HP Deskjet 9800 Wide Format Color Printer (C8165A#A2L) | 
| Brand: Hewlett-Packard
List Price: $353.99
Buy New: $166.00
You Save: $187.99 (53%)
New (35) Used (2) Refurbished (1) from $133.00
Rating:  43 reviews
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Apple MacOS X 10.1 - 10.3
System Memory: 32
Modem: None
Shipping Weight (lbs): 30
Dimensions (in): 16 x 23 x 7
nv:Resolution: 1200 x 1200 dpi
Print Speed: Up to 30 PPM
Dimensions: 18.3"W x 9.0"D x 6.2"H
Connectivity: Parallel
Connectivity: USB
Standard Paper Input: 150-Sheets
Duplex Printing: Optional
Paper Sizes Supported: Letter
Paper Sizes Supported: Legal
Paper Sizes Supported: Executive
Paper Sizes Supported: 4" x 6"
Paper Sizes Supported: 5" x 7"
Paper Sizes Supported: 11" x 17"
Paper Sizes Supported: 3" x 5"
Paper Sizes Supported: Tabloid
Paper Sizes Supported: 8" x 10"
Warranty: 1 year warranty
MPN: DJ9800
Model: DJ9800
UPC: 829160703473
EAN: 0829160703473
ASIN: B0007O97Y4
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
| |
| Features:
| • | Resolutions up to 1,200 x 1,200 dpi and 4800-optimized dpi color | | • | Print speeds up to 30 ppm black and 20 ppm color | | • | Duty cycle of 5,000 pages per month | | • | Print sizes from index cards to 13-by-19-inch posters, even borderless | | • | Parallel and USB ports; PC, Mac, Linux, UNIX compatible |
|
| Accessories:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
HP DeskJet 9800 is a compact, feature-rich printer to create vibrant office documents and in-house marketing material. Experience the versatility of up to 4800-optimized dpi A3+ borderless printing plus optional 6-ink photo-quality and optional automatic two-sided printing.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
HP and the half-cocked printer (sorry JK Rowling) August 6, 2005
Amanda Richards (Georgetown, Guyana)
110 out of 122 found this review helpful
What I find puzzling is why HP continues to churn out new printers even before the latest models are put on display, making all sorts of changes, but ignoring completely the old problems that are handed down from generation to generation.
Like its predecessors, this fancy-shmancy printer promises much for people who need to create posters, flyers, banners and so on, but as usual fails to deliver the goods.
It works great for the ordinary stuff - printing letter sized documents from e-mail, Word, Excel etc. with all the settings on "normal", and even does pretty well printing high resolution pictures on photographic paper, but when it has to get down to anything more complicated, it shivers, balks and then goes into a blind panic, creating havoc and paper destruction with wild abandon.
Firstly, this one uses completely different ink cartridges to previous printers, and to add insult to injury, these are smaller than the old ones. Even though there's a very helpful feature that tells you how much ink you have left, it only serves to annoy you when you see that you are just two days away from shelling out more money for new cartridges.
Secondly, my previous HP printer allowed me to create a letter-sized document and then enlarge it to 11" x 17" with a couple of clicks. If this one has that feature it's too well hidden for me to find it, and I gave up trying. If you need a flyer done, and were thinking of blowing it up to make a matching poster - the least irritating way is to change the paper size settings and just enlarge everything manually. If you only need a poster, make sure you set the size first. On the subject of size, this printer assumes you know the dimensions of paper with the codes A3, A4 and so on, and only by "Googling" did I confirm that 11 x 17 goes by the alias "tabloid".
If you need to print a bundle of flyers, and planned to print them in the economy fast mode, don't even consider setting it to 25 and going for coffee. Even if you fan the paper until your co-workers complain about the chill, the printer will work itself up into a frenzy, and begin printing your document in random pieces on multiple sheets of paper, and spitting the results at you with almost religious fervor. You also have to remember to indicate that you don't need the two-sided printing, or you'll get a bunch of blank pages in the middle of the pile of 150 sheets it used to print your 25 flyers, most of which look like bits of a jigsaw puzzle.
The "Cancel Print" button still doesn't work properly, and you'll have a lot of wasted paper if you need to stop a print job. The control buttons have now been moved from the right hand side like every other printer I've ever owned, and are now on the left hand side, so that I have to do yoga stretches over the desk to get to them.
