HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One Printer

Comments about HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One Printer:

This printer is worth the extra money. It is much better built than the older models. There are older models that do the same thing but are not built as good. The ink is priced well and has a high yeild. At 2,200 for black and 1,400 color. The ink also does not fade. It is not cheap looking and will work well for any business or home use. The print quality is excellent and is very fast. On a quick print it still has a excellent quailty print.

Comments about HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One Printer:

Do not buy this printer! I bought this printer about four months ago and thought I would give it a chance before writing a review. Our old HP "All in One" lasted about four years before dying and printed very well. So we bought a new one. It prints very quickly which is nice, the print quality is not that great but good enough for office reports and the like. The trade off for speed is acceptable. This one does little more than the last one other than duplex printing, but it is twice as big and takes a very.... very.... very.... long tome to turn on. It has large print cartridges which is nice but we have to keep buying new print heads for the black which is annoying and expensive. We get streaks when printing black if we do not change the print head almost every time we change a print cartridge. Every time something goes wrong or it decides to clean itself the whole thing locks up for ten minutes while it whizzes and buzzes and prints out lots of test pages just to annoy you, not to mention wasting that very expensive ink.
I tried to call HP about it but spent thirty minutes on hold on my business line. They never called me back either. Basically they offer no support so if you have a problem you are on your own! I plan to chuck it out and buy a new one... from some one else. Very disappointing.

Comments about HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One Printer:

As treasurer for my church I print a lot of reports and do quite abit of copying so I wanted a
all around printer that doesn't use a lot of space. This one fit the bill. Having had an HP All-in-One in the past that lasted a lot of years I had been looking for another like it. This one is it. It grunts & groans abit when warming up but otherwise it is a great addition to the small office

Comments about HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One Printer:

We use this as a personal printer and as an frequent home office printer. It is replacing an older and worn out HP 6310 printer. This printer is physically larger and takes up a larger footprint than the 6310.(The first 8500 I brought home had a loose piece of the mechanism jamming the print carriage. HP Tech Support, with a foreign worker on the phone, was pretty useless and he did not understand the problem. I gave up on him and brought that printer back to Staples for an instant exchange. This review is of the second printer.)The first thing that I did after unpacking the printer, using the excellent HP procedure for the 8500 All-in-One on their website, was to uninstall all my previous printer drivers and run CCleaner to remove any lingering HP registry entries. Once done I downloaded and installed the most recent installation package for the printer, bypassing the installation disk. The printer installed perfectly in my network, as did the fax drivers. This was a huge improvement over past HP printer installations and I believe that using CCleaner helped with that process.The first time that the printer is turned on takes 10-20 minutes because the printer is running its diagnostics and priming the printer ink lines and the two print heads. On a normal startup in takes about 2:15 to run its diagnostics and check its print heads and ink supply.This printer does not use the tri-color cartridge of previous all-in-ones, but rather four separate cartridges. This will be expensive the first time the starter ink cartridges need replacement, but should be less expensive in the long run since running out of one color will not cause you to need to throw out perfectly good ink for the other two colors. I also purchased the initially more expensive XL replacement inks that are also cheaper on a per copy basis. One other thing, the print heads are not included with the ink, but the available information is that they are long-lasting.The actual print quality is excellent. The print speed is excellent and a noticeable improvement over the 6310. My ability to fax directly from Microsoft Word was seamless and fast.This printer comes capable of duplex printing. The installation of the duplexer was easy and took about 10 seconds. Printing in duplex is slower than printing one-sided prints. In the duplex mode the printer prints the first side and almost ejects it and then lets the ink dry for 10-15 seconds. Once the ink has had a few seconds to dry the printer backs the page back into itself, prints the second side and then ejects the finished page.I am quite happy with this printer, especially since I actually only spent [$] for it after turning in an older printer for the $50.00 instant credit under a HP program that runs through 9/29/09.

Comments about HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One Printer:

I purchased this to replace my previous d series AOI from 2002. That unit was still working pretty well up until recently, so I think HP has pretty good reliability.

We do like this machine; we do recommend it but we have issues:

The first thing is that this base model doesn't have the full 14" glass for scanning drawings, sketches, etc which we do a lot of. The promo info says you can scan up to 8.5 x 14 but it doesn't say you have use the feeder to do that. Only part of the top opens and so the glass is only 11". You have to buy the next one up to get the whole top to open for the full 14". So we had to return the base model the day we set it up and discovered this and pay $100 more for the wireless capable Bluetooth model because it has the full glass. And not just for scanning, but you can't even photocopy photos out of magazine or a book, or images in a product binder, etc etc without the fully opening top.

The second thing is that so far the software does not allow color options on our iMac's! It says "No user selectable options" in the printer dialog box! We tried getting help from HP, but this is NOT resolved. We have another printer, a wide format printer, so we can use that when we want to change the settings to improve the prints, but it is unbelievable that this machine does not allow user selectable options for saturation, brightness, warmer, cooler, cmyk settings etc!!

I'm sure it's a software thing that we have to download some update or some fix from HP but this problem, and HP's lack of response when we tried to get it resolved is really unacceptable--especially for a machine that has card slots for photo cards, etc. How do you color correct for photos from the card?

Third thing (a minor issue) is that there are so many options on all the other functions that it is difficult and confusing to use compared to my previous AOI (which had the color options!!!!). They have made the controls far more complicated; you have to go through so many touch screens on the unit; a little better when you use the onscreen prompts on the computer, but it seems needlessly complicated compared to the AOI it replaced.

I would have kept the old AOI except it was dying and they offered a $50 rebate to trade it in.

I also wonder why it has to have a bright green stripe on the control panel. A little garish compared to the fairly sophisticated design of the rest of the machine.

I do like this machine, as much as the old one, really, but the overly complicated controls, the lack of info on the scanner for the base model and this lack of color options stuff is incredibly annoying when mostly it does what we want an AOI to do. It has spec'd duty cycle of 15,000 pages/month. We do a few hundred, maybe between 1 and 2000, but the spec on the other models is only 5 or 7000/month, so we expect this to be a very reliable machine, like the last one.

Comments about HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One Printer:

I upgraded this product from a HP 7310 which broke after 4 or 5 years of use. This printer has it all. No need to go for the more pricier models of the 8500 series (unless you want wireless printing).

This is a network printer that can do duplex (double sided) printing. Print quality is very nice and fast. Scanning over the network works great with the feeder. It scans into a PDF file in a specific location even if you do not own a PDF application (reminds me of corporate scanners). The flatbed scanning brings out nice quality scans too. I have not run into any software issues, but it feels cleaner than the 7310's software. The software instantly finds the printer on the network. The design is more compact than previous models that I have looked at.

The downside of the printer is the ink cost (like any other printer nowadays). I have not run into any issues yet with the printer. It also doesn't have the nice big LCD that I had on the 7310. I believe the higher end 8500 series models have the big LCD, but there is no need to spend more for that. Not really a con, but the flatbed scanner is slightly smaller than the 7310, but this model is more compact so that is expected.

All in all, this is a great investment if you own multiple computers on a network, but do not want to pay the extra for the wireless functionality. If you do moderate printing on average and require some heavy printing at times, this printer will do the job nicely. Highly recommended.