HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-in-One Multifunction Printer

by Roy Rivera
(San Francisco)

I started to run a small home based printing business using an HPD145, which I bought way back in 2002. I initially discovered that this handy piece of machine could do superb prints such as school programs and newsletters. Later on, I tried doing odd jobs for budget wedding invitations and calling cards and soon enough, my handy 7 year old printer couldn’t live up to expectations anymore. Instead of having it repaired, since the cost will amount to the price of a new printer, I simply decided to say goodbye to it and bought the HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-in-One multifunction printer.

I had no reservations in choosing an HP printer in as much as my old one served me well for quite some time. I chose the Pro L7680 over the 7580 series because the former has a legal size scanning feature, an LCD screen, an Ethernet networking, a blocker for junk fax and most important of all, it allows for two-sided printing. I can say it’s reasonable enough at $349 to think that it used to cost around $600 a few years back.

Another series, which is the Pro L7780 and a little more priced at a hundred dollars was basically the same, except that it had a wireless networking and a second tray. I was thinking about the second tray since it would come in handy if I had to print some envelopes, but I imagined it would give less room for movement so I decided one tray would do for the moment. Anyway, I can always buy the extra tray for $99 in case I feel I really need one.

The only thing I can say about the tray though is that they should have used tabs instead of relying on the rollers to keep the envelopes in place. The roller feature only keeps them aligned but the whole bunch has a tendency to slide on to the left side.

I guess I was too excited about it that my initial steps regarding installations seemed to take ages before I could get it to start running smoothly. The installation procedure took me about 12 to 15 minutes I guess because I had to re-check if the ink cartridges and print heads were properly installed. What I really find time consuming is the period it takes for the machine to go through some tests including the printing out of several test pages. In fact, I almost thought that the test process is also ink consuming but I think it’s better this way than having to go through errors on actual work loads. In time I got used to these tests, by just doing other tasks rather than wait for it to wind up with its testing procedures.

I did get to experience a paper jam once but it turned out to be my fault. It’s a good thing the machine illustrated the jam by displaying a picture of how I placed the pile of paper too far back in the machine. I simply made it a point to check this often so I haven’t experienced any paper jams again.

For a small business like mine, which deals mostly on paper this Pro L7680 can really live up to expectations. Customers have no complaints whatsoever now because the job outputs are as good as laser quality prints. Although photo printing is not one of its strongest points when it comes to printing a heavy load of pictures, in fact I intend to buy myself a separate photo printer in case I get more volume of photo printing jobs.

The scanner is something that I don’t regret at all because its legal size scanner capacity didn’t limit the paper size of the scanning jobs I had to accept. Not only that, the output was just great, just like they said, 2400x4800 dpi-19600 enhanced.

As to the fax machine, I don’t really think this has much use nowadays because e-mails are better substitutes for sending documents. Just the same, in case somebody does need to fax messages, I don’t have to stand-by and wait for the message so I can get it to print. I just put it in auto-print mode to accommodate the printing of incoming fax messages. In some cases, I can put it in an alert mode, so I can be more selective as to what fax messages to print.

My overall rating for this machine, four stars, as far as a small business like mine is concerned. I’ve had 7 years experience working with HPD145 and I was right in replacing it with another HP Printer, since I knew more or less how HP printers work through good or bad times. HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-in-One multifunction printer was a good choice at a reasonable price. In fact, my business couldn’t have gone better had I chosen another brand.