Matt’s Officejet 6110 scans perfectly under Ubuntu, but won’t play nice with Leopard. When Matt called HP for support, he was told that the company has no plans to issue new drivers so he should just buy a new printer. To soften the blow, the tech mentioned HP’s trade-in program, which would give Matt a whopping $16 for his printer.
He writes:
I recently ditched Windows XP at my house, and have moved to the Macintosh platform (and converted my PC machines to Ubuntu)I’ve had zero issues with the conversion, except for my HP “all in one” scanner/pc/fax machine. Although I can get it to work just fine with Ubuntu, I cannot scan from OS X Leopard.
After some googling, I contacted HP support who informed me that there are no plans to update their drivers for Leopard. This is not an old printer, I bought it 4 years ago and I’d think it’s in their best interest to support the segment of the market that’s moving to Mac.
Instead of solving my problem with a new driver, they’re trying to solve it by offering me a “trade in / trade up” program where they want me to buy a new HP printer. The only thing this will serve to do is to kill any brand loyalty I had to HP and cause me to never buy another HP product again.
I find it funny that the open source community can get scanning working just fine on Ubuntu, but a company like HP can’t tweak their drivers to get it to work on a mac. C’mon HP, get it together!!!
Here is HP’s response-cum-sales pitch:
Hello Matt,Thank you for contacting HP Total Care.
With the Officejet 6110 & the Leopard OS, you will be able to print dew to the pre-installed print driver with the OS. For scanning, there is no software and drivers that will support this. There will be no software updates for this product and the Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). We do have a program called trade in trade up. This is where you can trade the older unit in on a newer model. If you would like more information about this program, please reply to this email. Thank you
If you need further assistance, please reply to this message and we will be happy to assist you further.
You may receive an e-mail survey regarding your e-mail support experience. We would appreciate your feedback.
For information on keeping your HP and Compaq products up and running, please visit our Web site at: http://www.hp.com/go/totalcare
Sincerely,
Scott W.
HP Total Care
Matt might want to tinker with unsupported solutions. Try using drivers that aren’t necessarily intended for the old Officejet.
Can anyone think of a way to translate the scanner’s outdated language for Leopard? Suggestions in the comments.
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@Michael Belisle:
@Trai_Dep: Oh I did that once. I plugged a Windows 2000 machine into the internet once, intending to then patch it and install anti-virus software. Hilariousness ensued when I caught a virus-installing-worm before Windows Update had a chance.
Gave the machine its last rites a few hours later.
Ouch!
Well, your lil’ lab mouse died in the pursuit of knowledge, so I guess it was noble?
Lasers rule. I bought a Lexmark E310 back in 1999 and it still works great on OS X 10.5 and Vista. Lexmark has excellent driver support and supports pretty much anything from Win98 to Vista to Linux. You can get refurb’d toner cartridges online for about $30 that last for 5000 pages.
I’m an old hand on *nix. Have him check out the SANE drivers and installing that particular scanner layer for Leopard. It should work just like Linux. A host of the packages are available through MacPorts.
@Cullen D: Driver layer APIs and ABIs change from version to version. Linux doesn’t usually have this problem, as we’ve been on the 2.6 kernel there for years. If a 2.8 kernel were to happen, every last one of those drivers would be broken most likely.
Snoop-blog smells of Troll.
I fail to understand how anyone can be blaming Apple for HP’s lack of support. Is anyone in this thread remembering that Vista doesn’t support a great deal of hardware as old (and in many cases, newer!) then the OP’s problematic printer.
The inevitable PC-Vs-Mac only serves to make those who participate in it look silly as a result – this has nothing to do with with the OS, it has to do with HP’s “We don’t care, buy something else from us to solve the problem instead” attitude.
On the original topic, I’d tell HP to get stuffed and go buy a competitors product. I prefer Epson, personally, and have had an excellent experience with all their gear, including a 7 year old Epson 880 inkjet that still runs perfectly to this day – I just ran 20 pages off it a few hours ago.
I don’t blame HP for not wanting to support that OS. Next thing, we’ll see a complaint on here about how HP isn’t supporting BeOS!!!
I have the same issue with a office jet 5510xi. HP Sucks!
