I have to say that this was probably my worst experience with support I have ever had. First, a summary:

- Support could not solve my problem after an hour on the phone.
- The support guy tried to sell me an HP laptop and Norton Anti-Virus right in the middle of solving my problem!
- The guy's English was not very good.
- After getting off the phone, I finally fiddled with it and solved the problem myself.

I'll give you details later. But now for the good stuff. I really like the printer, but I am not really picky about color quality. The colors seem a little washed out, but I am no expert. I bought the printer for general usage, crafts (greeting cards, cover sheets for projects, etc.), for my kids to be able to do reports for school. We tend to be pretty heavy printer users (my wife likes to print web pages a lot and likes to print CD covers in color). We do not use it to print photos.

I did quite a bit of research before buying this printer. My requirements were:
1) Cheap ink
2) Fast
3) Reliable

I was also looking at the canon ip4200 which would have been my second choice. I decided on the HP because HP does not force you to use their ink like Canon and I could already find non-HP ink cartridges on the web. I don't plan on using them yet, but if the price of the HP ink increases, I know I have an alternative. Right now, you can get a good "combo-pack" at Staples which has all the ink cartridges and some photo paper all in one package for pretty cheap.

I like how quiet it prints, and how fast it is. I set the defaults to "economy" mode which is super-fast. The reviews I read said that the economy mode as good quality as a lot of the normal modes of other printers. My only complaint about using this mode is that it shoots the paper out of the paper tray so fast that it sometimes ends up on the floor.

Now, if you are interested in the details of my support nightmare, here they are:

I had problems with the printer driver software. For some reason whenever I would go in to the printer settings, the print driver would crash. so I decided to call support. I was connected to a very nice gentleman in India called "Mike" (yeah, right!). He had me try reinstalling the software from the CD, which did not solve the problem. But in the middle of trying to solve the problem, he asked me if I was running an anti-virus program. I told him I was. I thought he was suspecting the problem was related to the anti-virus software, but that was not why he asked. Instead, he gave me a lecture on how important anti-virus software was, and how my computer was at risk (I told him several times that I already had anti-virus software). He then tried to ship me a 30 day demo of Norton antivirus!

A little later during the troubleshooting process he tried to sell me an HP laptop ($150 off). I kept telling him I did not want a laptop but he tried to convince me otherwise. Unbelievable!

After about an hour on the phone, he could not solve my problem. He told me I would have to reinstall my operating system! I told him that was an unacceptable solution. He could not understand why that was a problem. I said something like "there must be somebody there who can help me". He said something like, "yeah, you are right, let me put you through to a more qualified expert who will be able to fix your problem. Hold on please while I transfer you. Please have your credit card ready because it will cost you $59.95 for this service." I politely told him no thanks. I had a hard time politely ending the conversation, but finally succeeded.

I then spent another hour giving it "one last try" before I took the printer back to the store. I decided to download the software from HP's support page. I didn't do this before because it was a pretty big file (150 MB?) and it said it was the same version that was on my CD. But I gave it a try (and also disabled the antivirus software during the install in case "Mike" was on to something). That seemed to fix the problem. Thanks Mike!