HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One Printer

5 comments

1. 

   C. Freeborn on December 8, 2009 at 9:45 pm

   I thought I would be able to scan legal sized paper–wrong!
   
   It has to be left on because it is very slow to do anything very quickly if turned off.The black print is very sharp. A good price of the features.

2. 

   Herbert Arthur Rideout on December 8, 2009 at 11:27 pm

   I bought mine at Sams Club just in case I had to return it and I had to the very same day. I got it home, the outside looked like it had never been opened but it had been. The ink heads were missing and the black ink had been opened and resealed with scotch tape. I think HP has lots of returns and are recycling the things. So… back to the search for a good printer.
   

3. 

   AUDREY Bennett Fla on December 9, 2009 at 12:33 am

   This is a great printer. It was easy to set up and easy to use. We are a small company (20 people) and it handles everything we need from faxing to copying to printing. Its on a network of 3 computers. So far we love it. The only thing we don’t love is the price of the ink cartridges.. shop around.

4. 

   Marlowe on December 9, 2009 at 12:53 am

   This printer arrived broken. The glass was broken under the copier mechanism and glass and parts were inside the printer. After many attempts to contact HP we received an E mail that they would call us. They never called. The only alternative I have is to throw the printer in the garbage. .Beware of HP support

5. 

   Descenter on December 9, 2009 at 2:29 am

   General Note: I bought this printer for my own use at home and for a small personal business I am running.

   Print Quality:
   
   Very nice quality and color contrasts, almost similar to what I get on the screen. I have printed so far about 20 pages since I bought it yesterday and I can tell that the ink is not smudging “yet”. But what I really liked is a feature the salesman told me about: the ink type for the 8500 new generation is special that if you mark a text with a highlight marker it will not smudge or “melt” with the direction of the marker. I tested it and it is TRUE even that I was using normal of the shelf A4 paper.

   Print Speed:
   
   It printed a FULL color page “image I took with my digi cam” in less than a minute in very high resolution. I guess this goes back for the very wide printing head!

   Ease of Setup:
   
   It’s very easy to get this printer started once you pick it out of the box. I have installed on the network, and while i was installing the driver in my PC, it asked me whether USB or network and when I selected network, it automatically scanned my network range and found it and installed “connected” to the printer without me touching the mouse!
   
   The reason i took one star out of the “Ease of setup” review is for two reasons:
   
   1- HP should have hard-coded the network drivers INSIDE the printer so that if you want to install it in an office environment you won’t have to install the software CD on each and every PC, which takes about 10 minutes per PC! I had to do this for my PC and my wife’s so she can use it also, that’s dump in my opinion, but never the less to be fair, this is not a “quality” issue and it’s a one time setup only. But an IT guy in a small firm would be pissed off to install the driver for each and every PC int he department.
   
   2- It took about 20 minutes from the moment I plugged the printer to power to calibrate and be ready for use, I don’t know why HP needs 20 minutes for calibration and setting up the printer but that’s annoying. Also when I switched it off and on again, it took like 5 minutes to “get ready”! Come on HP, do something about this, it should be switch on and print especially that you make us wait 20 minutes after the very first power on! which I believe will be the case everytime I change an ink cartridge or print head….

   Ease of Use:
   
   Excellent, smooth and smart! printing use is very similar to any printer so I won’t talk about it. But the scanning process is what I really liked. When you want to scan a document (normal or thru ADF) you have many options to chose from from the printer screen (those are what i remember out of my head): Document->PDF, Document->Text. Document->Image, Document->Email, Scan Images, Scan PDF, Scan Image->Email, Image->PDF.
   
   What I really liked is that when I scan a PDF, I don’t have to TOUCH ANYTHING ON MY COMPUTER, i simply put the document on the ADF feeder, select document->ADF for example, select to which computer I want to send the scan (since it’s on network, but it will only detect computers with the software installed in it) and press the scan button. The ADF scans the papers and it automatically stores them under My DocumentsMy scans folder and also opens the folder for me! How nice is that they don’t even let you wonder where the heck did my document go, it opens the storing folder for you, that’s smart thinking from HP people!

   Noise:
   
   It got some noise, but I would personally classify it as this: I can use the printer without waking up my wife who’s sleeping on the couch 8 meters away from the printer! That’s silent enough for me

   Features:
   
   It’s an MFP and delivers all what you expect from MFP. Some reviewers here are blaming HP for not including the two sided scanning feature with this printer, but I would say that it is available in the “wireless” OFFICEJET PRO 8500 printer. So don’t blame this product for not having a feature that is available on higher end products. You get what you pay for.
   
   However, in comments to the (you get what you pay for), for this price tag I would expect the printer to have the wireless network feature! which is available on many other non HP MFPs that are $40 cheaper than this one!

   Quality of Product:
   
   Very sturdy and well built plastic material. The only “quality” I didn’t like is the white-top cover that comes in contact with the scanner’s glass when you close it, it is made of PLASTIC! usually it comes some kind of hard white paper with sponge between it and the scanner cover, so if you scan a passport for example and you press the cover down with your hand to squeez the passport down, the sponge would help in “bending up” only where it comes in contact with the passport and the rest of it will make sure the white carton top is in direct contact with the scanner glass. But in this case since it’s a solid full white plastic without a spongy back, if you place a passport or such thick thing to scan, it will be tilted and the part where the plastic is lifted up from the scanner glass will be gradually looking darker as you get away from the passport or object! Not mentioning that it looks so cheap to have a solid plastic block instead of spongy one. For that they lose one star in Quality rating.

   Feed:
   
   Many people have complained about paper feed into the printer, honestly I didn’t use the printer that much yet, so I can’t really comment about this.

   Scanning Quality:
   
   Excellent! it can detect the objects on the scanner glass and gives you an image output for that object only (if you chose Scan->image option) for example an ID Card or driver license or a passport size photo! resolution is very nice for my personal use, I don’t really know the exact highest resolution, but you can look that up in product details, i’m just giving a user point of experience rating. So for the sake of being fair, i just gave it 4 stars

   Scanner ADF Speed:
   
   Pretty good, a single page takes about 5 seconds to be scanned, and it takes also about 5 seconds to start pulling the first page from the moment you confirm your two scanning options (destination PC and document type). That’s probably the best speed you can get for this price, Honestly I was expecting it to be even slower than this, I was really impressed with ADF speed.

   That’s pretty much it. Hope this review was content enough for your inquiries.
   
   I have uploaded 13 photos for the product too please have a look at them.
   
   Cheers.