HP Wireless printers

[smr54]

This goes in rants primarily because I know at least part of it was my fault.

At any rate, I had once, in error, bought an HP all in one that was wireless only. It had no wired connection, and when I got it home, it took a few hours of googling to get it working without Windows.

So...that printer has been dying, and when it stopped printing color for the one time I needed it to do so, I decided it was time to buy a new one. As we don't print very much, an HP inkjet was fine, and doing some googling saw one with decent reviews at a price I was willing to pay. Also, remembering the nightmare in the past, I did some more googling and it was now apparently pretty easy--one could enter things in the network setup, or use an adhoc configuration to configure it, or even use WPS setup, where you push a button on the printer and one on your router.

So....
Got it home, followed the instructions, which were to basically push buttons and follow what it said. However, the WPS stuff, both push button and PIN both failed. Then, I tried manually entering an address. I would enter the IP I wanted to give it, then the subnet mask, and it would give me a message that it failed and was reverting.

I then manually entered in my network name and password, but that failed to connect too. (I also, at various times, did the obvious, reboot the printer, reset the router, etc.)

I then gave up, and booted it into Windows on a VM. This is where it was my fault, by this time, I was too aggravated to look at the instructions again, where it specifically says don't connect the USB cable until instructed. Oops. (I didn't know this yet, though). I was just seeing that Windows wasn't finding the printer.


Ironically, both Linux and Mac were able to easily find the printer if connected by USB, but gave me no option to configure networking.

Finally, I tried one more time to connect by manually entering the network name and password and it finally took. At that point, though, from chromium, I wasn't able to get in and change anything. I was able to with OS X, using Safari.

After calming down, and looking at the manual again, I realized that the Windows install would have probably worked if I'd done it correctly. What I find aggravating though is that apparently, if installed on Windows, one can go in and configure a network. On OS X, their instructions for changing from USB to network were to disconnect the cable and do the whole printer LED panel thing that was giving me so much aggravation in the first place.

Well, now that I've shared my aggravation, I feel better. That was easy.

Upshot is that it now works fine and can be turned off when not in use but connects when turned on. And, the thing that my wife needed to print now prints perfectly, though she'd already just put it on a CD and taken it to a friend's to print.

[Dan]

Not sure which one you are playing with, but this beasty (HP C7280) was a complete breeze to set up to print in F10, F11, F15, F16. Not so much in anything farther back than F9. I hadn't even tried to set it up for wireless printing scanning etc. until about a month ago. And when I did ... it turned into quite the tail-chase until I finally quit trying to re-engineer the wheel, and instead of micro-managing the "wireless interface" on the linux boxes, I just set it (the printer) up for networking access, turned on the wireless function, disconnected the CAT5e, and let the router (Cisco E3200) do the hard thinking about the wireless configuration for me. Presto! Prints and scans just peachy-keen fine.

As usual, the printer itself wasn't nearly as big a problem as excessive operator headspace on the PEBKAC interface. <....>

Reading and following the constructions finally helped a bit, too. But ... as you well know ... only a coward reads the instructions! <....>

[DBelton]

actually, if you don't print much, an inkjet is absolutely the very worst kind of printer you can possibly purchase. Chances are, you will have to put an ink cartridge in every time you wish to print, or the printhead will be completely clogged up and the printer is toast (printheads usually cost more than the printers do on the cheaper printers)

I picked me up a color laser awhile back since I just print a page here and there in color, and hasn't costed me one penny since I bought it (been over 3 years now), and prints any time I wish to send a page to it.

Most of what I print is black, so my trusty HP 4050 gets hammered.

[smr54]

The Photosmart 5510e. Part of the issue, I think, is that I have a hidden wireless network--security by obscurity, I know, but it was the default, IIRC. My router is a DIR-655, by D-Link, and not that new, so it's quite possible that the WPS doesn't really work, even though it's supposed to work.

In my case, whenever I've had something that will connect with ethernet (some of the low end HPs, like this one, don't have a wired connection--you can only do wireless), it's always been pretty easy to configure with wired, going into the browser interface, then disconnecting the wired. Of course, ...."whenever" means twice in my life, probably, I don't replace printers that often.

@DBelton, you're right, but the two needs were color and scanning (and I didn't want to have a separate scanner), so the price difference was enough to make this a better choice for me at present.

[oldcpu]

I have an HP C309a premium all in one wireless printer, and it works fabulous with GNU/Linux. Contrary to what was alluded to in this thread, I do not have to replace ink cartridges often (and I do print a lot) and it has worked well for me for the past few years.

HP offer a good tool for configuring the a GNU/Linux PC to print from the printer. Have you tried using the HPLIP tool with wireless ? I use the HP 'jetdirect' options as my C309a supports the HP jetdirect. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Printing/HPLIP

I used the C309a's on screen controls to connect it to my wireless network (WPA2) and the printer always now uses the same IP address.

It works well for me and I'm very please with this HP device.

[smr54]

I use hplip. However, my problem was with getting it connected to the wireless network. Once it's on the network, the hp-setup (from hplip) works a treat.

I think (but definitely untested) that it wouldn't have worked if the printer weren't already on a network--that was part of my problem, in my experience, they often make an adhoc connection so that you'll see a network named something like hpsetup and can get on its web interface and reconfigure it there, but in this case, that wasn't happening.

[jbuckley2004]

Dan was a bit lauditory about the HP 7280. I have one.

Well, I'll admit that it's been easy to set up and get running in Fedora (I've done it since F11 without too much trouble). But really it is not a good printer for the money and it's caused me to distrust hp and their consumer business practices. I don't even trust that the ink is empty when it says. I was amazed to see a cartrige labled "expired" by the software, making the whole machine inoperable, and appauled at the cost of their ink.

But set-up was easy.

[Dan]

Hmmm.

Must be luck of the draw. This one hasn't given me a minute's trouble that wasn't operator headspace inspired.