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I notion I would execute what is normally the conclusion the beginning share because not everyone may have the time or the disposition to go through all these paragraphs unless actually eager in making a lift. I am providing more detail that should assist my conclusions AFTER the evaluation fraction.
Evaluation
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This is, esentially, the HP Officejet Pro 8500 Wireless All-In-One Printer with an extra paper tray, 3 extra ink cartridges and some promo materials. The unit I reviewed did not have the extra paper tray.
The reviewed unit meets the claim of it being a all-in-one solution. While it is not likely that any individual user would assume advantage of all its features on a regular basis, it is reassuring to know that the features are there. The supplied software and the printer's believe console interface allow for a tremenduous amount of flexibility and customization. Some of the more advanced features will require an above-average level of computer expertise but, even without a lot of customization, this will be a useful, noble printing/faxing/copying/scanning appliance.
While the apt quality of output would execute this printer a grand 'small office' candidate, its hasten would probably disqualify it if the slight office was doing any valuable amount printing. I provided some personal benchmarks so that any prospective itsy-bitsy business buyer could determine. As a 'home' printer, this comes as conclude to perfect as they advance. I will be using it as a home printer so please do clarify my rating within that context.
A minor observation regarding 'design'. I found it engrossing that some of the functions available on the touch mask are duplicated on physical buttons on the printer's console. This was striking because I actually saw this model for sale at Recent York's Fifth Ave. Apple store. It immediately occured to me that an Apple designer would have none of those buttons if allowed to redesign the product. This is not criticism, it's only an observation, also prompted by the fact that, for example, when specifying the number of copies to be printed, I could NOT consume the physical number pad but had to punch the number on the virtual keypad displayed on the touch cloak.
The strong, almost violent shaking the printer brings itself to when not on a perfectly actual surface was a microscopic disturbing to me. I have limited doubt that, if improperly placed, the printer would hastily lose its printheads alignment and it might even experience other technical anxiety.
Finally, I am tickled that the HP Tech help solved my Vista-related spot but it would have been better if a printer that was manufatured only a few days before I received it had an updated CD or, at least, a flyer advising Vista users how to gather the updated driver.
Considering all of the above, the this printer gets a strong, very certain 4 stars. However, my understanding is that the OfficeJet Pro is basically a 'home' or 'home office' unit, not a 'small business' printer. As such, I stare no advantage in purchasing the Premier' model instead of the 'one paper tray', less expensive version.
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First impressions
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The HP Officejet Pro 8500 Wireless All-In-One Printer integrates print, copy, fax, scan document and photo-processing functions. HP supplies the printer itself, 'starter' ink cartridges, print heads and a phone wire. Ethernet or USB cables are not included. Thin manuals are provided for wireless and FAX setup. A fleet installation poster is provided as well. The paunchy 300+ manual can be downloaded from the HP place. The CD has drivers for the several supported Operating Systems and a number of additional applications such as OCR (optical character recognition) .
Besides the Ethernet and USB ports, other physical IO include 2 telephone jacks in the benefit and slots for several types of memory cards in the front. The printer can be controlled from a PC or directly through a touch-screen color expose and several buttons that generally duplicate options on the menus available through the touch-screen interface. To satisfy energy saving concerns, the printer goes to sleep if not extinct for a while but it can be reactivated by either touching the shroud or one of the buttons or remotely from a networked workstation.
Software
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Drivers are available for the most novel flavors of Windows (Vista, XP, 2000) and for the Mac. It can be configured to either a local printer, connected to a PC via a USB cable or as a network printer, wired (Ethernet) or wireless (802.11g) . Another option (not tested by me) would be for one PC to connect the printer via USB and then portion it over the network. I experienced problems installing the Vista drivers but HP's tech succor addressed it by replacing the CD-supplied drivers with a version available at HP's position.
While installing the drivers, HP will also install a number of applications and services. Of these the HP Solutions Center is the most versatile. It monitors the printer's plot, including the ink levels and allows for configuring printing, scanning, faxing and other capabilities such as the forwarding of documents to network folders (tested) or to email (not tested yet) . In addition, the home page can be frail to control fax and scan operations, to convert a graphic image to text and to begin other applications such as the HP Photosmart Indispensable. I posted images of the Home and Configuration screens.
