Awesome all in one for high volume & high speed printing

I used to have an HP Officejet 9110 all in one (I also have a review of it on Epinions). After about 3 years and 100,000 prints, my 9110 is starting to have a few problems, although it still works for small print jobs, but on larger jobs it starts stalling as things warm up inside.

I read many reviews before deciding to get the HP Officejet Pro L7780, my main concern is that this all in one is based on the HP Officejet Pro K550 printer, which was HP's biggest mistake ever (the HP Officejet Pro K550 reviews confirm this), I myself had 3 or 4 K550s all of which failed with the same black/yellow print head problem, most of them failed in 24 hours.

Needless to say, this made me want to avoid the L7780 at all cost, but it is the only all in one printer by all brands that does what I need (high volume, high speed printing), so I decided to read all reviews carefully, and although there are many bad ones, none of the bad ones mentioned the famous K550 problem which was my main concern. The problems mentioned were mostly things that wouldn't bother me like ADF issues and poor tech support. I also noticed many complaints are due to simply not reading and following directions, for example one review complained about the scanner light staying on so HP could sell you more scanner bulbs, but right in the machine's preferences menu, you can set the inactivity timeout for the scanner bulb between 1 and 12 hours.

So far I've only had it for a few days and barely did 400 prints with it (all 400 prints went flawlessly). I'm waiting for a continuous ink system as I had on my 9110 to allow me to do tens of thousands of prints without having to refill anything and I won't ever have to buy an HP cartridge (as was the case with my 9110, all 100,000 prints it did were without ever buying a single HP print cartridge, and for just a few hundred dollars in ink). For those who intend to buy original HP cartridges, the print cost is still much cheaper than on other printers, but a continuous ink system can be bought for cheaper than a set of original HP cartridges. Once I get the continuous ink system and start doing real 1000+ page print jobs I'll update the review, but for now I'll review what I've seen so far.

You can tell the build quality went down from it's older version, the HP Officejet 9110. For example, on my old 9110 the scanner lid will stay open if you open it at a 20 degree angle or so, it also had a sort of suspension mechanism so that for scanning thick books the lid would adjust to the height of the book. On the new L7780, the lid does not hold itself open, you must rather flip it open over 90 degrees for it to hold open under its own weight rather than a spring mechanism that held it open at a better angle on the 9110. The new model also doesn't have the scanner lid suspension, so for thick books the lid must remain partly or fully open as it will not close on a thick book. These are not serious issues but a sign that HP's high quality products are becoming extinct.

Now, for the things that the L7780 had that my old 9110 did not:
-Faster print speed (35 pages/min VS 25 on my 9110)
-Borderless printing (finally! I had been waiting for this on a business machine forever! my 9110 could not print the bottom half inch of the page which was often a real problem)
-Color display allows scan/copy/print preview on the machine itself, you can even edit and crop scans on the machine's color screen, something that required an external computer on the 9110.
-PictBridge allows to connect and print from a camera directly connected to the machine (camera must also have PictBridge technology)
-Wireless connection, but I do not plan on ever using it

I got this top model of the L7000 series for the additional paper tray (I print by the thousands so the 600 sheet input capacity is almost a must) and the 96 MB ram. The 2 lower models, the L7580 and L7680, have 64 MB ram, do not come with an additional paper tray or wireless, the lowest model, the L7580, also does not have a color screen (it has a 2 line text display like the 9110) or the auto double sided printing accessory and has a letter sized scanner as opposed to legal size like on the 2 top models.

As I said at the beginning, please expect an update several weeks from now when I get my continuous ink system and start doing large print jobs on it.

UPDATE 1:
I haven't gotten the continuous ink system yet, but found a few other features I had not yet found:
-The PictBridge port not only supports PictBridge equipped cameras, but also USB storage devices like USB memory keys and even external USB hard drives, you can both print pictures from a USB storage device (or memory card) or scan pictures to them, right on the machine without needing a computer.
-My 9110 used to shake my desk like crazy, especially on Fast print mode, even though the new L7780 is even faster, it causes dramatically less shaking since they added a counterweight to the print carriage, so when it moves one way, the counterweight moves the other, smoothing out the shaking significantly

UPDATE 2:
I had the continuous ink system (CIS) for a few weeks now and printed about 3,500 pages, about 500 of them double sided, and I've had no real problem. I do have a slight issue with the black ink, but large air bubbles got into the printer through the black ink tube when installing the CIS, so this is an expected issue when large amounts of air has entered the system and will be resolved with a new printhead (the only damage is to the user-replaceable printhead worth about $60 and is entirely my fault for letting air in, this is a small price to pay for the savings a CIS system provides, and could have been avoided had I been more careful). The problem is that the first page after many hours of inactivity doesn't have all the black nozzles working, but they slowly start up throughout the first page, so I normally simply open the scanner lid and copy so it prints a full black page, this gets the ink going and it's then fine until another several hours of inactivity, this problem will of course vanish when I replace the printhead, but I'll probably live with it until this printhead completely dies, it is probably aging at a drastic rate due to the air bubble anyway (the ink is also the cooling liquid, without ink flowing, the heating elements in the nozzles overheat and age prematurely). I'll report after several thousand more pages after I replace the printhead to be sure this issue doesn't return, but this issue is to be expected considering the amount of air that entered, this air is now entirely trapped in the printhead which is why replacing it will resolve the issue.

UPDATE 3:
The black issue eventually resolved itself without requiring a new printhead, I assume it managed to get the trapped air out. One minor issue I noticed is that the printer is so fast that the scanner can't keep up with the printer, so when doing a photocopy, it doesn't print as fast as it could, but if you do multiple copies of the same page then it will reach normal print speed once it's scanned into memory. I think they should have put a faster scanner on the machine, one at least as fast as the printer. I also had an issue printing large print jobs (500 pages or more, but it also happened on 10 page jobs) where it would only print 1-5 pages and then stop as if it was done. There was an update on HP's website to resolve this and it hasn't happened since.

UPDATE 4:
The printer has now printed about 8000 pages, still no problems at all, I'm really starting to wonder where all those negative reviews are coming from, I think this is an awesome machine!

UPDATE 5:
35,000+ prints done, still no problems, and thinking of buying a 2nd one or the printer only version (without scanner, fax, etc.), the K5400.

To see a video of how fast this machine really is, see here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8OB2r071ZNo