Customer Reviews

Good product if you know how to setup wireless connection.
Pros:
1. Support Wireless connection.
2. Good price $150 in staples if you have a printer to recycle.
3. Auto double sided printing. Save trees.
4. Auto doc feeder. Now I can scan/print when I go out for lunch.

Cons:
1. Setting up wireless connection by following the quick start guide is a huge mistake.

I tried this on a Vista machine. The machine can print for about 30 minutes, and it goes offline. The HP imaging device monitor cannot detect the device, and it refused to launch. After about 1 hour I realized the IP address of the machine was changed because I restarted everything.

To avoid the problem, the best way to setup the machine is:
1. Setup network connection from the machine menu, do not use the setup CD.
2. Once the machine is connected, go to the wireless router config menu, and reserve the IP address for the machine. Now the machine will always use the same IP address.
3. Install the printer driver. You can copy the setup CD to the harddrive to speed up the installation process.
4. Run setup.exe, select add a device->through the network. Your machine should be detected by the setup program, and you should be able glide from here.

Good luck!

One more thing, when you scan make sure the firewall does not block the communication between the machine and the scanning software.

Everything you need, nothing you don't
My old HP PSC950 "broke" after 7 years of light use so I researched most everything out there. I wanted an all-in-one that was wireless. Looked at HP's, Canon's and Epson's offerings and read reviews. Found the HP J6480. Couldn't find any reviews at the time but it was everything I was looking for. All-in-one features and wireless, obviously, AND it also uses only 2 ink cartridges. The document feeder and duplexer are nice. No color LCD which is fine by me. The footprint is a little deeper and a little wider than the 950 but it fit where I needed it to fit. Wireless setup is easy, if you don't follow the directions in the manual. Please see Chong Yip's review. I basically did the same thing. If someone else other than you configured your router's security settings, you may want to find that someone to help.

If I had to make any complaints about the printer itself, there are 3. One is that it's kinda loud when it starts up and when it prints, compared to my HP 6980. Two is that when faxing using the document feeder, if you're faxing 2-sided sheets and have to put each side through to scan into memory, if you're not fast enough the J6480 will start sending it off. Maybe it's a setting but it would've been nice if it could ask if I was ready. I guess in an office environment, you would just leave it and have it take care of itself. Three is that the paper tray leaves much to be desired. While my old 950 and new 6980 have slide out paper "catchers" and a slot for 4x6 photo paper, the J6480 does not. The tray is angled up and fixed position so paper shouldn't fall.

But in the end, these 3 complaints aren't enough to knock my rating down. It was much simpler to setup wirelessly than the 6980 (I had to make a physical connection from my laptop to set that up and I'm a software engineer). The document feeder works well and is something I won't be able to live without from now on (the 950 didn't have one). It uses only 2 ink cartridges so their replacement should be cheaper than some other HP printers that use 6!! Automatic duplexing is a plus and non-expectant as this price. And last but not least, it's easy on the eyes though I'm afraid the white will turn to light brown over time as do most plastics this color.

Overall, this is a great value. I did the same thing that Mr. Yip did and bought it on sale at Staples (sorry, Amazon) and got [...] for my 950 for a final price of [...] + tax.

** UPDATE
I am not trying to draw business away from Amazon as it is always here where I compare online pricing to but I just visited my local Costco and found this printer for [...]. Kinda makes me regret trading in my busted printer for a measily [...] savings but it was busted anyway and I can only guess that Staples/HP would recycle it correctly. For what it's worth.

Very Unstable Drivers on Vista
So far I've had this printer almost two weeks, and I think I've finally figured out how to get it to stop crippling my system.

At first, the drivers on the CD caused my internet connection to drop every minute or so. I downloaded the latest drivers from the HP website and at first it appeared that things improved, but I discovered that the drivers caused my computer to hang after a short time and hose my system so bad it wouldn't even shut down! On one occasion of turning my computer off without shutting down, it actually messed up my operating system and I had to rebuild my machine!

I can definitively trace the problem to the HP drivers because the problems occur only after installing the drivers, the problems disappear when the drivers are uninstalled, and even on a freshly built system I experience the same issues right after installing the HP drivers!

For those stuck in a similar rut, here's the steps I've gone through after many hours of tinkering and talking with HP support to get things working (hopefully):

1. Download the latest drivers from the HP site. Version 4.42.0.0 seems to work okay.
2. Don't install the "Smart Web Printing" components (they may hang IE).
3. Give your printer a static IP address through the controls on the physical printer (you can't do it through the management software).
4. Disable the three HP-related services in services.msc.
5. DO NOT allow an automatic update installing the ~April 2008 Imaging Device Functions "critical patch" which will corrupt your system.

Other than the driver problems, the printer itself is fantastic. I've had printers hooked up to print servers before, but never an all-in-one that allowed printing, scanning AND fax-related activities over the network. The supporting software is also fantastic. Not only can you launch a scan from your network-connected computer, but you can designate that you want it in a searchable format (.pdf, .rtf, etc.) and the optical character recognition (OCR) software does a good job of recognizing text and sizing it appropriately (thus the scan is not just an image, but a document whose text you can cut/paste/etc.).

Also, apparently you have the ability to have received faxes save straight to your computer over the network instead of being printed out, the two-sided printing is better for the environment, as is the Energy Star rating which is a big plus in my book!

In short, the driver situation makes this purchase a sketchy one, at least for Vista owners, but the great features and capabilities of this printer have me hanging on instead of returning the printer hoping that HP will eventually resolve the problems.

UPDATE:
Actually, even with the above tweaks, I still exprienced problems with the drivers crashing my system (e.g. freezing after waking up from sleep mode). I even went so far as to downgrade from 64-bit to 32-bit, but my system is still dragged down by this piece of garbage and there's no ETA on an updated driver which has sat unchanged for at least three months.

Sad. It's a good product marred by awful drivers/software.

I'd take both stars away if I could.