
Comment: I agree with the few who say that don't believe all the reviews. "Built like a tank" is not a good thing on this case, especially when you have previously had some Canon Pixma printers that have excellent engineering. Tube of vaseline required to move/remove paper trays smoothly on D9180 is NOT included with the printer. And it is noisy.

I have used my printer very little and still it has developed fault where it does not understand when specialty media tray is lowered, rendering that tray useless. Small lever that reports position of the tray to printer seem to work fine mechanically, but pressing it makes no difference. Now warranty just ended and I'm stuck. In fact I have only printed about 80 sheets and have still original ink cartridges.

Printer driver is also bloatware, several hundres megabytes.

To HP's credit I must say that this printer consumes really little ink when not in use. That is probably it's best feature. I was away for 3 months and it consumed less than 5% of ink. I have had this printer over year in stand-by and still have original ink cardridges. Years ago I had a few Epsons and these were wasting most ink for head cleaning, making final prints very expensive. B9180's print head cleaning is quite intelligent and I hope other manufacturers will catch up in that respect.

Don't buy this printer if you like high gloss prints (a la Canon Photo Paper Pro) as HP does not have any good glossy paper. Buy it when you want to print mostly on matte paper like Hahnemühle Smooth Fine Art.

I'm very unhappy with this expensive product and will probably switch back to Canon unit. I remember that I was quite often impressed how well my previous Canon Pixma was designed and how flawlessly it operated for a mechanical product.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent with XP, need some Vista work arounds...
Comment: I've been comparing printers to upgrade my Photosmart 8750 for the B9180 - all said and done, HP is still ahead of the Canon and Epson photo printing peers. Taken, HP's customer service and tech support sucks, depending on who you get you may get different answers, some more helpful than others but with some luck I was able to proof the following workarounds I found on other bbs and tech support validated:

- Under vista, I was having trouble with 13x19 too, borderless leaving a 1 1/2 inch blank white tail at the end of the sheet. It seems to stop if I print at 200 dpi and manifests at 220 dpi and higher. It is a matter of spooling file size and is a Vista issue. My Desktop Photo station dual boots with XP and I do not see the problem. It occurs either with the HP plugin or "print with preview" in CS2. I wasted some materials before I fortunately found the problem.

- Another factor is CS2 isn't Vista friendly. Do a Google search: "CS2 and Vista." CS3 works much better. Lightroom 2.0 is good too.

- Another workaround is to use the specialty media tray instead of the main tray you can print any size or dpi file without the blanks areas. Does not make much sense but it seems to work for the few prints I tested.

Lastly, above workarounds resolve a Vista "May 2007" review that is outdated, since then, HP posted a firmware upgrade to the B9180 that works very well and integrates printer very tight with Photoshop CS3 version, specially for color correction under Vista.

Hope this helps,

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't buy anything HP, period !
Comment: HP Photosmart Pro B9180 Printer
Do yourselves a favor and get a Canon, or maybe an Epson. HP no longer makes products like the HP-41C I used to carry proudly when I was an engineering student 30 years ago. Yes if and when you are blessed and the unit works it turns out beautiful prints, but then so do similar printers from other manufacturers. Don't be fooled by all the comments about this printer being "fantastic" or "built like a tank", the moment you power it up you start hearing the worrying noise of the cheap mechanism within. After a troublesome setup I managed to use it for some three months and then it failed. HP, to their credit, have replaced the printer twice (most likely refurbished units), but with each replacement I get the same message to replace two of the same printheads. But since HP considers print heads consumable items I have had to buy a total of 3 heads at a cost of more than $180 including shipping.
So here I am with replacement printers that ask you to install new print heads, and when you do it will repeat the same message. I also have at least four full ink cartridges that were installed just 2 days before the drastic failure , another set of four unopened (in all worth another $270), and a full set of 8 cartridges supplied free by HP with the second replacement printer. Lots of expensive ink but no printer.
I will go now place order for a Canon pro 9500.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Beware of this printer!
Comment: I bought this printer a little over a year ago and was never able to print more than ten pictures reliably. The paper would jam halfway through nearly every print job. The few times the printer managed to complete a job, the results were decent, however these were few and far between.

