Has HP Trashed Its Printer Brand?

I was on the phone yes­ter­day catch­ing up with a friend who runs a bou­tique mar­ket research agency in the Sil­i­con Val­ley. She was run­ning errands at the end of her work­day, and was pick­ing up her all-in-one HP printer from the repair shop when I called. This was at least the third or fourth time she’s had to take the printer in for repair, due to its “hor­ren­dous paper jams,” she told me. She’s lost all patience with the beast.

She was so frus­trated with her fail­ing printer that our busi­ness con­ver­sa­tion got diverted into HP printer bash­ing. We started by talk­ing about how much we used to love the laser print­ers that HP made in the 1990’s. Both of our firms had HP print­ers back then, print­ers that pro­duced great qual­ity prints and oper­ated reli­ably for over a decade. She’s now about ready to throw her 3– or 4-year old all-in-one into a dumpster.

When she fin­ished vent­ing about her HP printer, I com­plained about the HP Laser­Jet P2055dn that I bought just 6 months ago. It prints OK, but not as well as I’d like, but that’s not my pri­mary issue. (My prior Laser­Jet printed bet­ter, even as it aged.)

This Laser­Jet suf­fers from com­mu­ni­ca­tion errors with my Macs; jobs dis­ap­pear into the ether. Despite 128MB of RAM, it prints S – L – O – W – L — Y. Heaven help me if I have to print a multi-page doc­u­ment from the web. Worse yet, any­thing that includes a bar­code — like a board­ing pass, a USPS ship­ping label, or an event ticket. Yesterday’s 2-page ticket (with a bar code) took almost 30 min­utes before the first page came out of the printer. Just think of how that log-jammed every­thing else in the queue. Board­ing passes usu­ally take 5–10 min­utes to print… It makes me grit my teeth when I think about HP’s claim that the first page prints out in <x> sec­onds. Yeah, right.

Unfor­tu­nately, I bought a new HP-branded toner car­tridge at the time I got the printer: an invest­ment of over $160. The car­tridge is unused, but it’s now time to replace the toner. Think­ing about the sunk cost in that car­tridge and its value in pro­por­tion to the printer’s price is the only thing that’s keep­ing me from throw­ing out my new printer just like my friend. The car­tridge is spe­cific to the printer, so if I dis­pose of the printer, the toner is money down the drain. (The envi­ron­men­tal­ist in me cringes at the thought of dis­pos­ing of a printer when it’s not even a year old.)

So my friend is now actively shop­ping for a replace­ment printer, and tells me she’ll never con­sider an HP printer again.

I’ll prob­a­bly use up my toner car­tridge, and then go shop­ping myself. Whether HP print­ers will be on my next shop­ping list is unlikely, unless some­thing mirac­u­lous hap­pens to improve the printer dri­ver before the new toner car­tridge gets used up. If web pages could print in sec­onds I’d be hap­pier, but know­ing I’m fac­ing a min­i­mum 5-minute wait before the first page comes out of the printer is a source of huge frus­tra­tion, day after day… It’s like a toothache that never goes away.

So here we have two small busi­ness own­ers actively dis­en­chanted with our HP print­ers, and talk­ing to each other about what the qual­ity decline must be doing to HP’s printer brand. And the time we’re both wast­ing as a result: she with trips to the repair guy in Los Altos, me with those unbear­able delays before the first page comes out of the printer.

What makes this story so dis­heart­en­ing is that both of us worked for HP ear­lier in our careers. As for­mer employ­ees (and for­mer share­hold­ers), we’d like to feel bet­ter about the brand. My friend might even have played a role on the laser printer mar­ket­ing team back in the 1980’s.

So how did HP lose its way?

I sus­pect that HP spent so much time focus­ing on dri­ving prof­its with all those printer con­sum­ables that they took their eye off the ball when it was time to ensure qual­ity stan­dards on the print­ers themselves…

The old HP, the one we worked for, used to obsess about qual­ity stan­dards. It used to be an inside joke among employ­ees: the size of the gap between HP prod­ucts’ actual per­for­mance and the mod­est claims that the com­pany would make within adver­tis­ing or mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als. I guess the new HP is different.

If only they offered a money-back guar­an­tee for the peo­ple they’ve dis­en­chanted… The results might send a finan­cial sig­nal that it’s time to start putting a higher pri­or­ity on qual­ity for devices whose life cycles should last years.

Tagged as: HP, laser printer, LaserJet

Revised on January 11, 2010