Hewlett-Packard OJ PRO 8500 Prices, Reviews, Sales, Compare
 |
Hewlett-Packard OJ PRO 8500 Prices, Reviews, Sales, Compare.
Product: Hewlett-Packard OJ PRO 8500 Amazon Price: Too low to display Availability: In Stock |
Compare Prices on Hewlett-Packard OJ PRO 8500
I conception I would manufacture 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 keen in making a recall. I am providing more detail that should benefit my conclusions AFTER the evaluation share.
Evaluation
----------
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 win 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 occupy 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, capable printing/faxing/copying/scanning appliance.
While the beneficial quality of output would execute this printer a respectable 'small office' candidate, its hasten would probably disqualify it if the exiguous office was doing any essential amount printing. I provided some personal benchmarks so that any prospective petite business buyer could resolve. As a 'home' printer, this comes as stop to perfect as they reach. I will be using it as a home printer so please do explain my rating within that context.
A minor observation regarding 'design'. I found it involving that some of the functions available on the touch cover are duplicated on physical buttons on the printer's console. This was striking because I actually saw this model for sale at Unusual 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 utilize the physical number pad but had to punch the number on the virtual keypad displayed on the touch mask.
The strong, almost violent shaking the printer brings itself to when not on a perfectly sincere surface was a exiguous disturbing to me. I have minute doubt that, if improperly placed, the printer would expeditiously lose its printheads alignment and it might even experience other technical concern.
Finally, I am blissful that the HP Tech succor solved my Vista-related jam 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 get the updated driver.
Considering all of the above, the this printer gets a strong, very determined 4 stars. However, my belief is that the OfficeJet Pro is basically a 'home' or 'home office' unit, not a 'small business' printer. As such, I explore no advantage in purchasing the Premier' model instead of the 'one paper tray', less expensive version.
_______________________________________________________________________________
First impressions
-----------------
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 snappily installation poster is provided as well. The plump 300+ manual can be downloaded from the HP set. 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 help 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 point to 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 obsolete for a while but it can be reactivated by either touching the cloak or one of the buttons or remotely from a networked workstation.
Software
--------
Drivers are available for the most unusual 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 part it over the network. I experienced problems installing the Vista drivers but HP's tech back addressed it by replacing the CD-supplied drivers with a version available at HP's dwelling.
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 situation, 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 faded to control fax and scan operations, to convert a graphic image to text and to open other applications such as the HP Photosmart Important. I posted images of the Home and Configuration screens.
I did not fully test the Photosmart Notable application yet but I request 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 belief. 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 employ anyway. This was done without asking for my permission. I had to expend Vista's Control Panel to lift 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 accepted pickle and there were not many known solutions. I was able to net at the HP residence a utility that tried to capture 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 succor was answered and a technician was able to address the jam 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 place. The file name for Vista 32-bit is OJP8500vA909_Full_12.exe. I will post an image showing how to find 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 dilemma. XP or Mac users should be fine.
Print
-----
Ink-jet printing outputs dapper documents even on the 'normal' resolution. Printouts can be either color or shaded and white, one-sided or two-sided. Print quality can be station to anything obtain '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 keen a astronomical deal of physical movement inside the printer. If placed on anything but a very genuine platform, the printer tends to swing quite violently from left to correct and assist. This had me concerned enough to proceed it from its initial station.
Copy
----
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 worthy slower to make. The copy quality is noble enough to form the copy almost indistinguishable from the new.
Fax
---
I did not fully test the FAX capabilities but it's worth menioning that a lot of flexibility is provided, including the ability to verbalize 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
-------
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 pronounce but, as expected, the formatting (headers, footers, margins) was not properly handled.
Photo processing
----------------
Photo processing can be controlled either at the console and the interactive touch hide 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 uncouth 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 frail is via the provided HP Photosmart Considerable application. Either through the touch conceal interface or via HP Photosmart the printer can be configured to exhaust photo paper from either HP or 'other' manufacturers. Inks more honorable 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 respectable.
Document Management
-------------------
I did not test the claimed document management capabilities yet.
Support
-------
I was gay with the quality of befriend provided. After a dumb inaugurate (20 minutes) where the Encourage 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 spot (peer above under 'software') . It's hard to order whether the better than expected succor 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 elephantine manual which I serene have to print.
Benchmarks
----------
I am including a few personal benchmarks with the hope that they might wait on someone fabricate the accurate decision when it comes to assume a home-printer or a tiny office printer.
- Printing
Was done on 10 pages of a Microsoft document that had some graphics and some color. The print quality was site 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 tiny, 6 seconds.
5 pages, 1 copy, 1-1 side (5 sheets) - 1 slight, 22 seconds.
10 pages, 1 copy, 2-2 sides (5 sheets) - 3 minutes, 55 seconds.
I spend this printer in a home office environment and it does a very nice job. Printouts are very crisp with grand quality. Colors are vibrant and intelligent. Copies are quick and of very obedient 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 unusual, higher yielding cartridges will over time provide a mighty better cost of ownership. The "Premier" version of this printer offers the extra cartridges for colors (not dim!) and the added tray. Since the incompatibility is about one hundred dollars and the regular yield cartridges are 20 each, I figure the accurate dissimilarity 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 idea was not that famous, the printer is the same as the "wireless" version.
Overall the printer is snappily, but not blazing (dead in duplex mode) . Does a kindly job to go on sleep mode. So with the energy efficiency and duplex capability, I do judge that it is more efficient to race over time since you spend less power and less paper (if you can live with the slowness in duplex which I usually can) .
I am very delighted 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 upright on the built in reveal and buttons which my kids and wife fancy. Without any instructions they were copying things in no time. The scan works with up to Legal/A4 size pages. It has been a mammoth choice for my home office. The wireless function has worked flawlessly in my network (6 computers attached) .
The form quality on this is Unpleasant.
The first unit I received wouldn't print from tray #2. HP wanted to replace my sign fresh printer with a refurb unit, but thankfully Amazon immediately sent me a modern one when I told them this.
The jam is that the 2nd unit is more broken than the first. Now it will print from tray #2, but the top moral corner of every page that comes from tray #2 is zigzag and dirty as if caught on the print head. Pages from tray #1 don't have this. I've removed the duplexer from the assist to let pages accumulate spit out that plan from tray #2 and none had the bend. That means the jam 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 thought to "desirable the rollers". Determined. Of a modern printer. They refused to transfer me to anyone in the US, or to anyone who actually had seen this printer for themselves.
Also, this novel unit emits a gentle hissing sound that the first one did not. Since I hadn't yet sent succor the first one, I double-checked this.
The concept is mountainous. The list of features is very spellbinding. The execution is a failure.
By the diagram, a number of people had posted that envelopes only print from tray #1. It's more than that. Tray #2 can only be archaic for standard paper. If I try to configure it to exhaust the included letter-sized HP Glossy Brochure paper, the software on the PC won't allow me to take anything but tray #1 as the source unless I change the paper type relieve 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.
