Well-suited for the home or the home office
I thought I would make what is normally the conclusion the beginning section because not everyone may have the time or the disposition to go through all these paragraphs unless actually interested in making a purchase. I am providing more detail that should support my conclusions AFTER the evaluation section.
Evaluation
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The reviewed unit meets the claim of it being a all-in-one solution. While it is not likely that any individual user would take 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 own 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 worthy printing/faxing/copying/scanning appliance.
While the superior quality of output would make this printer a good 'small office' candidate its speed would probably disqualify it if the small office was doing any significant amount printing. I provided some personal benchmarks so that any prospective small business buyer could decide. As a 'home' printer this comes as close to perfect as they come. I will be using it as a home printer so please do interpret my rating within that context.
A minor observation regarding 'design'. I found it interesting that some of the functions available on the touch screen are duplicated on physical buttons on the printer's console. This was striking because I actually saw this model for sale at New 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 use the physical number pad but had to punch the number on the virtual keypad displayed on the touch screen.
The strong almost violent shaking the printer brings itself to when not on a perfectly steady surface was a little disturbing to me. I have little doubt that if improperly placed the printer would quickly lose its printheads alignment and it might even experience other technical trouble.
Finally I am happy that the HP Tech support solved my Vista-related problem 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 obtain the updated driver.
Considering all of the above the this printer gets a strong very positive 4 stars.
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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 quick installation poster is provided as well. The full 300+ manual can be downloaded from the HP site. 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 back 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 display 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 used for a while but it can be reactivated by either touching the screen or one of the buttons or remotely from a networked workstation.
Software
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Drivers are available for the most recent 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 share it over the network. I experienced problems installing the Vista drivers but HP's tech support addressed it by replacing the CD-supplied drivers with a version available at HP's site.
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 status 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 used to control fax and scan operations to convert a graphic image to text and to launch other applications such as the HP Photosmart Essential. I posted images of the Home and Configuration screens.
I did not fully test the Photosmart Essential application yet but I expect 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 view. 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 use anyway. This was done without asking for my permission. I had to use Vista's Control Panel to remove 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 common problem and there were not many known solutions. I was able to find at the HP site a utility that tried to remove 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 support was answered and a technician was able to address the problem 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 site. The file name for Vista 32-bit is OJP8500vA909_Full_12.exe. I will post an image showing how to get 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 problem. XP or Mac users should be safe.
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Ink-jet printing outputs clean documents even on the 'normal' resolution. Printouts can be either color or black and white one-sided or two-sided. Print quality can be set to anything form '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 speed is adequate but duplex printing can be quite slow.
The print operation appears to involved a great deal of physical movement inside the printer. If placed on anything but a very steady platform the printer tends to swing quite violently from left to right and back. This had me concerned enough to move it from its initial location.
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 much slower to produce. The copy quality is good enough to make the copy almost indistinguishable from the original.
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 direct 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 content 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 screen 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 crude 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 used is via the provided HP Photosmart Essential application. Either through the touch screen interface or via HP Photosmart the printer can be configured to use photo paper from either HP or 'other' manufacturers. Inks more suitable 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 satisfactory.
Document Management
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I did not test the claimed document management capabilities yet.
Support
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I was satisfied with the quality of support provided. After a slow start (20 minutes) where the Help Desk person asked many questions related to my identity the printer's identity and the nature of the problem I was forwarded to a technician that was able to actually solve my problem (see above under 'software'). It's hard to tell whether the better than expected support 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 full manual which I still have to print.
Benchmarks
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I am including a few personal benchmarks with the hope that they might help someone make the right decision when it comes to purchase a home-printer or a small office printer.
- Printing
Was done on 10 pages of a Microsoft document that had some graphics and some color. The print quality was set 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 minute 6 seconds.
5 pages 1 copy 1-1 side (5 sheets) - 1 minute 22 seconds.
10 pages 1 copy 2-2 sides (5 sheets)- 3 minutes 55 seconds.More detail ...
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