HP Officejet Pro K550 Desktop Inkjet Printer, Color

I have been using my K550 for about 9 months. It is very fast for my purposes and produces excellent quality prints on a variety of stocks. The only probelms I have with it are "failure to print" which requires turning off the printer and restarting it, then waiting while it "thinks about it," and double and triple feeding on second side printing. If I wait about 15 minutes between first side and second, I have almost no probelms.

I purchase 20 computers and printers each year for participants in our program. I have usually had great success with HP deskjets. I'd seen a good review of this printer in pc magazine and went by that spring 2006. These have had lots of problems. The setup takes a long time and appears linked to the computer/printer pair. So installing the software, laptop by laptop with one printer failed. The necessitated uninstalling the software and reinstalling on site for each of the 20 machines. There are major problems with the black ink clogging and not working so HP updated the software, supposedly to shake the cartridge. That'd be irritating if you had to hear that throughout the day. Save yourself some grief and buy a simpler deskjet or a laser printer.

I became so frustrated with this printer during a project that it brought me to tears. It takes way too long to print (unless you use draft and the draft quality was so poor I could not use it). It grabbed 3-5 papers at a time even with HP quality paper, this caused printing on top of pages and finishing on the following pages. I checked my settings several times wondering if I was doing something wrong. It was not me that was the problem, it was this printer. Would I recommend this product? NO. Am I sorry I purchased it? YES.

The HP K550 was recommended as a replacement for my HP Deskjet 895Cse. The printer picks up more than one piece of paper frequently. Even though it prints quickly, it takes time for the printer to get started on a complex multicolored piece that needs to print. The paper holder is awkward if you are hand feeding one piece at a time.

I bought this to replace my 5300. It is a bit problematic, and not as good as the old one when it comes to flexibility. Leave it on overnight with no activity, and it goes into a coma. Power down, restart to wake it up. Quicken will print checks ONLY if the print mode is changed to direct feed versus spooled. This does not occur with any of my other pringers. Quicken support states it is normal for this printer, gave me the work around. +++It is a miser on ink, exceeds the cartridge ratings by a good margin. Prints very fast and very clear, no running of the ink on photo paper. All in all, superb print quality, but bad manners. Gving it to the kids.