As the use of AI moves into more and more aspects of our daily lives, it is becoming more and more difficult to reach a live person when calling a large corporation for customer service for just about any product one can imagine. While I am not totally naïve when it comes to the use of my phone and computer, I do experience frequent problems with which I need assistance. Often it’s very, very difficult to reach a live person. This has not been my experience with HP. For over 20 years I have used HP home printers due to the fact that I can always reach a live person with a minimum of time and difficulty who can then solve my problem. In addition, the HP products themselves are very dependable as my problems virtually always originate from my low level of technical skills. My HP home printers have invariably functioned for many years with almost no problems integral to the printers themselves, and I have no reservations whatsoever with recommending HP products to my friends and relatives. The HP printers are economical, generally trouble free for many years, and customer service with a live person who is friendly, courteous and highly knowledgeable is easy to reach 24/7.

Almost from Day One with this printer (Envy 4500) I have not been able to print from my HP Spectre laptop using HP Smart. Either I can’t print at all, or when it does print, it never prints in color. It will copy in color, but will not print documents from my PC in color. It will however, print color documents from my Lenovo laptop. This makes me skeptical about the Instant Ink scam that perhaps it is by design to mostly fail to print my color documents to avoid replacing my color inks. However, I am able to successfully work around my inability to print from my laptop by sending my documents to my email, and then open them and print them from my phone using HP Smart. And for that I am happy. However, I should not have to take the extra steps. And yes, I have contacted HP support. They failed to resolve my problem. After about two hours on the phone with support a few months ago, I was able to print in color from my laptop, but as soon as I restarted my computer, I have the same problem. I have bought my last couple of HP products. No more HP laptops or printers and instant ink is a scam. “Never run out of ink”. Well, during this same time, even through my phone, the color cartridge was failing to dispense yellow. Again, an hour with support until it was decided the cartridge was defective. They will send out another, but due to “supply chain issues” it will take about three weeks to receive. That did not help me when I needed my documents today. Anyway, the HP Smart mobile app was helpful when everything else HP in my life failed.

HP is the biggest scam company I have had the displeasure of working with. When the printer does work (always after several frustrating 10s of minutes of troubleshooting) it prints nicely. HP ink is a complete scam. Paid for it for also 3 years never received a single additional cartridge and never did I get use of the roll over pages they claim to provide. Finally cancelled HP ink and although the smart app says the cartridges I do have are low I should be able to print, all pages printed blank (after only finally printing when I sent them through HP smart app even though previously with ink subscription I was able to follow the traditional print process right from the document or website I wanted to print). I would recommend never buying an HP printer and 100% FO NOT get HP ink. Buy your own ink from wherever you feelComfortable and print as you see fit. Also it should be mentioned, with subscription you only can print so many pages a month from the printer you own or get charged additionally per page but if your print comes out incorrect or with errors those printer based mistakes count against your pages per month. If you do subscribe you cannot use a cash app card or any card you prefer to keep locked because if your card is locked at time of payment when you go to print you need to go through several steps including updating your card on file to print (even if you have several roll over pages available).

When you select your printer - if it will even connect to your network AND the app will recognize it as connected to your network AND both also happen to be responding at the same time - the app will often just sit there with a grayed out print button on the preview screen and won’t allow you to print your file. No errors or anything, not frozen, just not willing to print for unknowable reasons. When this happens and you’ve tried and failed to print already, before you unplug it (because power cycling is your only option at that point) the printer will not respond to any button input including holding the power button. Doesn’t matter whatsoever how strong the WiFi connection is reported to be or if you leave it connected to your network continuously like HP demands that you do. Occasionally it works like a charm, but that’s so incredibly rare it’s hardly worth mentioning. The HP ink subscription is a money gouging scam too, and the printer absolutely hates using anything but those subscription cartridges. Printing, when it happens, is incredibly slow. I had significantly better printing experiences a decade ago with a printer that was at least that old by the time I got it. HP is just out to squeeze every dime out of you and scrape every little bit of your private data they possibly can. If you have literally any other option, do yourself a favor and don’t use their products or services.