HP Laserjet P3005

Worst HP printer we have ever owned

We have serveral of these and they are only about a year old and they all requires or required fixes. I have older HP models that have never needed a fix at all. We are a heavy duty printing operations but still the older printer have handled it without issue.

Here's one tech's estimate to fix one printer

50679/HP LJ P3005
Fuser Unit $225.40
Gear Set $38.00
Tax $15.81
Total $279.21

50680/HP LJ P3005 (there's a little twist to this one, you have two choices)
Engine Control Unit (supplier #1 available now) $462.60
Paper Cassette 2 Refurbished $33.66
Tax $29.78
Total $526.04

Or
Engine Control Unit (supplier #2 on backorder-no date listed) $224.56
Paper Cassette 2 Refurbished $33.66
Tax $15.50
Total $273.72

As you can see it is cheaper to bu a new printer than to fix this.

p3005

This printer worked great for a year, then began having one problem after another.
All were expensive fixes too. As of today, it is on the blink (yet) again.
Will not buy another, and will not buy from HP again. A lemon if ever there were one.

Terrible printer and even worse company to deal with

Avoid this printer. Avoid this company like the plague. Avoid this line of printers. Save yourself some grief, buy a Canon. We bought this at work and I will make sure we never buy another HP product ever. This line of printers has a flaw involving the memory chip. HP is aware of this BUT they still don't mind having you jump through all the wrong hoops before you find this out. Then you have to remove/replace the chip (I understand there is some soldering involved) and whatever..... I am not a computer repairman. This printer is barely six months old. I don't feel as if the burden should be on me. However, typical HP fashion, it is. HP squirms out of more warranties than any company I know of. They did a similar thing to me about a $1500 desktop that died 3 weeks after I bought it. It is probably going to be cheaper for me to buy another printer. It won't be an HP.

This memory glitch is not the only problem with the printer. It also has to have the tray choices reset almost every single time it is used (when it worked). You set it, save the settings and then use it. It happens again.

Also, when you switch between this printer and another printer, the formatting does not change accordingly.

All in all, just a lemon of a printer.

I wish I had the option to rate this printer a zero.

FAIL!

I work at a hotel where we have 3 of these printers and ALL of them have the same problems. First, the paper frequently "jams" in that every 20-30 pages printed it stops printing because it detects a jam; when you open up the paper tray, however, you find a page that the printer has attempted to feed but failed - it's not even really jammed in the traditional sense. The "jam" happens less often when the paper tray is full so even though you can put a whole ream of paper into it you have to fill it up constantly so it won't "jam" as often. One other thing: when the pages feed out of the printer they do not collect together anything close to neatly. After a few pages, the pile quickly becomes a jumbled mess with some pages almost coming off the pile. Do not buy this overpriced piece of plastic.

Great Printer for a small network or home office!

I have had this printer for about a month. It was very easy to setup on our small school network, I assigned it a fixed IP address to make it easier to find and install on the 10 computers. I used the HP network installation utility to create an install program that each of the Windows XP and Windows 2000 pc's could use to load/install and make the default print driver. Very straight forward. (I set it up to default to double sided printing to save paper).

I downloaded the Vista PCL6 driver directly from HP and used that driver on our 4 Vista pc's.

I estimate we will be printing a couple 1000 sheets a month. I choose this printer for a several reasons:
- Past experience with HP higher end printers (my work uses them by the dozens).
- Ability to Duplex print (double-sided).
- Heavier duty than most of the 'bundled' printers that come with a new PC. This LaserJet can easily handle our printing load.
- Paper tray holds a full ream of paper (500 sheets)! We should not have half full reams laying around.
- Fairly fast printing. Although using the duplex mode takes about 2.5 times the time to make a single sided print. Estimate the first page in less than 10 seconds, then if single sided, a print every 2-3 seconds. In duplex mode, the page comes out about half way and then pauses for a couple seconds and it is pulled back into the printer and then is ejected out with the back side printed on. Takes about 6-7 seconds to print both sides of a page. (These are normal word processing documents without large graphics).
- Built in networking, the Jet-direct embedded print server is very easy to manage with a web interface. Also very easy to check on usage and toner level. Very good status and usage information, telling how many of which size paper and if single sided or double sided, error messages or paper jam logs etc. (So far no paper jambs or errors!).
- Had a $450 instant rebate which cut the cost in half, very good value for the money. Picked it up locally for the same price as Amazon had. Didn't have to wait for shipping and it was a sales tax-exempt purchase.
- Amazon had one of the best prices for the genuine HP toner kit, so I bought the toner from Amazon. You do get what you pay for, so compare the P3005dn to other printers in the same price range. This was a better deal than the HP P2015x.
- Printer came with one of the HP Q7551A toner kits ($110 value). This toner should last 6500 pages (the fuller Q7551X cost almost twice as much and gives double the number of pages). Double sided printing counts as 2 pages.

This was a good purchase for my school. I will write another review after we have used it for several months, maybe after the first toner change so I can state the number of copies we got.

Low Printer

Before I bought this printer, I had a similar one (an HP2420) that began to mal-function after using it for about a year. I thought it was just a "bad egg among a bunch", so I bought another one: this is a HP P3005. I bought this printer because it is a low printer that fits in my shelf where I station it. After using it a few months it began to make a similar noise and problems as the previous one. After resetting it a couple of times it is still working, but I would be cautious to buy another one of these models.