HP Jet Fusion 580 Color

Only had this printer for less than two months and the experience has been nothing but disappointing. I will go through all the negatives first and then the few pluses and you will conclude this is possibly a terrible investment. First upon arrival the fusing lamp was faulty. They knew this and had already sent one to be replaced the next day. Oops! Within two weeks the printer had an error on the blower systems that keeps the system cool. This had to be completely replaced, and had to wait three days for our contracted technician to come and replace it. Two weeks after this a what the call MAR system failed, this is what distributes the powder to be layered in the bed. This again had to be completely replaced. I will now go through the issues using the printer which where never disclosed by HP nor the vendor which would have completely made us not decide to go with this machine. The concept of recycling powder is bogus. The machine takes about 6 kegs of powder to initially get it to run. At $400 a pop this is quite a hefty price. Mind you half of that is already going into the recycling portion of the machine. Therefore powder that had never been used is already tagged as used powder. Yup, and so within three builds we had to remove one reusable powder container which now has no use. You cannot reinsert these kegs back to the machine as HP has found a very clever way of tagging these containers as not usable once you take em out of the machine. You can only use their containers and some will come faulty and must be returned, this has happened twice already. Basically the machine is a complete closed system that absolutely does not allow the user to have freedoms that would make one feel like we can have choices to how we use the machine. Compared to the zcorp we replaced this with this is a complete disappointment. Even with a Formlabs you are able to “open” the material options to have control of what your feeding into the tank. Considering this is a $180k investment one would think the owner would have some say or freedom to control the material use. The software jumps all over the place on the actual percentages of material basically giving me the impression there is absolutely no way to know how the ratios etc are being managed, they just expect you to trust them. Also yes $180k will be your total Investment since you cannot, absolutely cannot run this machine without having a service contract, as well as other components that are never disclosed until you are practically knees deep in the deal. Two stars are one too many as yes the parts printed are somewhat decent and robust, however considering ours has been down three times now, the reliability to get a decent print on time if at all is below 50%. And with that there is absolutely no safety net, no back up print service in case you are on a deadline and you are pretty much bound to wait till your technician shows up which they have as a limit of 3 days. You can practically lose a major job on three days if this fails at a dire time, or better yet, you’ll spend more money to send your print out to an outside source if you want to meet your deadline. HP pretty much came up with a great PR campaign to get these out, but have failed incredibly to make the me the customer confident that this is a truly reliable, cost saving printer. Far from it, they don’t even have a return program for the used tag powder kegs and expect you to just keep them laying around or dispose them on your own. Side note, their nesting software is a joke. HP, you can still redeem yourself, listen to the customers and come up with fair and better options to the material management. Otherwise this won’t last, you cannot incarcerate the user to your restrictions and closed system. There are far more options out there that will leave you in the dirt.