HP Officjet 7130 all-in-one

by Denise
(Tennessee, USA)

I originally bought this all-in-one HP for a home-based business. For the first two years it printed great, but for $500 I thought it was a bit expensive. I purchased it anyway in 2004 because I thought the all-in-one was more convenient at the time. It did make for great printing during the first two years, but the scanner and copier were always frustrating because most of the time the feeder would pull through more than one page at a time. Consequently, I just gave up trying to use the feeder for multiple pages and would hand feed them one page at a time. Then, little by little other things started to go bad. Maybe I expected too much for $500.

First the scanner quit working for no apparent reason. I still get an error message every once in a while saying "scanner quit working, turn off then back on."

Then the color part stopped working properly when I packed it up in my car to flee an anticipated hurricane--hurricane never did hit (yay!). So now if I were to print in color it looks as if the color ink is running out, so I don't even use the color option. However, I still have to keep a current color cartridge in the printer because it won't even print in b/w when it thinks the color cartridge is out, i.e. even if it's only dried out from non-use. And you can't trick it by installing another black cartridge because it doesn't fit--I just had to try it! So, that's about $36 down the drain every time I have to replace the color cartridge that I can't even use.

Also, I learned shortly after buying the printer that it won't work if you put an expired print cartridge in, so always check the expiration date on print cartridges before you buy them!! Who knew?? It actually will give an error message saying "print cartridge expired--replace now" or something like that. What a rip!

The copier does still work, but only in b/w, of course.

And the ink is expensive. A combo pack of b/w and color ink costs around $54.99 plus tax. Ouch!

So now it's telling me again that I need to replace my color ink (that I don't even get to use), so I'm trying to decide if I should cough up another $36 for color ink or just buy a different printer. Now I only need it for school since I'm trying to finish my degree.

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