HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color All-in-One Printer, 3 months of Instant Ink included

So far so good, much better than others I tried
I’m a regular household user (ok, also a teacher, but not the kind who prints All The Things) but had an old Officejet because of a crazy black Friday deal back when black Friday deals were crazy. It died of old age and I thought I’d downgrade because budget. But I just couldn’t go back to regular printers. I returned two out of frustration before deciding to just pay a little more and go back to Officejet, it’s only been a couple of weeks but so far I don’t think I’ll have any regrets.Pros:+ Seems to be on sale often so it’s not terribly more expensive than lower end printers.+ The print quality is very good. I’m getting a drop of those light horizontal lines, but just a bit, and I bet they could be ironed out if I had time to sit around with settings or something. But overall I’m much happier than I was with the other printers I tried, text is sharper and colors are more true.+ Paper tray is closed. I hate that all the new expensive printers these days have the paper sticking up from the back open to the elements. I can only assume their paper feeders get gummed up with dust pretty fast, and the papers themselves can’t be too happy. The paper tray on this printer is great.+ It’s not noisy, relative to others.+ HP Smart app is great, easy to use, has a nice set of functions.+ Had no issues with setup.+ So far seems to be picking up jobs just fine from my phone and laptop.Cons:- I really don’t like the boxy design. I’m putting function over form but I really don’t like it. And the front panel seems a bit flimsy, it’s not the most important piece but my old Officejet didn’t have a front panel that opened and I don’t really see the point of this one as you need to lift the top to get inside anyway.- would love to have a paper bypass tray. Like if you want to print one envelope, it would be great to have a place to just feed that in rather than remove your whole paper stack, change the size in the tray, print your envelope, and then put all the paper back.- like I said before, I’m getting a drop of banding (is that what it’s called? Tiny horizontal gaps?) When printing chunks of color. I’m not sure if this is fixable and the print quality is still the best I’ve seen in this price range, but it’s a flaw.- the touch screen could be a little more responsive- That’s… Really it so far. I had a lot more complaints with every other printer I tried.Neutral:~ Let’s talk about instant ink. Many reviews had issues with this. They seem to not understand how the program works. It’s not that complicated. No, you don’t get six months worth of ink in the box with the printer. They will send the ink to your home as needed over six months if you sign up and give them your address. I haven’t gotten to the end of the trial yet so I don’t know if they actually brick your printer if you try to use generic ink, but they were very explicit about you agreeing not to do that when signing up. I have no issue with this because I did some math and I believe the instant ink actually is a better deal than even generic ink is. My old printer accepted generics (after an initial period of reluctance) and it wasn’t all that exciting. And with subscription ink I won’t need to worry about waste when the printer decides to clean the printheads (my old one did that a lot)I do think it feels scammy for them to make you commit at the outset to never use other ink for the life of the printer (what?!) But at the same time I’m comfortable with what they’re offering. I’ll be annoyed if they raise the prices though, and I think if they’re making you commit upon purchase then they in turn should commit to grandfathering you into the ink prices as of the time of the commitment.~ Several times I’ve sent a print job from my phone, got an error message on my phone, while the job printed just fine. So it’s good that the job printed fine, but it’s weird and annoying that my phone thinks it didn’t, and now I have an error notification sitting there, and if I’m not near the printer I don’t know whether or not it actually printed or if I need to retry. I’ll have to figure out how to make that stop. Maybe I’ll need to uninstall and reinstall the phone app or something. Overall a very minor hiccup compared to the issues I had with other printers.

Not So Free Ink, Weak Wi-Fi
I Got this printer to replace an old Canon that stopped working after 10 years. One reason for picking this printer was the “free” 6 months of ink. Well, I needed to call tech support just to set the printer up. The tech support person wanted to install HP software on my computer. Now I know the difference between software and drivers, and I told tech support that I did not need software just drivers. After some back and forth the tech finally relented and helped me install just drivers and no HP bloatware. After the tech finished helping me with the drivers the printer needed to go through a registration process to activate my “free” ink. As part of the process of registering the printer I was told that I should keep the printer turned on all the time. All was well and good until about a week later when I turned the printer back on. The printer wanted to start the activation process all over again. I was able to get the printer back online without tech support this time and it stayed activated after that even though I turn my printer off when not in use. about 2 months later I get my “free” ink in the mail, right on time because the original cartridges are going empty after only 20 or 30 pages. I installed the new cartridges, and the printer worked well for another 3 and a half months. At about the 5 and a half month point I get an email saying my “free” ink period is about to expire, now I have printed about 50 pages over the 6-month period. I went to the HP ink web page and canceled my $5.99 a month subscription ( a week later they sent me an email informing me that the price was increased to $6.99 a month), and that is when I was informed that if I cancel my ink subscription my printer cartridges will be turned off, and now my “free” ink is USELESS and my printer will not print until I replace the full ink cartridges, and a new set of cartridges for the printer will cost About $85.00UpdateAfter I replaced all of the ink cartridges, and turned my printer back on again it said it needed to be set up again. Well now this is the third or fourth time I need to do the initial set up. I call tech support (time to start a paper trail) and “we” discover that the printer has dropped its IP address. The tech insists that there is a problem with my switch/router causing the issues. A couple of weeks later the same thing happens again, and again I am on the phone with tech support, and they say I have internet issues. When I ask why all of my other devices work and only my HP printer drops its IP address every couple of weeks they dance with the question. A couple of days later a rep from tech support called me and said that they want to replace the printer.When I received the new printer, I was able to set it up without any issues. Two weeks later I turned on the printer and it said setup needed, and there is no IP address in the printer. I called tech support, and again they blamed the issue on my internet. I was told that the printer would work better if I used a network cable instead of Wi-Fi. When I explained to the tech support rep that the printer was WIFI only (no Ethernet port) he suggested that the printer was too far (15 feet) from the router and that it had to be within 10 feet of the router. When I asked the rep how weak signal would cause the printer to lose its IP address, he could not answer the question but insisted that I would need to get up from my desk with my Wi-Fi connected computer on it and walk into the next room to turn on my printer, then walk back to my desk with my Wi-Fi connected computer on it to send the print job to the printer, and again walk back to the printer to retrieve the printed documents from the printer that is nice and comfy snuggled in right next to my Wi-Fi router.Now when I turn my new Brother printer on it says ready to print every time.

I just received it and it seems very nice . print very well . I am getting the feeling that they want to sign you onto a plan where they get your credit card and send you ink whenever they want . and charge it to your credit card . if that is the case I don’t give free access to my credit card to anyone . So it may be going back to sender . but so far so good .

More effort was put into HP being able gathering information, forcing you to use expensive cartridges, or to sign up for a subscription service than to make the printer functional and easy to use. I didn’t want to sign up for an account in order to use my printer and I had to search the web to figure out how as the instructions they provide REQUIRE you to make an account. I will not ever be buying an HP again, find a brand that will prioritize making a quality product rather than continued profit from it’s users.