Great Printer with a LOUSY Print Driver

Overview:
My previous HP printer was a Photosmart 385, which was an awesome printer but died an unnatural death (somehow a dime got caught inside the printing mechanism and chewed up the works). So I purchased an a616 to replace it.

Setup:
There are two kinds of setup for this printer: USB (to a computer) and Bluetooth (to a PDA or cell phone). The Bluetooth setup was amazingly easy. After I purchased a $30 Bluetooth transmitter for the printer, all I had to do is invoke Discovery mode from my two cell phones and pair them to the printer. I was printing camera snapshots in under two minutes. While the default pairing code is 0000, the user can select any four digit code for pairing using the printer's control panel.

I wish I could say that the USB setup was as easy. The print diver is unreasonably huge. It actually comes on a DVD. That's right, folks, the print driver is actually over 700 Mb in size. I have three computers and have thus far been able to intall the driver on only two. On the first machine (a Toshiba w/ 1.5 GHz Pentium III), the install process took over 90 minutes. On the second machine (a Samsung Tablet PC w/ 900 MHz Celeron) the process crashed the operating system, necessitating a full reformat/reinstall of the operating system and all applications. After that, the process again took 90 minutes. On my third machine (a home-built Athelon 2.4 GHz desktop) it has thus refused to install at all. The process simply ceases progressing at step 3 of 4. Upon reboot, the installer removes the partial install and does another forced reboot. This is highly unsatisfactory!

It begs the question: Why must the Windows driver be so amazingly huge when the printer apparently needs no driver at all in order to print from a PDA or cell phone? If I would have known that the driver tended to crash operating systems or simply refuse to install, I would have purchased a different printer.


Printing Characteristics:
The device prints on 4"x6" and 5"x7" paper. It's apparently smart enough to know what size paper is loaded, since pictured came out the right size when printing from a cell phone. The printer is also smart enough to scale camera phone pictures to fill up the entire page, even if the native resolution of the picture would be insufficient to do so. The built-in interpolation works quite well, since scaled cell phone pictures don't look as grainy as one might expect. The device seems to print somewhat faster than my old Photosmart 385. The color saturation is quite good and is pretty close to the drug store photo developer. The paper's surface seems oddly "textured", which is one of the few ways one can tell that it was printed on a printer and not at a lab. A nice feature that was added to this printer is a time-to-finish estimate that displays on the printer's control panel. As an added benefit, the printer is also extremely quiet.

If you can actually get the driver to install, the Windows printer control module is pretty user friendly. There is a very useful setting that automatically squeezes 8.5x"11" source material down to 5"x7" or 4"x6". There is also the option to use post cards, index cards, or plain paper. You can also designate the use of a black-only cartridge. In plain paper / black cartridge mode, the device makes for a useful portable receipt printer (in my old job, I did that all the time with my Photosmart 385).


Device Control Panel:

The screen that is built into the device is bright and sharp. The buttons on the printer also light up. My only gripe is navigating the onboard menus. It should be easier to access key features than it is on this printer. It's cumbersome and complicated.

Summing it up:

Print quality: A
Print Speed: B
Built-in Control Panel: C
Size/Weight: A
Bluetooth Setup: A
Windows Setup: F

Recommendations:
If you plan on only printing from PDAs or cell phones, or if you only plan on pulling memory cards out of you camera to print, then this is a perfectly good printer. However, if you plan on attaching this to a computer to print (which most people will) then I cannot recommend this device because the installer tends to either not install or actually crashes operating systems. In this respect, I am deeply disappointed at HP for allowing a high quality device to be so crippled by such buggy, unreliable software.