Review: The HP Officejet Pro 8500

Last week, Hewlett Packard sent me their HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 to review. Here’s what I have found, after a week of putting it through it’s paces.

First things first, I am not a printer geek. In fact, printers REALLY bore me.  I have probably owned around 20 printers and they were all pretty much the same – other than slight improvements in the print quality and speed over the years.  So, when the 8500 arrived at our offices, I was not expecting to be impressed.

I was wrong – here’s why!

Ok, firstly, the HP Officejet Pro 8500 (909g) has wifi and the range is superb.  You can, if you wish, connect it using USB or Ethernet.  However, the wifi option means there’s no need to worry about where you place it in your office, because it doesn’t need anything other than a power source.

Like many printers in its price range, the 8500 is also a photocopier, a colour fax machine (does anyone still fax?), a 5 slot card reader and a scanner.

Functions are controlled, either from your computer or via the bright, colour touch screen on the front of the machine.  Using the touch panel, I was able to connect to the office router in around 60 seconds.

Print speed, cost and quality

I know what you are thinking, it’s an inkjet printer, so it’s going to be slow, expensive to run and the print quality is going to be nothing like as good as a colour laser printer. No, probably no, and no.

Speed wise, this printer is easily the fastest inkjet I have seen. It’s actually as fast as my HP laser 1300.  Usually, an inkjet printer really struggles to print lines or tables, so I tested the 8500 on a pdf document I have, which is basically packed with tables, line graphs, line drawings and such.  Not only did it print everything without a flaw, it did so extremely quickly.

HP claims the running cost of the 8500 is extremely low, with a CPP (cost per page) of around HALF the price of laser printers in the same price range! Talking of running costs, the 8500 is designed to use as little power as possible, drawing around half the electricity of laser printers in it’s price range.

The print quality is simply stunning.  Text, images and photographs all look superb.  Even using default settings, the 8500 produces sharp, professional documents.

Two sided printing

The 8500 can print on both sides of a sheet of paper, direct from the feeder tray.  It prints on one side, waits a few seconds for the ink to dry, then it feeds the sheet back into the printer and prints on the reverse side.  The alignment of the print has been perfect every time and the end result very impressive.  I have seen this feature on more expensive laser printers, but not as sophisticated on inkjet printers or laser printers in this price range. This is a great way to reduce your paper costs and is obviously kinder to the environment too.

Scanner & OCR

The 8500 will also scan documents to a network folder, by pressing it’s ‘digital filing’ button.  Equally, you can scan direct to email – again, at the press of a button!

In addition, it comes with it’s own Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which works very well. I tested it, by getting it to scan a document, which it had already printed.  It then opened that scanned document in my word processor and the OCR was 100% accurate.  It can be configured to open scanned documents in other programs, depending on your requirements.

Memory card support

There are 5 slots on the front of the printer, for memory cards.  It takes:
1. Compact flash 1 and 2
2. Secure Digital (MMC)
3. XD Picture Card
4. Memory Stick / Magic Gate Memory Stick / Memory Stick Duo
5. USB – PictBridge enabled

The price?

The Recomended Retail Price in the UK is £310, though at the time of writing this they are available via amazon.com for £249. Shop around!

The HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 – Pros and cons

Pros

• Wifi - Can be easily positioned and no need for cables.  Wifi range is very good too.
• Speed – Comparable to laser speed.
• Running cost – HP claim running costs are 50% lower than similarly priced laser printers.
• Print quality – Excellent.
• Convergence - Photocopier, scanner and fax all work well.
• Software set up - Easy and quick to install.  Set up took less than 25 minutes under Windows XP and Vista.
• Touch screen – The touch screen is clear and really useful.
• Environment - Low energy pull and double sided printing, to reduce paper consumption.

Cons

• Software - I found the software to be awkward to navigate around at first.
• Noise - Noisy on start up. Fine after that though.
• Standby mode – One of its energy saving features is to go into a standby mode. I found the computer sometimes lost the connection when the printer came out of standby mode.

Overall: 9.0 out of 10

I really enjoyed putting the 8500 through its paces.  The print quality is superb and once you get used to the awkward software that comes with it, it’s very easy to get high quality results.  If the running costs are as low as the guys at HP claim, I will increase my score to 9.5 / 10!

[Full Disclosure: This unit was sent to me to review by HP, free of charge.]