HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-one Printer
Posted by phone deals staff | Posted in Fax & Multifunction Devices | Posted on 05-09-2010
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- Maximum Print Speed 35 ppm Black/34 ppm Color, Laser Quality Up to 15 ppm Black/Up to 11 ppm Color
- Built-in Ethernet Networking
- 2 Line Text LCD Display
- 250-Sheet Paper Tray, 35-Sheet Automatic Document Feeder, Automatic Two-Sided Printing
- 64 MB Memory, 384 MHz Processor Speed, and Scan Resolution Up to 2400 x 4800 dpi
Product Description
Looking for professional-looking printing that’s also affordable? Our Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-One offers impressive results at up to 50% lower color cost per page and using less energy than with laser printers. You’ll be able to print, copy, scan, and fax, plus cut your paper usage in half by printing on both sides of the page…. More >>
HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-in-one Printer
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I have been looking for a networked color laser printer suitable for home and small office use for some time. Then I received an ad for this printer. I was convinced to try it because of the new ink technology, the relatively low cost of replacement ink cartridges and the duplex printing capability. So far I’ve been completely satisfied. It’s easily fast enough for my use. Print quality is high. It seems to have good color accuracy; I’ve printed a couple of photos on high quality photo paper and been quite pleased. It was a breeze to install (we are a Mac household). The scan and copy functions are easy to use. Duplex printing is slow but adequate for the times it is used. I’ve yet to have to replace a cartridge so I can’t speak to the cost per page of printing.
Rating: 4 / 5
Note that ink for this printer will set you back One Hundred and fourteen dollars!!!
Before purchasing the Officejet 8500, be aware that there appears to be compatibility issues with the current drivers (as of 5/5/2009) and Windows XP. Basically, the user gets the following error: “The printer has not yet responded, but the Microsoft Office program may be able to proceed without printer information”. I have spent hours on the phone with their India-based tech support and with their chat technical support. Sadly, HP provides the worst technical support that I have ever experienced. The telephone reps barely speak English and the chat reps serve multiple customers at the same time, leading to long delays between their responses. Moreover, I have been cut off during chat sessions five times, which leads me to believe it is intentional as this always seems to happen when I attempt to corner them on difficult questions. Before getting cut off today (5/5/2009) the chat technical support rep acknowledged that there are known incompatibilities between the drivers and Windows XP. Presumably, this means the software was written for Vista.
Also be aware of the astronomical ink cartridge prices that will set you back half the cost of a new printer.
This is the third HP multifunction printer I have purchased. Historically, I have purchased top-of-the-line models from the HP Officejet line for my home office. Generally, I have been rather pleased and impressed with their ability to work for years with few paper jams, either in the printer or document feeder. My primary complaints with HP and these printers are twofold: 1) the ink prices are exorbitant (i.e. pay as you go) and 2) HP has atrocious tech support. The Officejet 8500 appears to have all-around better construction than the other HP Officejet multifunction printers I have owned. Yet it hasn’t been without problems.
Looking back at my other purchases, it is striking how much prices have come down. Yet HP continues to gouge its customers on ink with the four cartridges costing $[...]+ tax. The first Officejet (d155xi) worked almost flawlessly for three years. I finally decided to sell it when moving. The second Officejet (7310xi) worked extremely well until one day it would not power on. Apparently, something had gone wrong with its main processor. The printer was on a surge protector the entire time, so I have no idea why this happened. I do turn the surge protector off every day before going to work to save electricity as this severs vampire loads from the electrical system. Perhaps the on/off cycles were not good for the printer. After determining the 7310xi was beyond repair, I purchased an Officejet 8500 from HP direct. The printer appears to be well made, but it has problems with communicating with my notebook in addition to having issues with photo printing that have been not fully resolved.
The timeline of my Officejet purchases:
2002 – March Officejet d155xi (HP Direct) 800 + tax/shipping
2006 – March Officejet 7310xi (Sam’s Club) 368 + tax
2009 – April Officejet 8500 (HP Direct) 269 + tax/shipping -fifty buck trade-in rebate for 7310xi
The 8500 does not come with a USB cable, which was not an issue [at first] since I have so many surplus cables. Apparently, the 16ft cable I used with the 7310xi was not compatible, possibly because it may have been a USB 1.0 version, which I can’t determine. So I tried one of the dozen or so shorter USB cables I have, some of which were in fact USB 2.0. While I got the printer to work, I repeatedly get errors such as “The printer has not yet responded, but the Microsoft Office program may be able to proceed without printer information”. So, I purchased a new 16ft. Belkin USB 2.0. Unfortunately, I still get the same errors and freezing of the computer. I have not resolved the problem and don’t look forward to calling HP’s tech support. Their Indian support reps have the worst English I have ever had to deal with in a tech support setting. I do appreciate their new chat tech-support option, which allows the customer to select his skill level such as “novice” or “expert”. Yet, the chat sessions abruptly severed communication with me multiple times with a red warning message, “we are having technical problems, please call tech support”. What a ridiculous headache!
