Through a friend, I’ve acquired an HP Deskjet 5850 Color Printer with wireless capabilities. It boasts “Connect to either a wired or a wireless network without using an external print server.”

I have mixed feelings about this printer. I’m very happy that it comes with a built-in Jetdirect card and wireless capabilities, but setting it up wasn’t intuitive. After fumbling with the manual for about 10 minutes, I finally found out how to set it up. You need to plug it in on the ethernet to configure it for wireless, which makes sense. The manual suggests you use the driver disk (full featured one, not the basic one) to `automagicly` configure the device. This did not go as planned.

After attempting to save the settings I gave it a few times, I finally gave up and looked for another solution. I found out that there is a web server packed onto the hardware which allows you to edit all of the settings manually. It had by default 128bit encryption and didn’t let you change it for the setup. So after correcting that, the printer installed and I could ping it when I removed the ethernet cord.

One downside is that it would appear the ONLY way you can setup this printer is by using the driver executable. The usual methods on a windows network would be to \{computer-sharing-printer} then double click on the printer to add it, but this isn’t connected directly to any computer, so it must be setup by another means. That would get somewhat annoying if it had to be done for many computers.

I set up the printer right next to my wireless access point. The printer said in its control panel that the connection with the WAP was a 4 (Good) on a scale from 1-5. Upon printing a test page over, about halfway through the print job, I received a message that the document could not print, but the job would be restarted. Instead of restarting it resumed the job only to error with the same message just seconds later. After the second restart, it errored again and didn’t resume.

I’d like to believe that the printer we received was faulty (it wasn’t new in package), but I’d assume that it might just be a faulty model.

Overall, I’m not that impressed. I will most likely use it for its wired ethernet services.