HP Color Laserjet CM2320nf MFP

Great quality and fast

Bought this on sale at Staples for $479 after $50 any printer trade in allowance, so it was definitely time to move to a color laser. I was concerned about some of the reviews that had problems with paper curl, but to my pleasant surprise, there was minimal paper curl from the very first print with cheap paper ($2 a ream stuff). Setup was pretty straightforward. I use a Mac, so installation was smooth as usual. The only glitch that I see, which probably isn't a glitch, is when you scan documents in, it treats them as full size of the glass, which is 14 inches long. You can choose auto cropping, but it can make it smaller than a page. There is no selection for a standard 8.5 X 11. Not a big deal, but just thought I'd mention it. The color print quality is amazing. There's a slight gloss to the toner, so it makes everything look great. Bottom line, I'm pleased with this purchase and for the price, I don't think there's anything that can compare.

hp 2320

this had Errors on screen out of the box, hp refused to replace it, they sent a tech
to fix is, the tech used an old part which had more erros than the first one, the printer continuly do calibration, a lot of cleaning cycles during work day, also some times it would just restart in the middle of scan or print job, as far a as faxing some time it will not recive all the pages, the installation takes too long and it really puts a heavy load on the workstaiotn, just imagin if you have to install it on 10 computers , it will take about 7 hrs , scanning to PC did not work all the time, may be one out 3 times it would work, many erros pc not found, also printes slow,

I think this is the worst HP has ever made, hp should not be selling this product any more, and should replace it with some thing better to every customer.

Great MFP, with one caveat....

I've had this unit for a little over 2 weeks now and have given it a full, and I mean FULL workout. I've printed a whole ream of 28lb paper with various text, graphics, etc, along with 20 or so color photos on laserjet photo paper and continue to be impressed with the output. I have made all sorts of copies and sent/received probably 10 faxes (through MagicJack, no less!), as well. All with only one issue....

That dang annoying paper curl. This thing just loves to curl the paper, no matter what type of paper, no matter what type of printing. There is even a setting in the setup menu on the unit, called "Reduce Paper Curl", which supposedly reduces the fuser heat, but it makes no difference.

The GOOD news is, it's replaceable under warranty! I spent a bit on the phone with HP Business Support (VERY IMPORTANT! You MUST call Business Support@800-334-5144! HP "Total Care" knows nothing about this printer and will just keep transferring you back into their same queue over and over); and was informed that there were an early batch of these units sent out with fusers that were out of spec. The way to tell which fuser you have is to open the back access panel and look at the foam rollers. Supposedly the "new" fusers have orange rollers, and the bad ones(like mine) have black foam rollers.

Another good piece of news is, these come with a standard next day, on-site warranty. I have a tech coming out tomorrow to replace said bad fuser assembly. The Business Support agent I spoke with, while clearly not American, was MUCH more knowledgeable and willing to help than the standard Total Care agents. I could also understand him better. In the end, an extremely frustrating experience with the non-business support group, ended up morphing into a somewhat pleasant resolution.

I will update the review notes with the outcome tomorrow once I have the unit replaced. I know I won't be able to change the star rating, but even with the curl issue, it's still a solid 3.5-4 stars. Especially considering there are later models released without the curl issue.

***UPDATE #1***
They are over-nighting the fuser assembly to me and the tech will be here between 10 and 4 to install it. The on-site tech just called and said that if I was so inclined, I could try the swap myself, or if it's more than I care to delve into, then he'd be happy to come do the swap. I'll check and see once it gets here tomorrow.

***FINAL UPDATE***
Unfortunately, the new fuser did not completely rectify the paper curl problem. It did appear to lessen the curl a bit, however. But, I guess Ill live with it. I will note, the on-site HP tech was wonderful! He was friendly, knowledgeable and very professional and was very apologetic that the fuser swap did not fix the problem. We even spent a bit, looking into the paper path, to see if the rollers were causing the curl issue and not so much the fuser. It wasnt, by the way. If it were the paper path, the curl would be in the opposite direction. He gave me his cell and said to give him a call if there's anything he can do to help out in the future. Short of the agonizing experience I spent initally with the Total Care helpdesk, this has been a very good experience.

***The FINAL, FINAL UPDATE***
ON a whim, I decided to go back into the menu and re-enable "Less Paper Curl" and that with the combination of the fuser replacement, has netted usable results. The page is still curled, but it's definitely not as bad as it was, pre-fuser change.

Don't Buy if You Have A Mac!

