HP Color B5L25A#BGJ LaserJet Enterprise M553dn with HP FutureSmart Firmware

The product is nice, but trying to get any form of customer support is not possible and an embarrassment to a company like HP. Here is what happens when you try to ask a simple question: Go online and click the Get Support Options button. You have to choices: they would clearly like you to use Chat since it probably cheaper for them. They tell you it is faster; it is not. Enter your name and serial number and you will be placed "in queue"; 5 people are i the queue ahead of me. They tick off the queue at a rate of about 5 to 10 minutes per person. So, about half hour later, you stare at the exciting message "Waiting for technician... Position in queue: You are next". Now things slowly become worse, 10 minutes waiting, 20, 30 minutes go by, still nobody, then aha "Connected. A support representative will be with you shortly." Sounds good except no support representative ever bothers to be with me, and certainly not "shortly". We are about an hour in to this now. So lets try to call the provided 800 number: 800-3345144. Ok we know it will be "longer" to use that phone option, but we really do like our simple question answered on that $600 business enterprise printer with $1000 refills, and you would think someone at HP would care to answer the phone. No, they dont. Call the number, and you will prompted to speak the model of your printer. You would think the HP voice recognition can recognize the models of it own printers. No, it can not. It can only recognize the the numbers at the end it, not the actual models. So your LaserJet Enterprise M553 is known as 5-5-3. Dont even try to add the M to it, because they may think you bought kitchen blender. But 553 will get you through to the support person, and the system suddenly knows then that is a Laserjet M553, so that is encouraging. So are the 5 or 6 "clicks" that follow, even though reminiscent of a 1950s manual phone switchboard, one would think there is a person connecting "shortly" to answer our question. No. They just hang up the line. No "sorry", no " we are to busy", no "more than 5000 in queue ahead of you". Just hang up. Ok lets call again... same result. Call 4 more times... identical scenario. Lets check the customer support chat window that is still open. Still no one answering there either. And that is how you get a one star review on Amazon.

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Prior to buying this I asked a couple of questions (posted above), one was if this printer was as good as a color printer found in a fortune 500 marketing department. My answer is YES - the 1200x1200 DPI is *very* impressive. I was going to lay out about $300 to print up some letterhead to use with this printer, but after completing the art with Adobe Illustrator and importing it as a *.png file into a Word header and printing it on 72lb glossy paper Im knocked out. Any difference between this and professionally printed letterhead isnt worth paying for. Having printed a couple of photos I would still send out to get printed any pictures that mattered - but I think if I spent the time to figured out how to better adjust the colors even this might be not necessary much of the time. Really thin and small print is sharp and clear without any pixelization that I can see. I think 300 sheets of glossy double sided 72 lb paper was about $20 something, compared to hundreds for the same in letterhead. A great investment. I bought this really for printing marketing material and to have quality printing to send to customers - it accomplishes that with flying colors, I really couldnt be happier with this purchase.

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Great printer. Our company has purchased several of these. We have had nearly zero mechanical issues. Great color and great double sided printing. We have had almost no jams. Very reliable. The ink is way over priced and cost more than a new printer. Thats the only reason it does not deserve five stars.IMPORTANT TIP: When the printer says you are out of ink, keep printing! We get about another 2000 pages out of the ink cartridge.Come on HP.

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Fantastic printer; it replaces my HP 4000, which I had gotten used and which then gave me about 15 years of good use. This is clearly made for the office, with a large duty cycle. The speed is phenomenal, even with color images, it does duplex automatically, it does up to 1200 dpi. You can even email a document to it, and it will print it and have it ready for you! And if youve ever had an HP printer, its a breeze to set up (its even a breeze if youve never had an HP). It is huge and heavy, though -- which is both a pro and a con in my book. Sturdy build, not easy to carry, so get it where you want it and leave it there. The only other con I can think of (and you all know what Im going to say, Im sure) is the enormous cost of replacement ink cartridges. Whats good is that the cartridges are all separate, so you can buy just the one you need when you need it, but at about $250 each, the four cartridges cost you a thousand bucks, if you were to have to replace them all at one time. The yield of the high capacity cartridges is quite good though -- I believe they are rated at about 9,000 sheets each, and the printer comes with "starter cartridges" which are not full capacity, but I suspect I wont need to change them until well into 2017. There are other HPs that are a little lower in price, but it was a no-brainer to pay the extra money to get this one. If my other HPs are any example, this baby should last me a good 15 years.

