Accessories

40.76 pound paper weight
I went in to buy a Cannon printer and got suckered into buying a more expense HP machine. I am now on my forth 7780 since purchasing the first one on September 13, 2007. This first machine ran well for six months, copied, printed and the wireless was great then one day without any notice stopped. I contacted HP and spent two and a half hours per day, on average, for two weeks on the phone with a customer service reps, I assume were in India, who didn't know what they were doing or talking about. I was finally told to ship the machine back, at my expense. After not hearing anything for a month I contacted HP only to find out that they didn't know where the 7780 was at. One system said they received it, the other said they didn't. My shipping records showed they got it. When they finally corrected their error, in April 2008, I was sent the second 7780 machine in 17 separate boxes, got the pictures if you want to see them. When the seventeenth box arrived I contacted HP to find out what was going on. This time the customer service rep was in Canada and had the worst attitude. When I asked her about these seventeen boxes she said I would need to put the pieces together and call her if I was missing anything. Basically it's your problem and you can take it or leave it. It wasn't until I contacted the president of HP that any action was taken, at which point I received a phone call from a high level manager who said they were sending me a complete printer and to return the seventeen boxes. Printer number three arrives in May and it ran two weeks then died. Dead as a door nail. Again I contacted the president of HP and they agreed to send me another printer. Printer number four arrives in June and never made it past the initial setup. It aligned the print heads for two hours. Indicated the yellow ink was empty, when it was a new cartridge and clunked and wheezed then finally died. No fax, no scan, no nothing, DEAD!!! This is our last and final try with any HP product. I now have a 40.76 pound paper weight sitting here taking up all kinds of space and have to go back to my old and reliable Cannon MP390 machine. I knew I should have followed my first mind and stuck with Cannon. I will never, ever buy anything HP for my business or personal use again.

Oh, and of the seventeen boxes, there were two feeder trays, two two-sided printing accessory motors. No power cord, USB cable or print heads.

Run Away!
I bought this beast 4 months ago. The wireless network has never worked. The fax works intermittently. It's prone to paper jams. The paper trays are difficult to work with.

But I can live with all of that.

Earlier this week I started having trouble with the yellow ink. The printer stopped and said that it wouldn't print without a new yellow print cartridge. I went to the store and bought an XL cartridge and installed it. The result was yellow ink in splooged all over inside the printer, which then informed me that there was a problem with the yellow/black printhead. I spent over $100 to have a new printhead sent next-day day from HP. I installed it, and the result is more yellow ink spewed all over, and now the printer is saying both printerheads (including the new one) are shot. After 4 months of bad-to-decent service, I now have a $600 (including the new printhead) paperweight.

MAJOR FLAW in the DUPLEX SCANNING / FIXED SOLVED THE IMPOSSIBLE "PAPER JAM" ERROR
This device consistently stretches the text on every duplexed scanned side.
In other words, if you set the scanner to scan both sides of the page, the underside / 2nd part always stretches the text at the top of the 2nd page.

(SEE SUBMITTED PHOTO)

Sometimes, it has just been a single sentence, other times an entire paragraph.

Contacting HP TechSupport is as painful as it is useless. Search their tech support and find out everything else about this thing except what you need to fix.

Searched Google to no avail either.

BUT - the scanning performance speed is superb for an MFD in this price range,,,, too bad it just skews the tops of the even numbered pages.


------ SOLVING THAT "PAPER JAM" ERROR ------
REFER TO THE USER SUBMITTED PHOTO FOR GRAPHICAL NOTES
Required Tools:
(2) Medium sized paper clips

Preferable Tools:
(1) Pair of pliers with rubber grips
(1) Edged tool such as wall paper knife, metal pick or toothpick to clean out gear teeth.


This fix applies to paper jams the device believes are in the rear duplexer and often occurs after a real jam that has shredded the paper inside the mechanism.

Despite the fact you've carefully cleaned out all the visible paper from inside with the cover open, paper can jam the gears used to drive the rear rollers and even the tiniest amount of shred prevents operation resulting in the impossible Paper Jam error.

HP Tech Support online and on the phone don't troubleshoot it past "clear the paper from the device than try again please" b.s.

After removing the duplexer, grip any of the four rubber rollers and attempt to rotate in either direction, if they don't move freely with little effort, then continue with these instructions.

Begin:

1. Take the first paper clip and contact the lower two brass rectangles, this fools the device into believing the duplexer is installed, keep the contacts bridged (don't remove your hand or the paper clip until Step 4.) THERE IS NO ELECTROCUTION RISK.
2. Press the "OK" button on the control panel to pretend the paper jam is cleared.
3. CAREFULLY OBSERVE THE pair of white gears on the left, if they seem to clutch, stall, skip or freeze then you have paper shards which are causing the jam.
4. Using a firmer grip or pliers, grip the furthest left rubber roller and rotate in either direction , the gears should rotate with your efforts and look for shards of paper in the gear teeth.
5. Use the paper clip, toothpick or any appropriate edged tool to clear the shards.