I did not fully test the Photosmart Considerable application yet but I examine it to meet most basic photo management and printing needs and perhaps more.
If staying with the defaults at drivers installation, HP will install other, generally unneeded or unwelcome applications and services. One of them, the HP Customer Participation Program seems to be taking hundreds of megabytes but not doing anything useful from the end-user's point of idea. I found Web discussions indicating that the 'program' was guilty of a memory leak. I removed it. Another unwelcome (to me) addition is the 'Yahoo Toolbar' to my Internet Explorer which I don't exercise anyway. This was done without asking for my permission. I had to expend Vista's Control Panel to pick it after the fact.
Finally, one 'glitch' that occured after my initial installation from the supplied HP disk had a pop-up constantly telling me that the "HP product assistant" had to be installed or updated and asking me to provide a path. Providing the path for the requested file which I found burried 3 levels deep inside the supplied CD, was not helping and the cycle kept repeating endlessly. Some Web research revealed that this was a celebrated predicament and there were not many known solutions. I was able to catch at the HP status a utility that tried to retract all HP drivers software from my PC but, 4 reboots later and after re-installing the drivers, the popup returned. A call to the HP benefit was answered and a technician was able to address the plight after taking over my computer, performing the 'cleanup' job that I tried myself and then installing an updated version of the drivers, downloaded from the HP plot. The file name for Vista 32-bit is OJP8500vA909_Full_12.exe. I will post an image showing how to earn to the drivers from the HP Solution Center. The HP suppport remediation completed after about 2 hours. The HP technician stated that 'only Vista' installations experience this quandary. XP or Mac users should be well-behaved.
Print
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Ink-jet printing outputs shapely documents even on the 'normal' resolution. Printouts can be either color or sunless and white, one-sided or two-sided. Print quality can be place to anything execute 'general everyday printing' to presentation, photo-quality or to ink-saving 'fast/economical printing'. The supplied paper tray can be loaded with up to 250 sheets up to 'legal' size. One-sided print bustle is adequate but duplex printing can be quite monotonous.
The print operation appears to interested a titanic deal of physical movement inside the printer. If placed on anything but a very valid platform, the printer tends to swing quite violently from left to upright and encourage. This had me concerned enough to depart it from its initial station.
Copy
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The copy function allows for anything from one-sided/one-sided to two-sided/two-sided copies. As in the case of printing, two-sided copies are powerful slower to invent. The copy quality is valid enough to obtain the copy almost indistinguishable from the fresh.
Fax
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I did not fully test the FAX capabilities but it's worth menioning that a lot of flexibility is provided, including the ability to disclose the faxes to a network folder (which I did test with the scan function) rather than having them printed. It is also possible to block 'junk' faxes by maintaining a list of the offending phone numbers.
Scanner
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As a scanner, one can file the output to any of up to 10 preset network folders or if when the scanning process is initiated from a PC, output can be directed to a designated user's local folder. Scanned documents can be translated to text via the integrated OCR function. My experiment with a printed document produced with Microsoft Word returned 100% accuracy for issue but, as expected, the formatting (headers, footers, margins) was not properly handled.
Photo processing
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Photo processing can be controlled either at the console and the interactive touch conceal interface does allow for some flexibility. Input is provided by inserting one of the supported memory devices containing pictures (MMC SD, CF, XD, MS/DUO or USB) . Some outrageous cropping and sizing is available as well as color processing - sepia or gray scale prints can be produced and the colors can be manipulated to be darker or lighter. The more flexible solution and the one more likely to be ancient is via the provided HP Photosmart Considerable application. Either through the touch conceal interface or via HP Photosmart the printer can be configured to employ photo paper from either HP or 'other' manufacturers. Inks more noble for photo printing are available from HP but the quality of prints that I produced with the supplied ink on Canon Photo Paper Pro was safe.
Document Management
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I did not test the claimed document management capabilities yet.
