My parents needed a new printer, and after some research I decided to recommend them an HP OfficeJet Pro 8000. Today I gave it a try, by printing some CD covers for a CD to give away for christmas to some friends.

HP failed in a very subtle way: I had printed the covers, cut them, produced the CDs for them. Then I wanted to put the printed covers into the CD cases.

Despite the graphics being 12cm x 12cm in size, HP managed to print them in 12cm x 11.4cm. Without any notice (or giving me a choice) it had decided to scale them on the y axis. Which makes them completely unusable, since they don't fit the 12cm height of the CD case now.

After some more experiments, I decided to retry without duplex, and voila: 12cm x 12cm.

Duplex on HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 is only usable for draft printing, since it will distort your pages!

(See also this devidence in the HP forums, of people with the same issue, an attempt to investigate the margin messup happening, a report that the DJ990c driver can print duplex on this printer without messing with the margins, but is slower and offers less print quality. So it seems that this is an HP driver problem. And technically, it must be caused by the driver; at least it should be able to compensate for this!)

I also noticed another issue with the print. The bottom right corner of the graphic didn't get enough ink, it looks like the printer stopped printing a bit too early. I don't know if this also happens in non-duplex, since I worked around this by adding a header and footer to the page.

Seriously, we should send back the printer. On my first try to use it, I already encountered two bugs. I wonder how many bugs I would see if I'd use it every day?