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HP DeskJet 5650 Color Inkjet Printer

HP DeskJet 5650 Color Inkjet Printer

List Price: $159.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Full of problems!
Review: After spending countless hours with customer service and google searches of my own. I have officially given up on this printer.

I have a Dell computer which runs flawless - except when trying to install and use this lemon of a machine.

Even if you are tech savy - you will not be able to work out the many issues with this $130 piece of worthless plastic.

Issue 1 - Although this printer comes with a parallel cable port - it doesn't work at all. That's right - it's a decoy. The software won't install using a parralel cable and hp knows it! When you call hp support thats the first question they ask - so they can try to talk you into using a usb cable.

Issue 2 - The printer software is not compatible with the display adapter in most dell dimension computers. One of their tech support assistants admitted this to me and told me to call Dell. Nice Huh.

Issue 3 - Bad customer service. Spent hours just trying to get the right department. Had tech support try to put the problem on me.

Any other brand of printer must be better than this lemon.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Installation should not be this painful
Review: Amazon delivered this printer so quickly, we hadn't yet bought a Parallel cable. No problem though, since we have 2 other computers with printers. Unfortunately, the installation procedure froze. After speaking with 4 charming people in the New Delhi customer center, we discovered that the problem was with the first Parallel cable. After switching to the second cable & finding the same problems, we asked to speak to a supervisor, who informed us that the printer often worked only with a USB cable.

Installation using the USB connection was a breeze.

I suspect that we will rate the printer as *****; however, it receives the lowest rating not for the 7 hours that it took to install, but because at one stage we were instructed to deactivate Norton Antivirus & can no longer get it to work. Getting Norton up & running looks to be a lot harder than installing the printer.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fabulous Printer
Review: Early this year, I wanted to upgrade my HP 722c to something faster with cheaper ink (are you listening HP?). So, I bought a Canon 560i, which is the same price as the HP 5650. After 6 miserable months of intolerably bad print quality (2 lines on every page come out squiggly, the black isn't very dark, etc, not nearly laser quality), which I now attribute to either a bad print head or a bad feeder, and not my own ability to line up the cartridges) I went back to HP, despite the ink prices.

I am SO happy with my new HP printer. The text is laser quality (you can print resumes and reports and be proud of your product) and the photos are great. I've printed out old black and white so far, and I can't wait to try some color photos based on the amazing photo that prints on your test page.

I had absolutely no trouble installing this on my Windows XP home system. Perhaps people who had trouble with this didn't follow the installation steps in the right order - I doubt that the problem is with the printer, but with the software configuration on some people's computers. I installed my printer in 20 minutes. The only glitch I had was getting the CD to run by itself, but I got it going manually.

I see from the other reviews that if your printer is going slower than you'd like make sure you have a USB 2.0 cable, and not a 1.0. They're cheap at Target. Mine runs fine (I'm using the Canon USB cable, at least it was good for something) I also hear that the newer ones now come with cables, but check the box before you walk out of the store (I got mine from Buy.com for $89 with free shipping, but was from older stock that doesn't come with the cable).

I can't believe the quality of the text and photos you get for your money with this printer. I tried Canon, but sorry Canon, your products are flimsy pieces of junk and your quality control stinks.

Go for the HP, whether it's this model or another one. You will get reliably great quality results. Those frustrated people who gave printer 2 stars were doing so based on their installation experiences, NOT the print quality, which is the important thing.

My only question on this printer is how long the ink cartridge will last. Although yes it's cheaper than past HP products, it's also smaller.

In the meantime, I will be printing out resumes that I can have pride in, and scanning in some photos so I can play around a bit more with this great little printer!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: WOW, all that for under $200.00!
Review: First off this is the easiest printer I have ever encountered. Installation took about 10 minutes at the most. I have Norton anti-virus program and was never asked to disable it (don't know why you would). Also we have a home network with 3 computers and everyone can use the printer with no problem (2 computers running on XP home and 1 on XP Pro.) As for the pictures they are amazing. It takes about 2 seconds to swap out the black cartridge for the photo cartridge and your off. 4X6 borderless prints at the maximum dpi (4800X1200) in less than 60 seconds and 8X10 in about 90 seconds. Its fast and no one will never know that you printed the photo. I have had family members ask me where I had my digital pictures developed. The pictures are just amazing you will be in shock when you print the first one.

Yes, there is a lack of directions but just do a little poking around and you can figure out how to use the printer.

This was a gift to me and I would recommend if you know someone who wants a photo printer to get this one or another HP. HP makes the best photo printers as far as I have found. And the ink is much cheaper than any other printer manufacture (about $19.99 for black, $24.99 for photo and $34.99 for tri color).

