I WAS SURPRISED to see you give a 4.5-mouse rating to the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 850C (March '96, page 55). Having always respected HP's reputation for high-quality products, I decided to buy a DeskJet 850C. The first one I bought stopped working after printing one document. The second one did not work at all. The third had problems when printing black text. The text was missing lines or dots in the characters, similar to when the cartridge runs out of ink. I tried all of HP's troubleshooting tips and was not successful. I've printed several test pages from many 850C machines in many stores, and all have had the same problem with text.
I am very disappointed with Hewlett-Packard and have since purchased an Epson Stylus Color II printer, which works very well.
Edward R. Wehbe
ewehbe@aol.com
ALTHOUGH I CURRENTLY own and use a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 850-series printer, I cannot agree with its 4.5-mouse rating.
When I bought the printer, its driver was incompatible with my Power Mac 8500. After several weeks, a new driver arrived, and now the printer works, but HP's background-printing software has the annoying habit of trying to eat up all of my 16 megabytes of RAM and often freezes my Mac. Your review failed to take into account HP's lackluster Mac support and software. This alone should have reduced the mouse rating.
