Hewlett Packard lied to me.

When I moved into my house a little more than two years ago, I wanted a printer that I could use from any computer in the house, which has a WiFi network. HP introduced a printer with embedded WiFi right around that time, and I bought it: a PhotoSmart 2710 All in One (since replaced by another model, maybe one that works better), which is an integrated printer and scanner with 802.11 wireless networking built in. In other words, you don’t need to attach the printer to one computer on the network or to a print server; it has the network and the print server built in and shows up on the network as a device that any computer can print to.

It’s an all-in-one device, which I thought meant that I could do the other features — scanning and faxing — without attaching it to a computer. It does act as a fax machine, which is a kind of scanner, so it has the telephone built in. It also comes with slots for a variety of memory cards (USB, SD, etc.), so I thought I would be able to scan photos and documents directly onto a storage card. But I didn’t try until a couple of days ago, when the printer told me that my USB flash drive was not “PictBridge compatible”. So I went to BestBuy to get one that is compatible with PictBridge.

This is where the “lying” part comes in: You can’t use the WiFi-enabled PhotoSmart all in one printer scanner as a scanner without plugging it directly into a computer with a USB cable. So what the heck is the point of having an ALL-in-one device on the WiFi network if you have to connect it by USB cable to use it as a scanner? Maybe I’m too severe to call this lying, but it feels like I was lied to. (And it only took me two years to get the time and motivation to figure it out!)

So I was about to walk out of BestBuy, all pissed off at Hewlett Packard. (I could tell you about how bad their software is or how the printer crashes on a regular basis and has to be restarted or complain about other experiences I’ve had with other HP products that lead me to NOT want to buy their products anymore. In fact, if you want to have a little fun at HP’s expense, watch this video at YouTube.) But then I realized I still wanted a scanner, since I want to start scanning all the photos I took before I got a digital camera. So I found the scanner section at BestBuy and started “researching” scanners with only one constraint: Nothing made by Hewlett Packard.

I Bought Canon

My research lead me to buy the CanoScan (why would Canon mess with its brand in one of its own products!?) LiDE (I still don’t know what this means even though I’ve installed the scanner and used it for one test photo scan) 600F (nor this). I decided I like the way it looks compared to the Epson which was bulkier but had almost exactly the same features. Plus somewhere in the back of my pre-Cambrian, I had the impression that Canon was better at scanning technology than Epson, which is better at printing. Who knows!?

This scanner is a pretty amazing piece of equipment, to be honest. They’ve made a lot of progress since the last time I looked at flatbed scanners, maybe 10 years ago. What’s truly amazing, however, is that the software still sucks. For instance, I scanned a photo and saved it in the JPEG format, which is a standard way to store photos. Then I wanted to record in the file properties (otherwise known as metadata) what the date of the original photo is, who the photographer was, and so forth. The photo editor (not made by Canon) does not have a “feature” for doing that, even though you can flip, edit, emboss, blur, fisheye and whirlpool the photo! Even better, the software (Photostudio from Arcsoft) is so clearly made for Microsoft Windows that it does not even recognize where to put its windows on the computer screen and so it’s buttons overlap with where I’ve put the application icons for my Macintosh. And when you move their buttons, the program doesn’t remember that you moved from one session to the next, so you have to do it every time you open the program again.

In other words, the folks at Canon have clearly treated the software that comes with this amazing hardware as something of an afterthought. I’d estimate they spent about 10Z% of the total product development on the software and the rest on designing the software.
I Die From Embarrassment

Anyway, I use this software and I can just feel that feeling come over me. Those poor people at Canon who decided to name their product this way and then decided to bundle this software with their very amazing piece of hardware. They must have crappy jobs to have to do such a bad job on behalf of the customer in turning that beautiful hardware into a product. I’m sure they are hampered by that big company atmosphere, where the decisions are made by hardware engineers who don’t understand software, couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag, have never visited a retail store, and generally would rather not meet an actual customer for their product. It must be a really frustrating life.

But I keep having the same experience over and over again — Hewlett Packard’s PhotoSmart software; Kodak’s Easyshare; Canon’s CanoScan Toolbox. So there must be something endemic about big companies that they produce this really crappy software and are still successful anyway!