Lastly paper does matter. If you want to frame a photo buy the good stuff. The price seems steep but $20.00 for 60 photos' is really not that bad (just a lot to shell out up front).

Happy Printing!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: DISAPPOINTED WITH THIS PRINTER
Review: For three years I was using a HP 932c deskjet printer. It was a work horse and gave very little trouble. It printed very quietly and the print was very sharp. This printer had only two cartridges a black and color. The photo images were excellent.
Finally it gave up the ghost and the warrantee people replaced it with a HP 5650 and called it an upgrade.
The 5660 sounds like a truck when it prints. It goes clunk, clunk,clunk and you might think it is about to break down. It takes two cartridges one color and one black. These cartridges are about half the size of the 932c cartridges and therefore have much less ink. The price for these cartridges is about the same as the 932c cartridges.
I discovered that I was getting bad photo images. I contacted the HP people and discovered that to print photos I must have a photo cartridge. They want about 24 dollars to supply this cartridge. So in fact to properly operate this printer you must have three cartridges.
How can HP state that this printer is an upgrade to the 932c.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: They don't make them like they used to .....
Review: HP printers have been my favorite for many years, but this particular printer is subpar. It's construction is noticeably flimsier than previous models, and it has compatability issues with a number of programs, including at least some versions of PrintMaster. I installed this printer on three different computers running two different operating systems (XP and ME) and the software installed differently on all three computers, even the two that are both running XP. HP's troubleshooting and maintenance software used to be excellent, but with this model it is difficult to figure out how to print a self-test page, much less troubleshoot any problems that might arise.

Also, this model is extremely particular about what paper you feed it. My old 722C would take anything, but the 5650 doesn't. I wasn't able to print at all on colored inkjet paper! Even HP Photo paper tends to jam in this printer! The automatic paper detect feature has a tendency to detect banner paper despite the fact that I have never used banner paper and this tends to cause the printer to lock up when I try to print.

The only reason the 5650 gets a two star rating from me rather than a one is due to the fact that it does print very nice photographs, particularly with the photo ink cartridge. Photos on the 5650 print sharper and clearer than even on previous HP models. That is, they do when the photo printer paper doesn't jam in the machine.

I have had difficulty with Canon in the past, but my father has been using Epson printers for about as long as I have used HP and he has some very nice results. Also, Epson is addressing the true digital photography lab with many of its newer products. I think it is time for me to switch ....

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not a good printer for students
Review: I am a college student, and I haven't had a good experience with this printer. I had a Lexmark for about a year, which was fast, but low quality and unreliable. When the cartridge ran out on that, I bought the HP 5650 instead. I've had it for about a month, and although setup was easy and the quality is very high, this is NOT A GOOD PRINTER FOR STUDENTS! Even on fast draft printing quality, it takes at least a minute to print a full page of text. The quality of the printing is very good, but it is EXTREMELY slow, even compared to most cheaper printers. The claim of 21 ppm is laughable. I think you'd need about 30 of these to get 21 pages in a minute.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: hp desktop 5650
Review: I am sick of HP products breaking on me or the fact that they charge a ton for ink, so that it is actually cheaper to buy a new printer than pay for junk low capacity ink cartridges... the paper doesn't feed well, and when the ink runs out, printer stops working.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: HP rocks
Review: I bought this printer for four reasons: affordability, quality, simplicity, and ability to plug in to my Apple Airport Extreme.

In version 10.2, it worked great. However, when I upgraded to version 10.3.7, the printer would not work at all. I called Apple support (Apple care) and although they were very helpful, were stumped.

I sent an e-mail to HP support and within a day got an e-mail directing me to this link: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107054. Now, the printer is once again working great!

All I wanted was a simple, basic, and moderately fast color printer and the deskjet 5650 delivers. But the fact that HP support was so great easily doubles the value of this product. I highly recommend it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Second HP printer to breakdown after a year
Review: I bought this printer when my previous HP printer (different model) refused to print yellow. After contacting the subpar support at HP I was essentially told there was nothing I could do. So I went and bought a new HP printer because I was generally satisfied with the printing results and assumed the problem with the first printer was just bad luck.
Sure enough roughly the same amount of time has passed and this printer failed. It started by sporadically notifying me that my ink cartridges are bad. To fix this I would power off and power on. After a couple weeks of that it managed to jam its ink head cleaner into the ink jet heads and now it does nothing. It doesn't even power off.
Throughout my PC had problems communicating with the printer forcing me to perform the voodoo ritual of turning on the printer, turning it off, unplugging it and then plugging in the printer once again.
It is clear to me that HP no longer cares about quality. Maybe it has to do with the general lack of direction of the company. I will opt to buy any other brand before considering another HP.


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