After approximately 10-11 months of trying various paper and setting combinations, I finally gave in and called HP's tech support. I'd read many reviews of this experience and I was prepared for the worst. Sadly, my expectations were confirmed.

The first 45 minutes of my initial call was spent trying to navigate HP's support queues. Eventually I really someone who walked through the usual "level one" tests, e.g. confirm power, confirm paper, etc. I've worked in enterprise IT for ten years so this was a bit annoying but I was pleasant throughout, recognizing that the guy had a job to do.

Eventually the conclusion was that I should try different paper. I agreed, and he promised HP would send a small bundle for testing. After waiting three weeks, I called to check on the order and found that it had been cancelled. The reason given was that the printer was no longer under warranty. Excellent work, HP.

I'm sad to say that this experience is precisely what I had expected--an infuriating waste of time. With no further recourse, I took the printer to a nearby dumpster and bid farewall.

In short, don't buy this printer. And if you do, never, ever call HP for support. It will be a complete waste of time.

Damon

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great if you're not in a hurry and you're a system administrator
Comment: I am running Windows XP Professional with 2 GB of RAM on a Pentium IV 2.4 GHz CPU and Photoshop CS2. I am printing to the printer via Ethernet on a 100 Mbit/s switch.

Pros:

1) I love the consistently good "lab quality" print quality that the printer produces.

2) I love the high level of color controls that are provided through the Photoshop plug-in.

3) I also love, of course, the ability to do borderless printing at 13x19.

4) I also love the fact that the print heads and the ink cartridges are separate, which yields cheaper ink cartridges. According to the documentation, the print heads should last the life of the computer.

5) I also love the eight separate colors, especially the light gray (which isn't found on HP's cheaper Vivera printers), yielding more accurate color shading for both color and black and white prints.

6) I love the intstant drying and automatic alignment when using Advanced photo paper, which is decently priced if you can find a decent store that specializes in such stuff.

7) I love the archival quality, waterproof, pigment based inks.

Cons:

1) I hate that if I wish to print 4x6 photos, I have to wait 5 minutes for the first one to come out, and three more minutes for each additional one, using the "Best" image quality setting, which is recommended, of course, for "lab quality" photos.

I am guessing by the high CPU usage from the print spooler that if I had a faster computer, it might be faster, but a 2.4 GHz CPU is pretty fast.

This makes the use of the printer a point of convenience. I bought this printer because I thought it would be more covenient to print out my own photos than upload them to the local photo processor or burn them to a disk, order them, then go pick them up. However, with how slow this printer is, it's only more convenient to print them out myself if I'm printing a few ad hoc photos here or there. To develop a whole shoot of 15 or more photos, it quickly becomes more convenient to drop them off at a one hour photo, or even, I hate to say it, upload them.

Please note that the advertisements claiming that it prints 4x6 in 10 seconds is for draft mode, which you will never do. If you look at their technical specs, it supposedly prints a 4x6 in best mode in 70 seconds, but even that is not true. It's three minutes on a medium range computer, like mine, with a two minute warm up period. Not to mention, you also have to tear off the tabs.

2) I hate that I don't get the same print controls using any program other than Photoshop.

3) I hate the fact that you cannot use the Photoshop plugin if you are not logged in as an administrator of the computer. This is surprising, as I don't know of any computer administrator that gives everyone else administrative privileges on a workstation. I know that I don't. So, this leaves me with some serious concerns, having to change my policy for my users.

Conclusion:

Overall, I am happy with the printer, as most of my printing is on an adhoc basis, but my wife was looking forward to using it to print out all 4x6 photos in lieu of sending them out to be printed, so she is less satisfied. She'll probably still use it, but will have to commit to the wait. I'm not looking forward to giving her administrative privileges on the computer.

Here are current local prices for me:
100 4x6 Advanced Glossy Photo paper : $12.99
100 8.5x11 Advanced Glossy Photo paper: $29.99
25 13x19 Advanced Glossy Photo paper: $49.99
HP #38 Ink Cartridge: $33.99

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