All-in-one printer

Wednesday October 14, 2009
Big functions for small office
By SHAUN A. NOORDIN

Whether you need to print, scan, copy or fax documents, the HP Officejet Pro 8500 is here to serve.

When I was asked to review a home/small office ­printer, I was expecting a regular sized printer.

You know, the kind you plug into your home PC to print out your school assignments or overdue office reports. Nothing big, nothing fancy.

So, you can imagine my surprise when a colleague had to strain himself hauling in the absolutely huge HP Officejet Pro 8500 into the office.

It’s so huge, my drawer can go into the box it came in! I now have a printer taking up literally a third of my desk and my colleague now has a hernia.

Turns out there’s a good reason for this, though. The Officejet isn’t “just” a printer for a small or home office.

It’s a combination of printer, ­scanner, copier and fax machine. It’s as if the people at HP were thinking, “now, how many features can we cram into this thing?” and worked their way up from there.

And the best thing about it? It does each part really well.

Setting up

Plugging the Officejet Pro into my Windows XP machine, I found that the setup was much easier than I anticipated.

The assembly mostly consisted of plugging in the duplexer to the back of the printer, and the HP software that came packaged with the machine took care of the functional side of things.

Although the Officejet comes in a few flavours, I only got to review the basic (A909a) version.

I had to be content with a ­(physical) button interface on the machine instead of a fancy ­touchscreen available on the more expensive Wireless (A909g) and Premier (A909n) versions.

(Incidentally, the Wireless and Premier versions also come with WiFi connectivity, so check those out if you have a thing against wires.)

Nonetheless, most of the Officejet’s essential features were made very accessible from its control panel.

With the press of a few buttons I could easily scan multiple documents, adjust the quality of the copier and — why not? — print photos directly from a USB thumbdrive.

Print media

Since the Officejet was designed for home/small office use, I decided to test the inkjet printer by printing out the most business-ish document on my PC — a Magic: The Gathering rulebook.

Hey, don’t laugh. The text came out sharp, the graphics/illustrations were all very clear, and the colours were strong and vivid.

Subsequent tests on various e-mail messages, webpages and (actual) business documents proved that the Officejet consistently produced excellent colour and greyscale prints, even at the default settings.

On the other hand, I was only happy with the high-resolution photos I printed until I paid closer inspection.

The colours, although bright, weren’t a perfect reproduction of my JPGs. This carried over to the copier function too, so it wasn’t just my monitor.

Plus, if I made the effort to notice, I could see barely visible horizontal lines on the photo (also known as banding), even at the best print settings.

If you’re not as fussy as I am with my photos, you can even print your pictures directly from a memory device by sticking it into one of the four memory card slots or the USB port on the machine.

The quick and the quiet

HP claims that you can print 19 pages of colour documents (at normal quality) per minute but realistically I only saw a speed of 10 to 11 pages per minute.

It’s much slower if you’re printing duplex, though, since the printer waits about 10 seconds for one side to dry.

Still, it’s a pretty decent speed since I rarely needed to print a mass of documents that utilised the full capacity of the 250-sheet tray.

Additionally, whether it’s printing or scanning, the Officejet rarely generated sounds that rose above the standard background noise of the office.

It’s not exactly whisper-quiet, but the only chance you’d complain about the machine being “noisy” is if your home happens to be in ­a ­monastery.

Scan-tastic

The Officejet features a flatbed ­scanner at the top of the machine that measures in at 8.5 x 11.7in. That makes it perfect for A4 and letter-sized sheets (which the printer function also uses), but you might have a little trouble with legal (8.5 x 14in) documents.

Alternatively, if you’ve got a pile of documents to scan, you can simply throw up to 35 pages into the ­scanner’s Automatic Document Feeder, press a button and sit back as the machine makes JPG or PDF copies.

The documents scan at 200dpi by default (higher if you adjust the manual settings), so that it captures all the details that you might need.

The scanner also has an OCR ­(optical character recognition) feature if you literally want your pictures to be worth a thousand words.

Copy and fax

As you might imagine, the copier function combines the Officejet’s scanning and printing capabilities, so you end up with copies with an excellent resolution and strong, vivid colours.

Unfortunately, the good quality of the copies is contrasted by the function’s relative inefficiency compared to (obviously) a dedicated photocopier.

For one thing, you’re using ­printer ink, so if you go too crazy with making copies you’ll soon need to restock on HP’s cyans, magentas, yellows and blacks.

For another, the time it takes to copy a single page is the sum of time it takes for the scanner to start and the printer to finish. Happy waiting!

One additional function on the feature-laden Officejet is the fax. But honestly though, with the advent of e-mail, does anybody use faxes anymore? I fax as often as I hunt pterodactyls.

Still, it’s comforting to know that if I need to fax anybody, the ­function’s there. You can store up to 99 numbers on speed dial, and the standard features such as fax forwarding are all there.

Conclusion

The HP Officejet Pro 8500 makes an excellent addition to any home or small office. It’s easy to use, it features a lot of essential business functions and it handles its main job — the printing of documents — really well.

The only real drawbacks I noticed were the copy function’s lack of efficiency, and the less-than-perfect quality of the photo prints... but only because I’m really, really fussy about my photos.

To be honest, I’ve grown pretty fond of having the Officejet around — so much so that I’m rather ­reluctant to return the review unit.

I’ll really miss having the ­convenience afforded to me by the machine’s multitude of well-­engineered features.

And besides, I’d probably hurt my back if I tried to move the thing from my desk by myself.

Pros: Features an array of well-designed functions that combine into one effective machine.

Cons: Photo prints could be better; copier function not as efficient as a dedicated photocopy machine.
Officejet Pro 8500

(HP)
All-in-one printer
PRINT RESOLUTION: 1,200 x 1,200dpi
INKS: Officejet Inks — CMYK
PRINT SPEED: 19ppm (black, normal quality)
SCAN RESOLUTION: Up to 4,800dpi
COPY RESOLUTION: Up to 1,200 x 600dpi
COPY SPEED: Up to 34cpm (colour)
INTERFACE: USB 2.0, ethernet, RJ-11, fax, PictBridge
PAPER HANDLING: 250-sheet input tray (printer); 35-sheet automatic document feeder (scanner)
PAPER SIZES: Up to A4
OTHER FEATURES: Fax, memory card slots (CF, Memory Stick, SD, SDHC, MMC, xD)
DIMENSIONS (W x D x H): 19.45 x 18.86 x 11.77in
WEIGHT: 12kg
PRICE: RM1,299
WEBSITE: www.hp.com
Review unit courtesy of HP Malaysia, 1-800-88-4848.