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Awesome printer, super fast, easy to hook up . Prints double sided and works well when hooked up using Ethernet connection. Best printer yet. Ink is expensive but buy the 508X cartridge advertised as 12,000 copies per black cartridge. Printer does come with toner to get you started. Very happy, did a lot of research before purchasing and this is a great printer for the money. UPDATE!! 8/17/16 Great printer for any small business that prints in high volumes of documents each month. Still running strong. We get 3-4 months out of a black 508X cartridge and close to 5-6 for the Color cartridges. Would buy another to have a spare just in case, it is that good.

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This is simply the finest printer I have ever owned. It is a commercial quality printer capable of printing thousands of pages without getting tired, While it is clearly a commercial printer I can operate it in my home office (a deferential environment) without disturbing the environment. Cartridges are good for 12,000 pages (black or 9,000 (color) but are really expensive. Refills are just coming on the market which will make printing large quantities economical. This is really a good printer.

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Im not affiliated with HP, this is not paid advertising for anybody. I just wanted to give positive feedback for a product I genuinely feel deserves the good remarks. Hopefully you find this information helpful. I bought this printer as a gift for my wife, and she likes it very much, but honestly its probably over-kill for our home use. She doesnt need all the enterprise business features, but those are very much appreciated by myself, who provides technical support. I particularly appreciate the printer works with my Linux computers over the home network, and the HP admin Web UI makes management easy. The main selling point was color photo print quality of 1200 DPI, which is good enough for my family, and actually is kind-of an understatement. Totally subjective, your miles may vary, we are not professionals.... but the photo prints look really really great! The toner that comes with the printer is the "A" variety (E.G. CF360A black toner) which is the smaller capacity lower price toner cartridges you would expect to receive on a new printer. There is an "X" variety that supposedly provides higher ink capacity, which is what I bought my wife for backups toner. However, the factory toner cartridges still show 100% with our nominal usage over several months, because we dont print anywhere near this printers rated monthly capacity. The point here is there is plenty of toner available in factory new, but your miles may vary. Its hardly worth mentioning this printer has duplex printing, because of course it does as its a business class printer. That said it also prints at a fairly decent rate, the (PPM) Pages Per Minute specs that all printer makers seem to obsess over. Finally, this printer supports mobile printing from my Android device via HP mobile print services. Its not something I ever thought would be worth mentioning, but being able to make prints from phone or tablet is totally convenient, and a game changer.

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Printer worked fine for 3 1/2 months. Then it started streaking when printing. We contacted HP and found out that they will not honor the warranty. The reasoning was that it was not purchased from an authorized dealers. However, Amazon is refunding the purchase price. Pleased with Amazons swift resolution to the issue

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This worked until it didn’t, then it exploded black toner everywhere and will no longer print black after trying 3 new cartridges. Now I have a 50lb paperweight in my NYC appartment that I now need to figure out how to responsibly recycle. For the price, my home office printer should have lasted more than a couple of years of extremely light use. I wouldn’t have written a review has the phone support not been so confrontational, dismissive, and aggressively incompetent. The guy literally offered 0 troubleshooting steps, just told me I was out of warranty. Sounds like he was thinking of a familiar and common product failure and didn’t wanna waste time. Do.not.buy.

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Im very happy with the print quality of this thing. Its fast, clean, not necessarily quiet, but the print quality for the text we print is fantastic. Three stars due to the cost of genuine toner. Now the cost of ownership: HP, you should be embarrassed to sell the toner. Each high-capacity toner cartridge is around $250. With some basic math, you can see how expensive this thing is to operate when you print a high volume of black and white text pages. Had I known the cost of the genuine toner prior to purchasing (shame on me) I would have chosen a different manufacturer. I havent had the experience other folks have had with tech support but I remember the early days where HP used to CHARGE people for software drivers specifically for early model CD burners. Same old HP.

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