Buyer beware: Printronix printers

A few months ago, I became fed up with my HP M479fdw laser printer. There were a lot of things about it that irritated me, but the last straw was when I discovered printing graphics-heavy output onto card stock yielded a printed image a half inch shorter than it should have been, making it impossible to use the printer to for graphics-heavy business cards, which I needed.

I did some research into the cause of this problem, and as far as I could tell the only fix was to buy a printer with a straight paper path, i.e., the card stock needed to go in one side of the printer and out the other rather than being curled back and coming out the side it entered on. Alas, straight paper paths are not a feature of most cheap or even expensive laser printers; they’re pretty much exclusive to Very Expensive printers, certainly more than I could afford, with one exception: the Printronix LP654C printer.

I’d never heard of Printronix before, but I did what research I could to vet the company and its printers, and they seemed fine, so I decided to go ahead and buy one.

If you want to read the whole saga of what happened after it arrived, read on past this paragraph, but allow me to summarize in case you’re not that interested: the printer was terrible, the company was unable to resolve any of the issues with it, I ended up returning it for a full refund (part of which I was only able to obtain via a credit card dispute), and I discourage anyone who stumbles across this blog posting from doing business with this company. I didn’t think a printer company could annoy me more than HP does nowadays, but Printronix succeeded.

Things started to go down-hill with the printer shortly after it arrived. I ended up encountering a whole litany of problems with it, enough that I ended up returning it on the grounds that the printer was grossly defective. I asked for a full refund including shipping costs; they refused to refund the shipping costs because of “company policy,” which I addressed by successfully disputing the full amount on my credit card after I warned Printronix that I was going to do that and they still refused to refund the shipping costs.

Here are the biggest issues I encountered. Either of these by itself would have been enough to demand that Printronix take the printer back for a full refund:

• The printer would occasionally simply fall off WiFi and refuse to reconnect. Even when I went through the laborious process of navigating its control panel menus to tell it to connect, it refused. The only way to get it to reconnect was a restart. A printer which, unlike every other networked device I own, cannot stay connected to the network, is grossly defective and useless to me.
• The company had no mechanism for distributing firmware upgrades and no mechanism for customers to check for available firmware upgrades. The online manual claimed that firmware upgrade software was included with the printer, but that was simply a lie (the company informed me only after I bought the printer that the manual was wrong and they were going to update it to remove that section, and issue they were apparently unaware of until I brought it to their attention!). This makes the printer grossly defective because every printer has bugs and security holes in its firmware and if there’s no way to distribute firmware upgrades then there’s no way for the company to patch them.

I encountered numerous additional issues that were less severe, as described below. I interacted extensively with the company while attempting to get these two major issues and the others resolved. While doing so two things became clear to me:

I want to give several examples to justify point 2 above:

• Shortly after the printer arrived I emailed Printronix’s support team five technical questions about issues I’d encountered with the printer. The response I received literally did not answer a single one of my questions.
• One of the people at Printronix I emailed back and forth with had an email address link in their email signature, but when you clicked on it you ended up sending email to a different person, i.e., the text displayed for the email link and the actual link were for different email addresses.
• This same individual had a graphical banner in their signature telling me to “Visit http:/Printronix.com”, which has two errors: “http” instead of “https” and one slash instead of two.
• The printer was shipped to me in two boxes, one for the auxiliary paper tray I bought and one for the printer itself. When they agreed to take it back, they asked me to ship it back in the original boxes. Then they only sent me one return shipping label.
• During much of my interaction with the company’s supposed technical experts it became clear to me that I knew more about laser printers than they did.
• There is a driver / documentation download page for the printer on the Printronix website, and literally every time I visited that page it displayed a pop-up forcing me to enter my contact information to access the downloads. It shouldn’t do that at all, but leaving that aside, it should at least save a cookie in the user’s browser so they don’t have to respond to that pop-up over and over and over again.

Here are the other problems I encountered, in no particular order, in case you’re curious:

• The printer’s administrative user interface, both the control panel on the printer itself and the integrated web server, are absolutely terrible.
• With most printers nowadays, you select the paper type and weight at the same time, e.g., when you select “Labels” or “Card stock” as the paper type, the printer knows what weight to associate with your selection. This printer, however, requires you to select the paper type and weight separately. I would consider this acceptable if, whenever you changed the paper type, the printer automatically prompted you to change the weight and told you which of the available choices were valid for the specified type.
• They claim the printer supports Linux, but the Linux PPD file they distribute is a PostScript driver rather than a PCL6 driver, and as as result jobs printed from Linux are about ten times as slow as jobs printed from Windows or macOS.
• If I recall correctly, this printer claims to support Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), but its implementation is apparently buggy and non-interoperable with CUPS, so I was unable to configure it as a driverless printer as CUPS prefers.
• In addition to the manual falsely claiming that a tool for firmware upgrades was included with the printer, the manual also falsely claimed that there was an app in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store for mobile printing to this printer, and that app simply doesn’t exist.
• When I attempted to connect the printer to WiFi, it displayed my WiFi network name four times, presumably because because I have two access points and each supports both 2.4GHz and 5Ghz. But all it displayed for each of these was the name, so I couldn’t tell whether I was telling it to connect to the right frequency or the right access point. But of course even that’s not the right answer, because what it should do is what pretty much every other WiFi-enabled device does: display the network name just once and then automatically choose the network with the strongest signal matching that name.
• When WiFi is being used instead of a wired internet connection, the admin web server displays the wrong IP address for the printer. It displays the (bogus) IP address for the disconnected wired ethernet instead of the address for the connected WiFi.

#printers #Printronix