The tragedy of the HP B9180 printer
It was the perfect printer in so many ways. Then it became the most expensive printer I ever owned.
In 2006, I bought an HP B9180 printer. It was amazing. In fact, it was a dream printer to use. It was fast and produced better results than any printer I had owned up to that point. It had nice large ink tanks that yielded a much better cost per mL of ink. Best of all, it didn’t need the kind of constant maintenance that other printers did. Instead, HP recommended leaving the printer on so that it would perform a daily head check. According to their representative, a set of cartridges would last a year and a half if all you did was let the maintenance cycle run without printing anything.
Sure enough, I could leave town for weeks at a time. Then, when returning home, I could immediately start printing and I’d get perfect prints right from the very first one. I raved about this printer — both on my blog and in person — to anybody that would listen.
Two years later, things had changed. Blobs of ink started appearing on the sides of my prints. When I opened up my printer to investigate, I found piles of ink clumped up around the slot that the printer uses to check its nozzles. As the print head moved back and forth to its parking station, it’d push the ink blobs around and push them onto the paper it was printing on. I pulled out the isopropyl alcohol and cleaned things up. A few months later, the blobs returned and I cleaned them again. Ok, so it was more maintenance than before, but the printer still turned out great results.
Then, sometime later, things went downhill, fast. The printer started consuming ink like drunk celebrity twenty-somethings consume expensive vodka. The quick nozzle check and head clean cycles started getting longer and longer, stretching up to over an hour at a time. And ink consumption went way up. A set of cartridges would only last a month or so at a time, even if my printing was light or nonexistent.
Of course this started happening not long after the warranty expired.
Investigation and feedback from several blog posts indicated that the problem was with the printer’s NEDD sensor — the device that is used to check the status of each nozzle in the print heads. With a malfunctioning sensor, the printer perpetually thought that the heads were clogged and was flushing ink through the system to try to clean things up. Instead of fail-safe, this printer’s behavior was fail-expensive.
Turning the printer off to stem the loss didn’t help much as the printer performed a full deep clean cycle on every startup. HP claimed that a cartridge should yield around 4500 4x6 photos. This translates into roughly a thousand or so letter sized prints. The last set of cartridges I installed yielded 75 pages. At $275 for a full set of 8 cartridges, the cost became prohibitive. A brand new B9180 cost about the same as two sets of cartridges.
Simple economics meant that it was time to retire the printer and move on.
In the years since then, many other people have run into the same issues and have sent email asking for help. Unfortunately, there’s only one thing to do: stop using the printer. It’s a shame. It was a great printer in every other way.