I've always been a faithful HP buyer, but this one pushed me over the edge. I spent $650 on this printer, to get rid of the headached that I had with using a separate laser pronter from an officejet that didn't scan well (couldn't adjust resolution/very slow/problematic). Well, some issues got better and some didn't. I scan a lot for my work. I must say, this printer prints beautifully and very fast. Absolutely no problems there at all. But, if you want to scan to email, it's in jpg form. Yuck. If you scan into the software, everything goes smoothly until you go to save the file. I don't care what resolution you are at, it can take several minutes. It even continuously puts my Imac G5 to sleep and causes it to start overheating. Isn't that strange? Nothing else has ever done this to my mac. I've called in and talked to several people - they don't care, they say that that is just how their scanners work. I was transferred so many times, and walked away with no solutions. Also, being a mac user, there is a glitch (they admitted to this), in which my letter size documents will scan in as legal unless I hit auto-crop which enlarges everything on the page and crops all the way down to the actual words on the page. It looks horrible. But the worst thing is how it shuts my computer down and wastes so much time. I feel I completely wasted my money. I'll probably buy a Xerox Documate 510 on the side (we use this at work and it rarely has problems) on the side. Don't waste your money. Printer works great - buy a separate scanner (not Hp's) or try out another company's multifunction printer. HP is not what they used to be.

Wish I'd had this while in business

I am very gratified by this purchase but also retroactively frustrated. We had a fax ($900), a monochrome laser printer ($1,400), a monochrome copier ($1,100) and a flatbed scanner ($800) in our small business office. Each was the best of their sort by contemporary ratings and our own experience, but each -- except the scanner -- was as large as this multi-function printer. The scanner was short and of course flat, so it was less volume, but it took up more working surface than any of the others.

This unit does each job better than those original sepaarates and it provides color capability to boot. Color copies and color prints both look like professional photo prints when done on the appropriate paper.

Very satisfactory. Highly recommended even at the combined price we paid for separates. Over $4,000. Now check the price we actually paid for this compact wonder. Amazing.

Good value for Money

Excellent performance and good value for the money spent. A little heavy to move it around but I'm very happy about its performance.

Great for Small-Business Office

I was wary of purchasing this product due to the reviews on both Amazon and other sites. However, I believe that most of the people giving bad reviews to this machine really did not set-up the machine correctly. If you check out the cnet or pcmag reviews, the Color Laserjet MFPs, both the 1300 and 2300 series are getting editors choices for the combination of speed, ease of use, great looking prints, and quality. As well as economy, the toner cartridges are a tad expensive, but buy the black one in a double pack (like getting the second 75% off) as you will go through this quickly. The color ones last a surprisingly long time.

With a correct set-up this has been the best recent purchase our office has made. The scan to email feature is the best. Even a novice can scan to their email now. Saves many headaches or formatting, saving, configuring, etc... in either Adobe or the software that comes with the printer. And no, there is no way to get authentication to work. But, there is a great workaround that not many people know about. Try your ISPs smtp server. As you are on the network already, many ISPs (Optimum for example) have a non authenticated "mail.optonline.net" smtp server that any customer may use. For this purpose, it is also incredibly quick with the upload speeds and makes for a very easy scan to email. For the most part, if you are using an authenticated outside source for your mail, you might be able to take advantage of this. If you use internal email sources, and cant figure out how to get it to work on your server, maybe you should not be configuring your own server then.

Overall, another feature that is handy is the fax mechanism. This MFP scans your entire fax in first, then tries to send it all at once. I had a 7400 series Officejet (about the same price as this laser a few years ago) that had the worst fax machine in it. It would error in the middle of scanning the pages in, making situations where the other party gets 2 out of 4 pages and then you have to send everything over again. Regardless, the fax on this machine is very well set-up by hp.

Copy is fast, the glass for the copy machine is small - only letter size instead of legal size, but the machine is too narrow to get legal size copies in anyway.

The paper handling is superb as well. The inclusion of the manual feed bypass on front makes printing items such as quickbooks checks, forms, preprinted letterhead, etc... a simple and easy task. Very well thought out design in my opinion.

Overall very good printer. I give it 4 stars for one reason alone, the toner cartridges are expensive at a yield of 3500-2800 pages for an hp business laser. The more expensive next model CM3500s get around 7000 pages yield out of one cartridge for the same price. But overall, the machinery is great for the volume of about 6-8000 sheets per month we print.

Also - HP has a promotion where you trade in an old printer (any model, and manufacturer, doenst have to work) and get $150 off this printer by mail in rebate. Makes this a really great deal in my opinion.

READ THIS BEFORE BUYING!

This may have been the absolute WORST HP experience that I've ever had. This MFP promises the moon, but can't quite deliver (at least not without a boost).

IF you are buying it because you will be able to scan to e-mail, unless you have control of your e-mail server and can disable authentication, maybe OK. If you are the likely SOHO user that has an e-mail host (which most-likely requires authentication to prevent SPAM), forget about it, won't work. Maybe HP will do some research next time they upgrade the firmware and enable settings for e-mail authentication.

IF you are plannning to scan to computer folder locations that are on a Windows Server 2003, be prepared to jump through hoops. Support was miserable on this machine. ONE person at HP finally knew about this machine right off the bat without transferring me 5 or 100 times. Apparently, this is a "Commercial Model" and support is only available Monday-Friday. For a machine that advertises compatibility with Win Server 2k3, it really isn't. Features required to set a location on the server for scanning directly from the machine aren't installable (namely the HP Toolbox). It took me a lot of trying to get it going (see my workaround at http://www.myitgeeks.com/Windows_Server_2003_HP_CM2320.htm).

If you just need a color copier, fax, scanner at a reasonable price that will work with XP, you're probably OK.