PRINTER DESIGN AND BUILD QUALITY
Despite HP’s less than acceptable tech support, HP’s engineers deserve credit for improving the design and build quality of their multifunction printers. Even though the previous printers never had a problem with broken paper trays or document feeders, these plastic pieces seemed extremely flimsy. The 8500 seems to be better constructed in that thicker, rigid plastic was used. Additionally, the parts that require interaction by the user, such as the receptacles for the ink cartridges, are much more accessible.
SPEED
While I have not conducted a side-by-side test, both printing and scanning appear to be faster than my most recent Officejet prior to this one, the 7310xi. Despite the increased speed, the 8500 doesn’t shake my printer stand as violently as the 7310xi did, suggesting the engineers used a lower-inertia print head. The scanning appears slightly faster, but really not fast enough for large jobs. Truthfully, I would pay a lot more for much faster scanning. I have a grown accustomed to using a Ricoh 6500 copier/printer/scanner at my day job. The ~50 page/minute scan to pdf capability really changes the utility of the printer.
STILL NO DOUBLE SIDED SCANNING
One of the features that really attracted me to the original Officejet was its double-sided printing capability. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide true double sided scanning. Some of scan options suggest the 8500 can perform double sided scanning but this appears to be more of function to interleave the second (back) set of pages. For larger double-sided documents, I find myself using the industrial strength Ricoh 6500.
PRINT QUALITY
The black text quality appears to be slightly better than that of the 7310xi. In fact, it appears indistinguishable from laser print quality. However, there have been some problems printing in color. First, when printing on plain white paper on regular ink volume settings, the colors appear a bit less vivid than the prints I made with my 7310xi. In fact, I have a few samples of color documents printed on the 7310xi that I was able to compare side-by-side with the output of the 8500, which clearly showed the difference between the two prints. Yet, this may be a result of HP’s strategy to market this printer as being more ink efficient.
When printing on photo paper, there appears to be some issues when selecting the photo quality settings and “HP Advanced Photo Paper” as the paper type. Using both HP photo paper and Kodak “everyday” photo paper, there were striations across the center of the page. It isn’t clear if the HP photo paper I was using was truly their “advanced” paper as this was a sample pack from HP. When using the “other photo paper” option, there were no striations. With certain other papers, however, I found that the ink would run with the slightest exposure to water – even after drying for more than one hour. Barely visible drops of water would cause easily visible spots on the page. While it isn’t clear precisely what was done with the ink and requisite paper compatibility, the 8500 does appear to be more fickle than the predecessors.
In summary, the 8500 appears to be better designed and constructed than previous Officejet models but is less user friendly. My guess is that many of the problems I am experiencing will be resolved when new drivers are made available. However, as a fairly technical user, I would not expect so many difficulties getting the printer to work. Moreover, HP’s consumer tech support is so unforgivably bad the company does not deserve your business.
Cons:
*Tech support is totally unacceptable, off-shore reps have both a poor command of the English language and weak technical skills
*Online chat tech support is disjointed with reps chatting with multiple customers simultaneously
*Printer communication problems unresolved as of 5/5/2009
*Photo printing requires more adjustments of settings
*Still doesn’t have a true double-siding SCANNING mechanism
*Drivers for XP seem to have compatibility issues
Pros
*Fast printing and scanning for a piece of home office equipment
*Sturdier construction than predecessors
*Reasonable price for the performance/functionality
*Smoother/quieter than previous Officejet printers
Rating: 1 / 5
I purchased my Officejet 8500 in early August. I had delayed my purchase for some months milking my old 7410 to the bitter end because of the generally horrible online reviews of the 8500. Finally I decided that the main failure of the 8500 was in its inability to feed multiple sheets without skipping pages and that seemed only to happen to 30-40% of the printers reviewed.
When I received my printer I tested its ability to accurately feed longer documents by both copying and faxing a 10 page document and it appeared to work, so I felt somewhat relieved and other than the bloatware provided by HP decided it was a pretty good purchase. And the bloatware can be avoided by using the Vista or Windows 7 drivers without the software.
