HP PageWide Pro 577dw Color Multifunction Business Printer with Wireless & Duplex Printing (D3Q21A)

This printer has absolutely exceeded my expectations. I run a business that requires me to send out about 600-1000 marketing letters at the end of each week. Every letter has a high quality letterhead that always seemed to loose a lot of quality when printed on a laser printer. I ended up having to print 600 letters on a general all purpose inkjet printer each week so that my logo and letterhead design would look sharp and stand out. Needless to say, a general inkjet printer takes forever to print that many letters and I ended up having to keep many ink cartridges on standby because it seemed like I ran out in the middle of getting the letters printed every time. This printer gives the best of both worlds. It has the speed of a laser printer and the vivid, accurate color printing of an inkjet.PROS:Very fast printing. Even when set at the highest speed, print quality is still acceptable for use on documents within the office. The second fastest speed, which is still very fast, works perfect for marketing letters since it seems to not loose any quality in the logo and the text is still dark and crisp.Scanner works great. The scanner scans quickly, even when the unit is connected to a wireless network. Wireless networks and scanning has seemed to always come with frustration in the past. The scanner that was replaced with this one would generally scan half a document and then stop for a couple of seconds before proceeding. I assumed it was having trouble sending the data through the network to my computer since it did not do this when connected via USB. That problem no longer exists and I have the added benefit of scanning both sides of documents simultaneously. I do a lot of scanning so this feature comes in very handy.Ink cartridges are large. I no longer have to keep a big supply of individual cartridges since the ones for this printer last a significant amount of time. I have printed more than 3000 letters with black text that extends 3/4 to 4/5 of the page with each letter having a color letterhead and footer. Additionally, I have printed just as many envelopes as letters. Each envelope contained the general address block with black text and a full color return block that includes the company logo. The color cartridges barely register a loss and I have just now received a notice of the black cartridge being low. I would say that this is not too shabby being that these are the ones the printer came with.The unit is compact. I expected this unit to be a bit bigger than my Brother laser printer. It is about the same size, maybe a little smaller. This unit, however, holds more paper.Printer has a good look to it.Sturdy. This printer is built solid. No component of it feels flimsy or as if it might fall off after too much use. All doors and trays close tightly, feel secure and does not rattle during printing.Low noise. This printer definitely prints quieter than a typical laser printer although it is a bit louder than a general inkjet. The part that makes the most noise with this unit seems to be the gears/wheels that eject the finished print. I believe that the speed in which these must turn in order to print as fast as it does is what makes them louder than that of a general inkjet. Laser printers have a high rpm fan to keep them cool while printing which typically emits a high pitched whine. Inkjets do not require these types of fans which makes this one quieter than a laser printer.Lower power usage. Laser printers draw a lot more power. I do not have any technical jargon to throw out to you on this, but I do have my own personal observations. Whenever I used my laser printer, the moment it powered up to start printing it would draw so much power that the light in my home office would dim for just a moment. Kinda like when you turn on a vacuum cleaner. This does not happen with the HP Pagewide.Nice touch screen. The screen is large and well lit. It also has an adjustable tilt so that it can be positioned to your needs. The screen registers quickly when an icon is touched and I have noticed zero lag or issues when having to navigate around in the menus.CONS:Catch tray does not hold enough finished prints. I really love the fact that this printer can be loaded with 500 pieces of paper. It cannot print all 500 without stopping though. You have to keep an eye on the catch tray and remove what has been printed after about 300 pages. It would be nice to not have to keep an eye on it. I would prefer to remove 500 pages from the catch tray when the time comes to reload it with another 500 pieces of paper. Having the ability to load it up with 500 pages but only be able to print 300 at a time does not make sense to me.Significant slow down while printing duplex. Logic says that this is inevitable since the page is printed, drawn back into the printer and printed on again. Duplex printing just seems to be slower than it should be. The first side of the paper seems to print in half the speed even before the sheet is drawn back in to be printed on the reverse side. I do believe my old laser printer has faster duplex printing even though it is far slower on single side prints.Cannot be loaded with 30 envelopes and routinely indicates a jam when it gets to the last envelope. The unit says that this can be loaded with up to 30 envelopes. Although it will print if you do, it seems that the first 4-5 envelopes will not feed correctly and causes the address and return blocks to be printed at an angle or have a small part of the return block printed off the top of the envelope. Putting in no more than 20 seems to work a lot better and will print without issues, for the most part. The other problem it has with envelopes seems to be when the last envelope is picked up and printed. I would says that about 25% of the time, the last envelope gets printed but the machine stops and reports a jam. I have to open the side panel and retrieve the correctly printed envelope. The "jammed" envelope is always in perfect condition and correctly printed. After clearing the "jam" and reloading the tray, I then have to wait for it to pick up a new envelope and pass it through the printer, unprinted, before it starts printing envelopes again.Does not give much details about what is printing. My older canon inkjet tells me what page it is on while printing, the real-time ink details, how many pages are left and an abundance of other information. This printer does not do that. When you click to see the details of what is printing, it just simply opens the default windows printing window. It just shows that something is printing and gives you the option to restart, cancel or clear. I expected more. Information like this is very useful when I am trying to print 500 envelopes and I am curious to know how many envelopes are left to be printed.The tray will not always lower when you need to load more paper or envelopes. When you pull out the paper tray, there is a metal bracket that lowers down to the bottom. After refilling and closing the tray, this bracket raises the paper up into position so that it can be fed into the printer. This bracket does not always lower and you cannot load paper into it unless it does. To remedy this, you have to close and then re-open the tray until it lowers.Looses connection to my computer after being unplugged. If the power goes out or I need to unplug the printer, I have to go into the software on my computer and tell the software the new IP of the printer. Not a big problem, but can be annoying when you have multiple computers that need to connect to it.Does not make use of 802.11AC. This printer will not connect to a 5Ghz connection. If you are using an 802.11 AC router like I am, you have to enable dual band and allow connections on the 2.4Ghz connection. Speed and functionality of the printer would be unlikely to improve using the 5Ghz connection but it would be nice for all of my devices to be able to connect to the router the same way so that I do not have to broadcast both a 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz signal with my router. I have only one device, including all cell phones, tablets and laptops that have to connect using 2.4 and that is this printer.