As someone else mentioned, HP has a real attraction to Windows, Windows, and only Windows.
Everyone else who doesn’t want to be on the Windows train can go screw themselves, so far as HP is concerned.
I’m not sure that Matt was given the correct information. Just before Leopard was released, I bought an HP 5610 multifunction printer. It took about a month, but new software was released. While I was waiting for the new drivers, only printing was available. Now I can print, scan, fax and OCR again. Matt should check again online to see if there is a new version of software for his printer or a similar printer.
Can’t feel sorry for this guy.
It’s so stupid when people think they are being screwed because some company isn’t going to take care of their 1 in a million problem.
I worked at a hardware store 15 years ago. This cheap f**k comes in with a light socket. A light socket. It wasn’t working. It’s all one piece, sealed. I could have sold him one for 5 dollars. But he wanted me to see if I could fix it for him. Can you imagine? I told him absolutely not. Is that bad customer service? Maybe he could come on here, to Consumerist, and whine about how bad customer service is at Such’n'such Hardware because the dumb employees there who make 4 dollars an hour won’t spend 30 minutes to take apart their 5 dollar light socket and try to fix it for them so they can avoid spending 5 dollars to buy a new one.
Printers are so cheap these days. And I don’t expect HP to make new drivers for every new operating system for ever printer they’ve ever made, forever.
This guy spends 300 dollars or something four years ago and continues to expect HP to support him? You updated to the newest operating system? Throw HP a bone and get a new printer to go with it.
Not a single tear. HP rocks. So do their RPN calculators and their market dominating laser printers.
Bad company? Bad consumer.
I have a similar story, I bought a lexmark printer about 2 years ago (the x2400 series all in one) the website at the time listed it as OS X compatible which was important because I had plans to buy a mac. About a year later I bought my Mac, plugged up the printer, no go, I go to the website, it still was listed as mac compatible, but their were no drivers to be found. When I contacted customer service, they said the only solution was for me to buy another model. My solution, I wrote a program on my windows machine that monitors a special email account, when I receive emails with a specific title, it downloads and prints the attachment. Annoying, but it works.
Im going to disagree that a 4 year old Officejet multifunction would be old. In fact looking at HP’s track record on multifunction officejets, they seem to come up with new models each year. While nice to have a multifunction, HP really needs to step up the game and think about unifying their support, it cant be easy to have 30 models with different driver supports. Oh wait, thats how they get you to upgrade. Slimy…
1. They have horrible driver suppport
2. Drive install of over 350 megs on some models.
3. Missing barebone driver install’s.
BTW, I use a 7310xi officejet, had a laserjet, broke after a year. That was an expensive one.
This is why I only buy products with open source drivers (even if the open source is based on reverse engineering, as long as it exists).
Lucky for you, your scanner is supported by sane. I have no clue how to install the OS X port of sane, but here’s some links:
[www.sane-project.org]
For the printer half of it, you’ll need to use cups + hpijs.
[www.linux-foundation.org]
Not using commercial drivers might take some getting used to, but it will save you tons of money. I now use my hardware until it either breaks down (and I can’t repair it myself) or it physically just can’t do anything useful for me anymore.
dew to? wow. heck yes for outsourced help.
i dont think it’s outrageous for hp not to support the printer. it is simply not practical for a manufacturer to update every driver ever made for every machine ever made whenever a new op. system is released.
it’s like buying a car that runs on gasoline, then they change the official fuel to water. are you going to expect ford, chevy, honda and toyota to step in and re-make your car to run on water? Nope, you’ll have to buy a new car or stick with gas.
just someone else crying when they dont get their own way. i guess if our economy was in better shape (so we could all afford to go buy new printers) we wouldnt take it so personally.
Last thing… Staples is currently offering an HP trade-in deal, where you can get $50 off a new HP printer (normally valued at more than $160) for bringing in a used HP printer… So go trade your printer for a new one… pay $110 for one that should cost $160.
As someone who’s had to return two HP computers in the past year to the store in which they were bought because they utterly failed, I say that Matt should forget HP and move on to a better hardware manufacturer.