Unfortunately within 6 weeks my 8500 has picked up the inability to consecutively load pages placed in its feed tray. It took 5 tries yesterday to fax a 15 page document. The first 4 tries faxed between 11 and 14 of the pages as the feed mechanism tried to work. I am not even certain that the 5th try worked completely but by that time I figured the recipient had enough copies of the document that they could compile one complete set.
So if you need to copy, scan for fax more than 2-3 page documents this is not the printer for you.
An additional problem is that it will not act as a stable member of a network if you use it as a wireless printer on your network. About once a week it will either go offline or get constipated with a print job. When that happens it generally takes a couple of hours of starting and stopping the puter, the printer and the print spooler and clearing the spooler to get it clear enough to delete as a printer and than it must be added again. I have heard that it is because HP has been unable to make the printer work with the Windows 7 DHCP system and that setting a static IP address may help. I suppose it does a bit as I only have to spend this hour or two every week now and was doing it every 2-3 days with a dynamic IP address being used.
Too bad they don’t sell the older HP 7410 any longer as that was a great printer. The 8500 Premier Wireless is simply junk.
PK
Rating: 1 / 5
In our small office we print over 5000 sheets a month and share the printer over a USB switch with 4 of us. We use it also for scanning and sending out customer documents. Speed for faxing and scanning was important as we often scan and fax 20 to 40 pgs.
The price per page was excellent due to the oversized ink cartridges printing 2 or 3 times the number of pages as we had previously obtained with other HP ink jets. For every day printing we have further cut printing costs by 75% by using refilled cartiridges from ebay. Overall the best color printer we have purchased in the last 4 years.
Only drawback that we have found is that for pdf scanning, a direct usb connection to a PC is required. Bottom line: Its got speed and the initial price is higher, but with much lower ink costs, payback is in a couple of months.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve owned various HP inkjet and laser printers since 1984. Once got an old LaserJet II from eBay that had an asset tag from the City of Beverly Hills for $125 that ran for 3 years after I replaced the paper pickup clutch. (I’m a nerd…I work on EVERYTHING I own!)
A couple of years ago, I got a Lexmark All-In-One, new, at Target, for $25 on sale. Seemed a no-brainer until I realized it was an ink sucking nightmare. Photo quality was below average as well, even with “premium” papers. It finally died 2 months ago and I started shopping for a new AIO printer.
Found the OfficeJet 8500 at Office Depot on sale and paid $199, quite a bit less than the MSRP. Got a 25% discount on the 940XL cartridges, and went home to install the printer. Took less than 30 minutes to unbox, attach to the house network, and install the drivers on 2 PCs. (both Windows XP, SP3) The test pages looked good, but one of my needs was to be able to print 8×10 photos I use for my acting auditions. I’m usually told to bring 2 headshots and a resume, which translates to $6-7 per audition, if I get prints from CVS or Wal-Mart self-service kiosks. That doesn’t include driving and my time.
So, the first thing I sent to the printer after setup and alignment completed was a hi-res color headshot from my portfolio. WOW! I use HP and Kodak papers as a rule, but NEVER got anything this excellent from the Lexmark. In fact, a side-by-side comparison with prints from the pro machine at CVS were identical. AND, the ink doesn’t smudge a bit.
Text printing is equally impressive. Crisp, clean, and no jaggies, even with small point sizes using average 20lb. stock. Made perfect copies of some legal documents I needed and sent a fax to a business associate as well with ZERO problems.
My wife is totally non-technical and she LOVES this printer. She has a small HP DeskJet in her office, but occasionally needs copy and fax functions it doesn’t have. The printer goes to “sleep”…power saving mode…but wakes up nearly instantly if either of us send a job to it. So far, no jams or issues of any kind.
I will also mention that both of us have iPhones and take a lot of pictures. Got the free HP iPrint app from iTunes and it found the 8500 first try and printed excellent 4 x 6 photos from our Camera Rolls on the phones. Zero problems, excellent output.
In short, this is the nicest, most full-featured “home” printer I’ve ever owned. The only “issue” was opening TCP port 9100 on my firewalls for the printer. For some users, this might be a problem, although the installer and docs tell you how to do it. (yes folks, it DOES pay to RTFM!!) Everything else was so simple and/or automated, a (reasonably bright) child could install this printer.
I recommend the 8500 without reservation.
Rating: 5 / 5