On the good side, it prints regular documents quickly and with good quality, and once you have your paper sizes set up correctly, it prints 11 x 17 and 13 x 19 posters. Time will tell whether the rollers have been improved on this model, as the last one refused to pick up cardboard or large paper sizes after a few months.
I'm beginning to think that the printer's devil has split its soul into multiple parts, and is using HP printers as horcruxes. Only by destroying them all will we be saved. Can anyone spare a trustworthy Defense against the Dark Arts printer designer?
Amanda Richards, August 6, 2005
 Very dissatisfied November 4, 2005
Tool Junkie (Floral Park, NY)
68 out of 70 found this review helpful
Bought this for the wife to do some scrapbooking. Thought for sure the other reviewers must have been doing something wrong. Nope. This thing has a mind of it's own...especially if you try to print anything larger than 8 1/2 X 11. HP has not perfected home user wide format printers yet.
I returned it for the Canon i9900 wide format printer which, granted, was $100 more but the quality is simply amazing. 91 positive reviews can't be wrong. I was so impressed with the Canon quality that I scooped up a PIXMA 780 All-In-One for myself. Also a tremnedous number of positve reviews there as well. Much cheaper ink, better quality - how did I miss these the first time. Live and learn from my experiences.
Fine Art Printer My Foot! January 24, 2006
Tiffany A. Toland (Seattle, WA USA)
30 out of 34 found this review helpful
I contacted HP a few weeks ago and asked them which printer would be right for my business. I am a fantasy art illustrator and frequently sell prints of my art and other merchandise at street fairs, bazaars, festivals and art shows. I asked them for something archival quality and this is what they pointed me towards. I *had* a Canon S9000 up until that point, and it was a wonderful printer for 3 years, but it gave up after 3 days of non-stop printing before a show and I was in a bind.
The 9800 was the same price as my S9000 and I wasn't happy about the fact that it didn't have individual ink tanks but I decided to give it a try.
It arrived at my house, I set it up, I installed the drivers, thinking that would prevent any problems. Unfortunately, as someone already complained, the drivers and the printer don't agree and I had to fight with it over media type and size. My "borderless" 11x17 prints were not really borderless at all. I decided while it was still printing that if the quality was exceptional I would keep it since my last printer wasn't true borderless either.
The colours were wonderful, but the quality was so poor I almost cried that I spent so much money buying this paperweight. An employee who assists with show set-up glanced at the picture and asked what happened... she is not a trained quality control tech and noticed immediately that the quality was very poor. My boyfriend and other friends also gave the same response. It looks bad.
I sent it back and am waiting for my Epson R1800 to arrive. This was the first and last time I'll ever buy an HP product.
 A speedy, sturdy printer, with accurate color and incredibly flexible print options. February 13, 2006
Greenmanwest
29 out of 33 found this review helpful
I have to admit that, after reading a few bad reviews of this printer, I thought twice about buying it. But the fact is, I already owned an HP Photosmart 7960, which had a steep learning curve initially, but after using it for 2 years I've found that it is a formidable little machine, and I've gotten comfortable with HP printer software, so I let customer loyalty guide me on this one.
I'm a graphic designer and photographer, expecting the highest quality images with excellent color fidelity from my printers, so the first thing I did with my new 9800 was to fill it with 13x19" paper (HP's photo & proofing gloss) on which to test print some of my more complicated Photo Manipulates. Since these files combine photographic imagery with type and vector drawings, they really put a printer through its paces!
I have to admit that there was a bit of guesswork involved- having looked over the paper carrier, and found that the largest marked paper size was "A3" (and noting that A3 was smaller than my 13x19 sheets) I opened the "page setup" menu, located a selection that said "A3+", which included a submenu citing "Super B" and "Borderless Super B", which I correctly deduced to be the 13x19 settings, selected the former, then selected "Print with Preview" (so that I could set up my own margins) and printed my first image. By the way, I later found that all the paper sizes are explained in detail in the PDF manual that is included on the software disk.
I can't say the printer was extraordinarily fast, but about 4 minutes later, I had a nicely placed 13x19 print of one of my favorite poster images. The color was accurate, there were no gaps in the printing, the photo was clear, the type and vectors were sharp and all of the margins were even and correct.
