HP Officejet Pro K5400 is so noisy and bulky

My colleague is an expert in shopping for discounted gadgets. Not too long ago he got himself a Dell Vostro 1400 with some freebies thrown in after some sweet talk with the salesperson. This time he managed to get a brand new HP Officejet Pro K5400 at a good bargain.

HP Officejet printer

No, he didn’t get it from Digital Mall, but he went to his usual hideout at Low Yat Plaza. At Mid Valley this officejet is retailed at RM699, but at his hideout at Low Yat, his special price was at RM625 only. What a good deal I must say!

Below was the conversation with my colleague when I saw the new printer in office today:

Me: Wow, new printer huh? Looks kinda cool. How much was it?

Larry: RM625 at Low Yat. At Mid Valley they sell this at RM699 without discount. Anyway, I have to pay RM5 because I paid by credit card.

Me: Was it the cheapest there?

Larry: I did not shop around in Low Yat, just bought straight from MTCS, the HP Reseller. Did not bother to shop around coz so much cheaper than Mid Valley already. Did not check out Canon or Epson also since there was so much hype on this HP printer. It’s supposed to be laser quality and can cope with large volume printing. I was told ink can last for 2500 sheets!

Me: I see. How was Low Yat? Any pretty chicks? Hehe…

Larry: Traffic getting there and into the car park sucks as usual. No pretty chicks on that day coz I took the lift straight up from car park and straight down after buying. The guy delivered the box to my car using a trolley… no need to lift a finger 🙂 Shopping all done within 20 minutes. Will need to go back another day to focus on the chicks.

Printer accessories

The accessories that came with the printer were pretty basic, consist of a network cable, a USB cable, a couple of CDs, some ink cartridges, two print heads, and a very simple 6-step setup guide. Indeed, I followed the 6-step setup guide and the printer was all setup and running on our LAN within 20 minutes.

HP color printer

The setting up basically involved inserting the 3 ink cartridges, as well as the 2 print heads. After that I simply popped the CD-ROM into my computer and run the setup routine which successfully detected the new device in the network and assign it an IP address.

Just when I thought everything was completed and ready to use the new printer… another 45 minutes was spent trying to figure out what on earth was the printer doing producing such noisy sound… it was like the printer was trying to adjust its print head or something… the motor was very noisy. On my first couple of attempts trying to print a test page, the printer didn’t print anything other than making the annoying motor sound. After a few times turning off and turning on again only I managed to print a test page… but not without a piece of additional test page with weird characters.

HP Officejet Pro K5400

My quick test also revealed that the ink smudges. Not sure if this was caused by our ordinary A4 paper though… but not likely because I wasn’t printing any photo quality pictures at all.

Overall, this is an over-rated bulky and noisy printer. At this size, I would expect an all-in-one printer capable of doing scanning, faxing and printing functions. But this guy is capable of nothing other than printing… although it supports double-sided printing, which I am yet to witness.