I read in this Schneier on Security post that some photocopiers store scans of old documents. I have an HP F4280 printer/scanner that I would like to give away. Is there a risk that I still have personal data on the printer itself? If so, how can I delete it?

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Those are commercial business printers that store copies on an internal hard drive. Consumer PC's only have memory to store print jobs, and it is usually 8mb, so they don't store much and is flushed when the next print job is done, so potentially there is only a few documents stored in memory at any one time. – Moab Oct 17 '10 at 3:24
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You be safe giving away your printer. From looking at the specs, your printer does not have a hard drive. Once the printer is powered down all the memory will be cleared. The article is discussing larger office photocopiers/ scanners.

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No, most consume printer AIO don't have any storage, it dumps them directly onto your PC. If you're really worry, you can do a Reset

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what he call hard-drive is more like a memory chip to store suspended print jobs, if it have a drive to store all printed documents without your knowledge, then it must be a spy machine. so if you really care, treat it like "old computers" : don't give it away, destroy it.

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-1 for destroying a possibly quite perfectly working machine just for privacy reasons. – onnodb Oct 18 '10 at 5:28
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