I’d check to see if the open source driver can be compiled to run on OS X. Mac OS X uses CUPS, if that is used to manage printing in Unbuntu, it may be possible to recompile the printer driver.
@randombob:
I know you can’t sway you Apple Fanboys
but FYI,
apple has less then 10% of the market share, hince why no hackers give a crap about it (no corp uses apple servers for there systems, they don’t allow enough propriatary customization). Also the majorty of the apple market is designers/artists…systems that Virus writers have no need to cripple (whats would be the gain from that) So should HP invest in less then 10% of the market…umm..no
Apple copied FREE BSOD…APPLE AND WINDOWS Copied Xeorx star, windows did not copy apple so don’t go spewing that garbage
most apple for life users hate windows because they can’t figure it out.
agreed with everyone who said this guy should have done his research…HP doesn’t owe him a driver…if he wants the printer to work, he should write it himself.
HP always sucks, they have been living off of a name they established in the late 80s/early 90s, but their products have been sub-par for a long time. Samsung, Canon, Epson, Lexmark, Brother are all cheaper and just as good generally, if not better.
And the whole lack of being profitable argument? That just means that they don’t actually invest in customer service.
Plus it is just wasteful to throw out stuff like that. I know that most tech geeks are avaricious consumers, but it is not like there has been significant progress in multifunction printers for a long time.
So HP never claimed to support that version OS for that printer, and the consumer here obviously never did their homework before assuming everything they owned would ‘just work’, and this is HP’s fault how?
While I do agree that HP sucks – proud owner of a Canon MP970 – this complaint is BS. Get a better printer and do your homework next time before switching to a new OS.
The OP is completely wrong on this one for several reasons. But you can tell that he knows nothing about computers by the simple fact that he was dumb enough to buy a Mac. Macs are ONLY for grandparents who are not tech-savvy enough to use a real computer. Macs are designed to be pretty, and appeal to the “dumb” or “computer illiterate” in our society. If you are over 8 or under 80, you should not buy a Mac – they’re toys. Macs are not computers. They are the Fisher Price version of a real machine. People who want to DO things don’t buy Macs. Why do they even make printers for Macs? It’s ironic really. Macs are for web surfing only. That’s ALL they can do.
@Atomike: What sorts of things? Oh please do elaborate. I want to know what I’m missing.
@realist.com: Please tell someone who cares. HP does support the Mac, so you’ll need to present your data to them, and convince them why they shouldn’t. Good luck!
HP did the same to me! They haven’t released any Leopard drivers for my 10 year old Office Jet 630. Not only that, but I’m having a hell of a time trying to plug the parallel printer cable into the little USB port on my MacBook Pro.
Seriously guy, what do you do for a living? If someone who bought a service or product from your 4 years ago came to you and expected some extra product or service from you — without expecting to contribute any extra revenue to you — what would you say to them. You might argue that a 4 year old consumer grade multi-function device isn’t old, but even business office equipment is going to be either fully depreciated, or close to it, at the point.
HP haven’t orphaned you — you have the ability to print. But the fax and scan capability likely require a whole new effort under OSX 10.5, efforts which don’t come free from a commercial company.
If you want free, realize that *YOU* are part of the free open source community — start digging through the options to scanning with your old device on OS X Leopard, figure out a solution, and then freely contribute your work back to others with the same problem. C’mon, get it together!
(Personally, if Ubuntu works so great for scanning, I’d just run it on your Mac in a virtual machine with USB support when you need to scan. Either that, or Freecycle your old device to someone who’s still happy running an older supported platform.)
You know….the thought just occurred to me that perhaps he could have considered looking for a driver before making the switch?
@Mr. Gunn: The thought occurred to a lot of people here, who decided that 2004 is the stone age and apparently enjoy throwing out their equipment every 4 years.
Let’s say he did. He would have found the following info:
He might have continued reading, and seen a little elaboration on the problem
He then might have looked at the installer version and seen “Yup, sure enough, it’s VISE v2.0″ and then thought, “But it’s March. Where the is the promised update that was due 2 months ago? Maybe HP has an answer.”
Considering the Troll/Comment ratio here, Consumerist, can we please implement a Vote The Troll flag? YouTube has a nice solution: you can set the number of Troll Flags that you’re okay with wading thru. Anything above that number and comment is collapsed. Thus, everyone’s happy. Except the Trolls, who are ignored by people interested in on-topic conversations.