This replaced another HP Pagewide of 7 years. The previous one worked OKAY not great. We liked it because it had laser printer speeds with inkjet quality for color. But the reliability was bad and had to be babysat to coax anything out of it. It finally broke when something inside that sounded like it wanted to be lifted could not, and not even my technically gifted son could fix it after many tutorials. It was always a nag for expensive HP toner but operated with 3rd party after some encouragement.This successor, which looked largely the same with a few cosmetic differences, OTOH had ALL THE DOWNSIDES x 100 and none of the upsides. Owned it for 5 years, NAG NAG NAG. Never operational. Spit out even HP toner. Always asks for new toner despite not printing 10% of the pages the toner is supposed to and cartridges really full.I have a b/w brother that's a tank with none of this drama and replaced the color service with an Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 which has been awesome and far better quality than the Pagewide despite no Pagewide technology and being cheaper.I will NEVER buy an HP anything again. Carly Fiorina and executive bots like her have destroyed a once great company. We had HP in the 80s and it was great. Modern day HP is a dumpster fire and produces dumpster fire products to scam customers out of money.If anyone needs a "free" Pagewide and is in the area, hit me up. I hate this thing. It's still "functional" as the day it came from the factory, which is to say "Not very much, except by design to swallow cartridges and $$$$". Yup, after paying $900 for it I'm just going to junk it, even a set of 3rd party cartridges are $170 at least and that is too much to swallow to keep this piece of junk working churning out substandard results.

This is the best printer on the market today for the money whether you have a small home office or a mid sized company. I was a little concerned by some of the reviews stating this printer is hard to set up. We have no "IT Department" as we planned to use this printer for my husband's home based business. But after analyzing the whole printer marketplace, this HP PageWide had the most features for the best price. So here is the deal-- you don't need an IT department to set this printer up. You just need some common sense. The printer comes with disks for the printer driver. Depending on what version windows you are running, you most likely will need to update the print drivers online. If you don't know how to do this or are having problems setting up the printer, simply call HP Printer Tech Support at 1-800-334-5144. You will need to give them the model, which is PageWide 577, and your Serial # on the printer which can be found on the back of the printer. The support is free since the printer is new. We are running Windows 7 Ultimate on a local network and hooked up the printer wireless. The HP Tech Support Rep was very helpful. The Tech Rep loaded a different HP Printer Driver onto our computer and everything works perfectly -- the printer, the copier, the scanner, and the fax. Also, if you lose power in your business or house, the printer will quit working because it changes the IP address. If after a power outage you can not get your printer to work, simply call the Tech Support line. They will help you reset your IP address for the printer and make it permanent so should you lose power again, you won't have to reset. So bottom line, even if you are a computer novice, like us, with a simple call into HP Support, you will have your state-of-the-art printer up and running. Best of all, they answer the HP Tech Support line very quickly and the agents are extremely nice. Our last HP printer lasted for over 10 years. We are very happy with this new model.