For the next print, I selected the "Super B Borderless" option, with a simple photograph pre scaled to the 13x19 paper size at 300 DPI, and was shocked when I came back to the studio with my coffee in hand expecting to find the print in progress, to instead find it not only finished, but dry! Then I checked the ink levels in my printer utility, found that the color had gone down by 2 tenths- quite a lot! But it boils down to about $2 dollars (plus cost of paper!) for a full sized photo that I'll sell for $150 or better. In a darkroom, a similar quality 13x19 color print on good Ilford paper costs me upwards of 12 dollars, and takes over an hour to make, so this is pretty cost effective. Not cheap mind you, but cost effective.
My next test was to print an even dozen full size prints. I set up the driver, selecting 12 in the print quantity box, hit print, and left.
I expected, after seeing the earlier dip in the ink levels, to find my job half done when I returned, and a low ink light blinking. So imagine my surprise when an hour later I came back to find my job done, a bit of ink still left in the color cartridge, and a still almost-full black one. Not bad for a first day's work, but I wanted to drain the cartridges so I could get and accurate print count, and start budgeting for my next art fair. So I took out the remaining "Super B's", put in a stack of 4x6 postcards and proceeded to get an 20 postcards done off the same color cartridge, in less than half the time that my epson R320 would have done the same job, and still had a half full black cartridge. My low ink indicator was finally blinking for the color cartridge, but as it turned out I printed another 8 postcards before it actually drained.
The new Vivera ink cartridges that are included with this printer are smaller than the old variety, but they are also a bit less expensive, with a similar, though slightly lower yield to that of their older and larger cousins. There are larger cartridges available however, for an extra ten dollars! (#97 and #96 are the stock numbers for the larger capacity cartridges)
Next day, after picking up a full set of cartridges- this printer only included the tricolor and black, so I picked up a photo color, and a photo gray to complete the set!- I decided to try out the six-color print quality.
I was not disappointed! The color quality was not significantly different with the swapped in photocolor cartridge- though the blacks were slightly less rich they were still acceptable, the color gamut was excellent (and especially on some of my more complex digital paintings, exquisite.) and the ink/paper surfaces beautiful.
I replaced the color cartridges with the black and grey ones and did a few B&W images, finding them quite good too.
Since HP has included the nozzles as part of the ink cartridges, instead of marrying them to the printer, hot-swapping cartridges is a simple and elegant way to expand the capabilities of the printer.
Later on I got adventurous and put in a few sheets of Arches watercolor paper and later a bit of Stonehenge, using the rear straight in manual feed.
Despite a lack of driver settings for these specialized art papers, a few easy adjustments produced very useable presets (all saveable) which produced excellent prints. The 9800 did have some difficulty handling heavyweight rough papers, but with medium and lightweight papers handled nicely.
As I mentioned before, all the paper sizes are explained in the PDF manual, but if you still have trouble with your paper size, select the "Custom Paper Size" option under page setup! You can designate a paper size, and save it as a preset for later.
I found the printed manual to be very basic, but the PDF manual on the included CD is comprehensive and well written!
I was pleasantly surprised to find that HP has upgraded their software to include a bookleting function for Macs (this was limited to Windows on the 7960) and that it works very nicely with the duplexer installed (the one complaint I have about this Deskjet is that the duplexer was difficult to get- I had to do some searching to find one for sale online, and the supplier was not speedy!)
There is a bit of tweaking required to get the margins set just right- my first attempts wound up with pages slightly out of position, and some paper was wasted nudging things into their proper places.
I have not had any problems with HP's customer service- the fact is, I've not had to call them yet about the 9800- it is easy to use, produces high quality prints in a reasonable amount of time, gets a moderate yield from its small but flexible ink cartridges, and really gets the job done!
In case you're wondering- my computer is not overly specialized- its a first generation iMac (godawful Bondi Blue color!) which I upgraded to 600 mhz with a Sonnett Harmony chip, a mere 384 MBs Ram, and an 80GB hard drive. It has only a USB1 port, so I'm sure this printer isn't printing at its fastest speed! My only complaint about the Deskjet 9800 is that HP didn't add a firewire port for us vintage computer geeks!)
