HP Color LaserJet 2840 All-in-One Printer/Copier/Scanner/Fax (Q3950A#ABA)

So it's a little noisy, it's still a well done HP product. From the upacking instructions,to getting operational was a walk in the park compared to other plug & play beasts I have dealt with. Even the Vista driver download,and install was painless. Anyone who runs a small office where actual work is done will appreciate the economy and PERFORMANCE of this machine.

We just got two of these things and while it still has bloat-ware utilities (sucks up 50 megs in memory) it is less trouble that some other HP print drivers have been. However here the critical flaw: never mentioned anywhere in the documentation (it took a call to HP to find this) is that this machine WILL NOT WORK WITH Win2000 SERVER (or any server software according to HP). You can not even get the install script to run, (they claim) you can install basic printing services, but none of the utilities. Kind deceptive marketing if you ask me. After unpacking this monster (>100lbs), it would be very be hard to ship it back. No issues with the actual printing, but most of our office machines (servers) can not use it.An update 5 years after the above: HP Support for Ubuntu is great, this driver was supported with ease, and now these things (still used as scanners and out-bound faxes) have a new life. As for users with Win servers (still screwed), as for Visa and Win 7 users, screwed with no plans to support. Here our last NT2000/XP node has just died, this product and its bloatware Tomcat solution have been more of less a bad dream and expensive to own. Whatever happened to the HP of my youth, at least the dusty equipment in the garage is still faithful.

First off, if you are buying this printer to use with a Vista computer, STOP. It quite simply is not vista compatible as of yet. They say it is, and they release drivers on their website. Go read their forums... they are on their 3rd or 4th revision of the Vista software (in 10 months), and typically the software gets posted for a week, then pulled. The software they have up there now was pulled, but they put it back because people complained there were no vista drivers... so now there are vista drivers they just don't work. Its embarassing reading the forums all the problems people have had with Vista and HP's lack of support. Its not like Vista came as a surprise and came out yesterday.Its pretty sad, I bought this along with an HP laptop I got for my wife, which came with Vista installed. Many months after Vista is out, they still do not have working software. Why would a major company like HP continuously release software which just flat out doesn't work... they should be ashamed of themselves. So for now, my wife has to borrow my laptop if she wants to scan or print to our laser printer.On my XP machine, things work fairly well. The software is still bloated and slow, but fairly reliable. As mentioned above, it takes a LONG time to install. Keep your disk, because it takes a long time to download as well. If someone could tell me why a print/scan driver is so huge, that would be nice. For an "all in one", its very good... good print quality, good speed, nice scanner, nice fax. Wish it had duplex. Wish the paper feed tray had larger capacity.One other note, I recently bought an HP D7460 to go along with my 2840 (To use for photo printing). When I installed the D7460 software, it completely took down my 2840 drivers... I could no longer scan or print to it, and the web interface also hung.

I bought the 2840 on Sept. 26 2007 and so far I've been very happy with it. The installation was a breeze. Just follow all the instructions in the manual and you shouldn't have any problems.The software installation is another story. I installed the software on two different machines, one runs WinXP prof and the other one runs Windows XP Media Center Edition. The installation takes quite a while but was successful on the WinXP prof machine and all features work flawlessly. On the Win MCE machine, the installation always stalled at the same place. I didn't have time yet to contact HP support but hopefully they can help.On the Win MCE machine, I've only been able to install HP's universal printer drivers which allow me to print, but only in b/w. No fax, no scanner yet.The machine does make quite a bit of noise while it's printing but it doesn't bother me at all. The inkjets I had weren't much quieter. In standby mode, the printer is absolutely quiet. Every 24 or 48 hours, the printer runs some calibration but I think this can be turned off in the options.The print quality is great. I've printed letter sized photos, text, brochures, etc. and I'm very happy. Copying works well to. The copied page is very close to the original.The scanner and fax work well too and the quality is good. I don't send or receive a lot of faxes, so for what I use it's good. The automated document feeder is very useful for copying, scanning and faxing. I'm glad it had that.Update 6/6/11: I've had this multi function printer for a while now and at some point the software stopped recognizing the scanner and fax. I've also got a new Windows 7 notebook and that one can't see the fax or scanner either. I've tried updating the software and driver with no luck. I've given up on it now. It's very frustrating having a scanner but not being able to use it. I'll probably replace it soon even though the printer/copier itself is still in great condition.I also switched our phone provider from a regular land line with AT&T to Vonage which is VOIP. I was able to configure the machine so that I could send and receive faxes. However it doesn't always work and sometimes it just keeps the line busy for no apparent reason. So now I mostly have it turned off so that it doesn't interfere with my Vonage phone line.

Good