We've been running our 500 since Feb very hard and overall are pretty happy with it. One issue that has really stood out and could in fact be ForgeInc's Issue, it has to do with the ink system. There is a thermistor that sits in the ink reservior in the carriage, one for each head. We have found since owning the machine that these can be flaky. They are easy to change and a pretty small part. The thermistor basically detects if ink is in the reservior. When it doesn't work right the ink pump doesn't know to pump ink to the reservior so the head runs out of ink. We've went through 2 or 3 since having the machine, the first time pinning the issue down was a real pain.
HP has not let us down yet as far as getting parts and people out to fix issues when they do come up. If they know you are down they try to get something going (as far as our experience has been).
My biggest gripe with the machine is the ink boxes and profiler chips. We've had a chip or two that just didn't work and put is in a bind basically with a good box of ink and a little chip that prevented us from using it. The profilers count down your ink use and tell you when you "should" be low on ink, but in reality we've had a LOT of ink left in the box. We try to crack the box open and watch till actually gets really low then swap out. Of course the whole system is created so you can't use 3rd party ink.