Support
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I was happy with the quality of back provided. After a listless open (20 minutes) where the Abet Desk person asked many questions related to my identity, the printer's identity and the nature of the pickle, I was forwarded to a technician that was able to actually solve my jam (glimpse above under 'software') . It's hard to snarl whether the better than expected help came because I mentioned that I was in the process of reviewing the printer on behalf of a known vendor.
In addition, the HP Web sites provide a lot of material, including updated drivers and the beefy manual which I peaceful have to print.
Benchmarks
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I am including a few personal benchmarks with the hope that they might attend someone do the moral decision when it comes to recall a home-printer or a cramped office printer.
- Printing
Was done on 10 pages of a Microsoft document that had some graphics and some color. The print quality was dwelling to 'General everyday printing'.
10 pages (10 sheets), one sided - 56 seconds.
10 pages (5 sheets), duplex - 2 minutes, 56 seconds.
- Copying
Set to 'color', 'General everyday printing' quality.
1 page, 1 copy, 1-1 side - 24 seconds.
1 page, 5 copies, 1-1 side - 1 dinky, 6 seconds.
5 pages, 1 copy, 1-1 side (5 sheets) - 1 exiguous, 22 seconds.
10 pages, 1 copy, 2-2 sides (5 sheets) - 3 minutes, 55 seconds.
I employ this printer in a home office environment and it does a very nice job. Printouts are very crisp with splendid quality. Colors are vibrant and curious. Copies are quick and of very grand quality and faxes are very easy to send and receive.
While this printer is a bit more than other available "all in ones", I felt that the cost per print with the modern, higher yielding cartridges will over time provide a worthy better cost of ownership. The "Premier" version of this printer offers the extra cartridges for colors (not unlit!) and the added tray. Since the contrast is about one hundred dollars and the regular yield cartridges are 20 each, I figure the genuine contrast is that you are paying 40 for a the extra tray. Well worth it for me. Other than the three extra cartridges, the extra tray, and some marketing software that I opinion was not that vital, the printer is the same as the "wireless" version.
Overall the printer is posthaste, but not blazing (expressionless in duplex mode) . Does a capable job to go on sleep mode. So with the energy efficiency and duplex capability, I do consider that it is more efficient to rush over time since you exhaust less power and less paper (if you can live with the slowness in duplex which I usually can) .
I am very contented with print performance and it looks solidly built. You can print or scan multiple pages with the built in Auto document feed (ADF) which makes it very, very nice. It is easy to operate apt on the built in reveal and buttons which my kids and wife like. Without any instructions they were copying things in no time. The scan works with up to Legal/A4 size pages. It has been a gargantuan choice for my home office. The wireless function has worked flawlessly in my network (6 computers attached) .
The accomplish quality on this is Dreadful.
The first unit I received wouldn't print from tray #2. HP wanted to replace my effect recent printer with a refurb unit, but thankfully Amazon immediately sent me a novel one when I told them this.
The scrape is that the 2nd unit is more broken than the first. Now it will print from tray #2, but the top correct corner of every page that comes from tray #2 is hooked and dirty as if caught on the print head. Pages from tray #1 don't have this. I've removed the duplexer from the attend to let pages catch spit out that design from tray #2 and none had the bend. That means the plight isn't tied to the external tray, but rather to the main printer.
I called HP, and their helpdesk in India dug through their books until they came up with the genius view to "well-kept the rollers". Distinct. Of a current printer. They refused to transfer me to anyone in the US, or to anyone who actually had seen this printer for themselves.
Also, this fresh unit emits a gentle hissing sound that the first one did not. Since I hadn't yet sent benefit the first one, I double-checked this.
The belief is sizable. The list of features is very piquant. The execution is a failure.
By the design, a number of people had posted that envelopes only print from tray #1. It's more than that. Tray #2 can only be obsolete for standard paper. If I try to configure it to expend the included letter-sized HP Glossy Brochure paper, the software on the PC won't allow me to win anything but tray #1 as the source unless I change the paper type help to normal.
I'd really hoped to avoid spending the extra money on a (non-HP at this point) color laser, so I'm sadly considering putting myself through this again by trying a third unit.