Or, create a poll and ask your readers if they’d like such a feature added. Bet it’d generate a HUGE number of comments (wink, wink, nudge).
@realist.com: yes, you’re right I was just so computer illiterate that I just had to buy apple. They say apple lovers are on a High horse and you just stop short of calling all apple users idiots. Please choke on the irony while I go use my intuitive and well made OS. Oh why am I trying I know I can’t sway you microsoft fanatics.
this same thing happened to me. i hate HP. i now have a big fax-scanner-copier-printer that only prints.
@Trai_Dep: Send an email to Ben. If there was a troll button, I would have clicked it here (nothing personal, but it’s a request that’s way off topic). It’s a good idea.
My, how times change.
Years ago, I went looking for a printer-scanner-copier. HP was tops on my list because I knew there was lots of linux support. I bought a PSC, hooked it up and haven’t had a problem since.
When I went shopping, people told me not to expect ANY linux support.
Now we’re years down the line and the next generation is complaining about lack of support for his OS.
Even if I hadn’t read the replies, they’d invariably fall into one of four categories:
[Abuse] Don’t be such a crybaby.
[Correction] This is why you’re wrong.
[Abusive Correction] This is why you’re wrong, Whiner.
[Snarky] Get a real OS.
My instinct is to agree with Correction, nullifying my reason for posting. But the internal voices are all chanting Snarky SNARKY!
I felt your pain, guy.
(I think this is irony.)
The final category is Religious. “God wants you to use Ubuntu on ALL of your machines.”
Why would you run an HP printer with anything besides an HP computer?
This happened to a lot of people switching to Vista as well. I was helping out a person who had to upgrade his printer for that very same reason. The real problem is being an early adopter of Tech. If you need to be on the cutting edge than sometimes you have to upgrade your hardware. This seems no different than needing to buy a newer computer for the latest OS. Seems reasonable to me.
If the box and system requirements said that it supported Leopard and it didn’t then you’d have a legitimate gripe but it didn’t. You bought a printer that was advertised to work with specific operating systems and it does in fact work fine with those operating systems. You made an conscious decision to upgrade to an unsupported OS. This isn’t HP’s fault.
I feel Matt’s pain.
I bought a Mac last week, and it doesn’t support my parallel port IBM plotter, my serial port 2400bps US Robotics modem, my microchannel Ad Lib sound card, or my external SCSI Iomega Jaz drive.
Seriously, Matt. Welcome to the wonderful world of technology. We can’t move forward if tech companies have to waste resources supporting old technology indefinitely. Your printer is old by modern standards, you’re probably lucky that HP still makes ink cartridges that fit it.
HP has become one sucky printer maker. It has nothing to do with Leopard. I had trouble getting my AIO to work when I bought it as part of an new Apple computer/HP printer deal!!! The current version of the aIO SW they have finally seemed to fix everything. But add this to their planned inks turning themselves off, it’s just another example of how crappy they are!
@JohnnyE: @Andy S.: Why is it necessary to exaggerate the age of Matt’s printer? Why don’t you compare to how “your” 4-year-old Logitech V470M Bluetooth mouse isn’t supported? Or your 5-year-old HP 2400 USB scanner?
Oh wait, I checked and they are. Do you know why? Because they’re not 10-15 years old like your idiotic examples.
@Michael Belisle: Ironic, huh?
Will do, thanks!
And, HP could easily create a generic driver w/ 80% of the functionality, that would assuage people in this situation. Or a driver that accepts some type of control variables/scripts that the hacker kiddies could play with to reach a minimal (again, not optimal) level.
It’s incredibly wasteful to throw away a 4-year-old toxic box simply because HP is unwilling to meet their customers’ needs halfway. Ironic, since HP sees little profit on their printers – it’s the ink that’s their cash cow, so it’d HELP their bottom line.
HP is doing the same thing with Vista. Our Designjet 130 is less than 2 years old and we’re SOL on a new driver.
Sure, I’ll buy a new printer, but you can be damn sure it won’t be a HP.