Bridge the lower contacts again and observe if the gears rotate freely, if so then you've cleared the insidious jam should be able to print until the next error from this piece of chit printer.

just say no
Pro: Print quality is very good and print cost (per the manufacture) should be approximately 1.5 cents per page which is excellent. Time will tell what the actual printing costs are.

CON:
This printer has a mind of its own. It does what it wants when it wants. Some days it works, some days it don't.

It a has a tendency to grab several pages at one time and if you are lucky it will just print on the top page, if not it spreads the print across several pages.

On occasion it has decided it is a paper shredder and is a royal pain to clean out all the pieces of paper. This printer jams like no other printer I have ever owned

The biggest problem I had had to deal with is the printer cuts off the last three rows of about half of the MS word documents I have printed. After numerous calls to HP tech support I finally get told the printer (depending on which tech support person you talk to) is not compatible with MS Office 2007 and/or Windows Vista. This problem also happens with other applications. In Excel 2007 it cut off the first couple of columns when printing.

HP tech support is hit and miss. Various tech support folks have blamed my ethernet network setup, the cables in my network, my router, my operating system, my laptop, Microsoft, other application software, etc. There have been some individuals who have provided stellar support in assisting me in trouble shooting and uninstalling/reinstalling the HP software but as the software itself is the problem no actual solutions have been found.

I opened a service account with MS at HP insistence that MS was the cause of the problems (thank you HP for another opportunity to spend money). This was to investigate the cause of truncation of the printed page because HP said it was a Microsoft issue; MS said it was the HP printer drivers that were the cause of the problem. MS had me open a word document in the safe mode (blocks the HP print drivers from taking over when using MS Word). In the safe mode it printed just fine. That cinched it for me as to the culprit. Weeks later HP did finally say that their drivers were incompatible with Office 2007.

Early on I down loaded the latest HP drivers for this product (version 8.0.1) at HP's direction. They had me check a variety of things and finally decided the printer is defective. They sent me a refurbished printer. Now I have them question how long I have had my printer because the serial number of the unit they sent me was originally sold more than year ago. Its great HP is willing to replace the printer, it would be even better if the damn thing just worked right out of the box. . A number of folks have had their printers replaced.

It has also shown a weird tendency to place a printed page in the lower tray instead of in the regular out put tray. I finally had to pull all the paper from the lower tray so at least I had some idea when the printer was playing hide and seek with its output.

The top document feeder tray is flimsy.

The small display screen should have been made so you could tilt it to improve its visibility in direct light.

I expect a top of the line printer to work out of the box. I have hours and hours of phone time to tech support. I am very frustrated with what has turned into a colossal pain. We bought this for use in our office. We don't have the couple of hours it has required each time we have started this printer up to finally get it printing. Once it is up and running we have to check each page for truncation of the printed text. Life is too short to have to deal with this printer. I have not even tried to use the wireless networking which I have hear is very troublesome nor have I have tried the duplex printing. I pulled the lower paper tray rather than continue to try and makeit work.

My last complaint is with the lack of documentation. If you are going to sell a product at least give the end user a decent manual describing the operations. I should not have to play around with the various controls to figure out how the thing is suppose to work. I had to call tech support just to find the fax log.

This purchase was a huge mistake. This printer is the Edsel of printers. I believe HP strung me along until I had the printer long enough that I could not return it. HP is slipping if this is the best they can do. This is marketed as a top of the line All in One printer. It isn't even close! Seriously, HP needs to do better or go away!

IN closing if this printer does not work for you right out of the box, return it and buy something else. Your life will be better for it.

muscular personal / smb all-in-one option
i have gone through a number of a-i-o printers in the past. i haved used units from brother, canon and hp. i found the hp l7780 on amazon at a ridiculously low price. i bought it thinking if it didn't meet standards, it would not be much of a loss.

to my surprise, this unit works as promised. the setup took some time, but it didn't require much input or efdfort from me.

the printer provides extremely good - near laser quality results, and fast. the fax was easy to use and is also fast.

the scanner also works well, but proved to be a bit more than difficult to set up than the other features.

the wireless network setup was a breeze using the unit's very intuitive control panel. about 2-3 minutes in all.

all in all, i aam extremely satisfied with the l7780. i would have given it a 5-star rating but for the scanner.

for less than $300, you cannot beat this unit.

warning: chose what you print caefully. in addition to killing trees, you will also dig a huge hole in your pockets, the cartridges are not cheap. but you already knew that's how how hp and all the printer manufacturers make their money.