HP Photosmart C4580 All-in-One Printer

I hate this thing. It's an installation nightmare, the cartridges are now coming up as "missing" or improperly installed, the wifi never works for more than a few days, the printer reports carriage jams all the time. And for all this, I think we are pretty light household users, printing roughly 10 pages a week and never printing photos. Maybe my expectations are just too high for a cheap(ish) household printer. But this experience has been so infuriating that I swear to my wife over and over that I'll never buy another HP product again in my life. BTW, I am a professional software engineer and consider myself a power user. I've done everything I can to research and troubleshoot the various problems. It's really too bad that I have so many problems. If it actually prints, the output is wonderful. And the scanner works very well. I think it's mostly the software/drivers that are the problem, at least until the last few weeks where we've started experiencing so many problems with the cartridges and the carriage.

I did a ton of research as I always do before I bought this printer. It took very little effort to set it up and it works great with two laptops in our household. Everything is set up wireless and it works flawlessly. For all the negative noobs that have so much trouble getting it set up, I say "RTFM!!"

For the price this printer has been fantastic. Setup was the same as for any Mac printer. Plugged it in and the computer recognized it and pulled the drivers. After the install I did check the HP Device Manager (installed on the dock) to see if any updates were available- none reported. I went into page setup and created some presets for the printer that allow me to print B&W, B&W drafts, and color drafts. I like to create the drafts options to reduce ink use and printing time when all I need is a quick map or document. [...] Print speed is reasonable and the quality is good and would be for printers that cost much more. The printer is shared across the house and all seems to be working well. My one problem is infrequent but noteworthy. Sometimes (once a week?) I will send a document off to print and will wait a full 1-2 minutes before it starts printing. It always prints- but about once a week it just seems to need to think about it. This could be an issue with the printer and Apple's printer sharing but it happens so seldom that some other combination of things seems to be at fault. The HP site has solutions for similar problems but they all involve power cycling the parts and I've done this with no resolution. So, I live with it and see the break as an opportunity to get some coffee.

I needed a Printer and Scanner and HP was on my list after used Canon for a long time. HP is known for its printers. So, finally i decided to buy this printer. The printer came home and in a few minutes i realized that this is the worst printer that anyone can buy. If you are planning to buy one, please don't buy this. This is why: 1) It just does not work with Mac. Mac and C4500 don't get along well at all. 2) With Windows it is slightly better, But if you start installing the software (recommended option), it installs so much of crap on your system that it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to finish installation. If you selectively install, you will get into problems later. It happened with me when i deferred my scanner software installation. Later things just did not work and i installed everything 3)Scanning is awfully slow. What is HP thinking ? Software has come a long way and the way my PC and the printer was communicating to make this work puts this product in the ancient category. Lots of other problems that i will spare the details of. Yes, i am really upset having bought this printer thinking that HP makes great printers. Perhaps, i should look at the price point also next. What can be good for [...] ?

I bought the HP Photosmart C4500 in store and liked it so much I decided to get one for my mom. However.... Installing it on a wireless network was difficult. The software was buggy. HP's help was not helpful. I gave up and had it working on one machine and allowed it to be accessed by the other machines on the network. That required the first machine to be on all the time to allow all the others to connect thru wi-fi. Later updates thru HP solved the issue and then caused it again. Eventually I found out that I needed to disable AERO in the various versions of Windows before installing. Since then it has been running smoothly. The photosmart software hub is intuitive when it works. The machine is light weight and once you use the new XL ink cartridges you get a good run out of it. It has lasted long in a home personal use environment. I would be hesitant to use it in an office situation. I have only tested the printing on photo paper function but don't actually use it. Suitable for those with time and patience to get it to work. When it works it does very well.