@shocker: [h20000.www2.hp.com] ? It looks like one was released Feb. 13. They’re still selling the Design Jet 130, so it’d surprise me if they really had no plans to support Vista.
@lifeofbean: Hey, I had one of those as well – bought in ’91 or ’92. Even dropped the extra $$ for the RAM upgrade. Served me well until an interface error repair far exceeded the value. Still have fond memories though…
@fluiddruid: It actually has nothing to do with marketshare. It has everything to do with the adversarial relationship that M$ has created within the marketplace. People (and by people I mean hackers) just like to screw with the CRAP that M$ puts out.
HP doesn’t have a scanner driver for my Laserjet 3030 under Windows Vista, but Vista doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. I have no room to bitch to HP though, I saved it from the dumpster. In any event the printer will work fine at the very least.
Seriously though, 4 years old for an Inkjet is IMPOSSIBLY old. However on the larger laser printers that’s still new. I work on Lexmarks every day that were manufactured last century. Alot of large corps get the printer and service for free and just buy toner.
@ChewySquirrel: It’s the printer that doesn’t work. It’s not the operating system. Nice way to try to spin it, though.
Also? Here’s what I do when I buy a printer: I find the one with the least expensive cartridges, then I buy that one. I’d rather spend more money up front on a printer and less money on the ink refills.
I’ve never been let down with Canon. HP pretty much sucks, as does Lexmark and Epson. I’ve never been more disappointed with a product than my old Epson all-in-one. SUCK!
@Atomike: I was going to write you an angry email, but I’m on a Mac so all I can do is read your comment and fume.
*le sigh*
As if I needed another reason to not buy HP products
@Theoutlet: I prefer freeDOS
@SacraBos:
That’s exactly the problem… HP’s bullcrap inkjet line doesn’t understand PCL or PS. All it speaks is HP binary gobbledygook. So you need a special driver to talk to it, that changes every time they increment the model number by 1 or 2 numbers. No wonder they can’t keep up with new OS’s, when they “replace” each model in their line several times a year with a printer that looks slightly different, has all the same features but takes a slightly different ink cartridge and speaks a slightly different dialect of suck printer-language.
The solution is don’t buy inkjet, especially not from HP. Last HP multifunction I had on my Mac still didn’t have Universal printer drivers. And all the HP crap that you have to install on your computer is running in Rosetta all day long (not just when you’re printing).
I switched to Canon for color multifunction devices, and their driver was beautiful in its simplicity and speed, and was fully Intel native, and didn’t look like a crappily ported OS9 app the way HP’s always do.
But if you need some sort of office-grade multifunction device, one word for you my friend, Brother Brother Brother. actually two words: Brother Laser. They are incredibly affordable (maybe 200 bucks or so for the MFC-7820N, even less refurbished), speak PCL AND Postscript, come networked so you don’t need to worry about lame USB driver crap (like Windows installing a second “printer” if you plug into a different port). Over the network, you can print to it as an IP printer like an HP JetDirect, using LPR like Unix prefers, just use its built-in Bonjour to just detect and install it on a Mac… I could go on and on. It’s about a 50 times better than anything HP makes for less than $1,000. Oh, and the (third-party) toner cartridges can be had for about $30 bucks.
I don’t work for Brother, but I have purchased 4 of them so far at my office. We haven’t bought an HP anything in quite a while.
@Theoutlet: Agree … this is HP’s business choice, way to ensure continued brand loyalty. I find it interesting that HP takes this stance, and yet it is a perennial partner with Apple in the seasonal “buy a new notebook/desktop and get $100 rebate for a [usually HP] printer of your choice.
It makes me scratch my head, sometimes, on just how Mr. Jobs chooses his marketing partners … still wondering what the braintrust’s reaction was to AT&T telling iPhone users in essence, tough luck, we don’t support Safari for online bill management (big oopsie, dissing the company that gave you exclusive service rights for iPhone, WTG, guys).
@ OP: Just got a software update notice yesterday that new drivers were available for the HP printers/scanners I’ve used — could be any/all of the 3-5 different HPs of various ages I’ve used in the last month, including a 6-year-old dinosaur. Might be worth your checking it out. Good luck.