I've also printed from a variety of software programs with no problems at all: (Photoshop CS, InDesigh CS, Quark Express, Illustrator CS, Mac Preview, iPhoto, Photoshop Essentials 3, Corel Draw, Corel Painter IX, MS Word {mac version}, and AppleWorks) but since each one has its own driver requirements, you really need to
be vigilant to make sure your printer driver and application driver are set to the same printer!
This printer is nearly silent while printing, and it does not shake or otherwise move my worktable at all.
An excellent printer a decent price.
 poor consumer grade printer posing as a professional machine March 15, 2006
J. B. Watson (NW Montana)
24 out of 24 found this review helpful
I purchased the HP9800d with two tasks in mind: to do production printing of sales materials and to print digital photos in high resolution, large format. I am disappointed to conclude that the 9800 will do neither. In short this printer will not come close to doing what it is advertised to do. I have been the full distance with HP customer support and they also agree that it will not perform yet they did not respond to my request for a refund. I have spent enough time, money and wasted paper to have bought three of these things, or better yet one good printer. This does not include the cost of sales materials mailed late and of poor quality.
Lets start with printing photographs. The printer is advertised to print at a simulated 4800dpi at up to 13x19 inches borderless. One would assume (foolishly) that the printer will do both at the same time. I am a graphics professional using industry standard software, Photoshop CS2 and QuarkExpress 6.5, my computer is an Intel based graphics workstation running XP pro. Sometimes I can get the printer to print an 8x10 at maximum resolution; I have never gotten it to print larger unless I drop the resolution down to best. HP support responded that best and maximum are almost the same so don't worry about it. If you want to print borderless in Quark, HP support will instruct you to use the old 9600 printer driver and set it to the default printer for that printing job. What a bogus solution when working in a networked environment, no one knows which driver is currently set and the printer tends to get confused along with us. If I send it an 8.5x11 from Quark with 4 full frame images it will only print 3 of them, leaving a hole in the layout. Thus we are forced to design our layouts around what the printer likes not our customers.
Now let's look at production printing. The 9800 is rated by HP to print 5,000 pages a month. That is 10 reams of paper. One would assume that at this rate the 9800 could do small production runs of specialty sales materials, which is one of HPs advertising points. We have been trying to print a 20 page catalog using two sided printing. We are using HP bright white paper. Paper handling is very poor. Many times it will refuse to pick up paper from the tray, we have found that if you only put 50 or so sheets of paper in the tray it works a little better but is still unreliable. We will set a print job and come back to find that only 2 or three sheets out of 100 have printed, repeat this a dozen times and the schedule is now shot. The 9800 has a nasty habit of pulling several sheets at once from the tray resulting in blank pages in the document and blowing two sided print order. This means that we have to go through every catalog, by hand, and look at every page to make sure they are there and correct and then go back and print the pages that are missing. Do that 100 times and now check your schedule again. To top all this off, paper outfeed is unreliable also. Printed sheets being ejected from the printer will catch sheets already in the out tray pushing them off onto the floor in a big pile. Great way to get the day started to come in in the morning and find 100 sheets of catalog in a big pile on the floor, completely mixed up and out of order, and don't forget some pages are missing and there are blank pages in there also. Now where did that sales schedule go?
If you connect the printer via USB and load the toolbox software you are in for a computer crash. The software attempts to establish bi-directional communications with the printer and cannot. It will continue to load copies of the toolbox and continually ping for the printer until it uses 100% of cpu time and grinds the machine to a halt. How many poor consumers are out there wondering why their computer hates them when they just bought it a new printer?
In summary, the 9800 might serve a snapshot photographer where demand and expectations are low. It is no where near satisfying a professional graphics artist. The 9800 might serve a very small office that does occasional printed mailings of low resolution and they have the time to baby sit the printer and double check it's output. The 9800 is definitely not the printer that HP would lead you to believe and I would not recommend for demanding professionals. The 9800 is a consumer printer, at best, that is posing as a professional machine. I have worn out piles of HP printers over the years and have been a very loyal customer. When it comes to the 9800 I feel that I was grossly mislead by HP and then left to hang when they could (would) not address the issues. Any equity or good will that HP had built with me over the years (and there was a lot) they cashed in when they sold me this printer. Rather than just going out and buying HP I will shop the field.
|
|
|
