HP 4315 Printer Review

I own an HP 4315 printer. Overall, I am mostly satisfied. In retrospect, I should have bought one of the higher-tier printers. The HP 4315 is a combination printer/scanner/photocopier/fax. I've only used the "printer" and "photocopier" features.

It has better resolution than the HP inkjet printer I bought in 1999. Moore's law applies to printers as well as computers.

The ink cartridges run out surprisingly fast. I haven't had that problem with other printers. I've started tracking how many pages I get per cartridge.

There's a feature where it displays how much ink is left in the cartridge. It's useless. Wait until print quality starts to deteriorate, rather than looking at that display.

There's a weird bug where it sometimes gets stuck in "Fax" mode and you're unable to print. Rebooting my PC and printer seems to fix it. Literally, I shut down my PC, turn off my power supply, and then restart. I have no idea if it's a Vista/driver bug or a printer bug. Unplugging just the printer doesn't fix the problem. Just rebooting my PC doesn't fix the problem. I have to power cycle both. It freaked me out the first time that bug occurred. Now, I know "**** this! I have to reboot!"

It has a photocopy/scanner feature. However, you have to spool the pages. If you want to photocopy something like an ID card, you can't do it on the printer. In retrospect, I should have bought one of the more expensive models, where the scanner had a tray like a photocopier.

Overall, it's a "good enough" printer, especially for the price I paid. In retrospect, I should have gotten one of the higher-end models that allows me to photocopy ID cards and not just paper. If you're shopping around for a printer, I still advise to buy HP, but get a better model than the HP 4315.