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HP OfficeJet 6500 Wireless all-in-one inkjet

Nice print quality, great running costs

Moving further right, there's a number pad for fax dialling – this is a fairly standard 33.6Kb/s fax, though it will handle colour faxing if you know the receiving machine does, too. At the right-hand end are three speed-dial buttons but, in fact, the machine supports up to 100, numbered speed-dials.

HP OfficeJet 6500 Wireless

Extra controls for faxing

Below the control panel is a single paper tray which can take up to 250 sheets. This is a slightly unusual design: the lid of the paper tray, which in typical HP style is also the output tray, is only supported on its right-hand side. The left-hand side is the adjustable paper guide for A4 right down to 15 x 10cm sheets. A pull-out paper support has to be extended when printing A4, increasing the machine’s footprint by a good 15cm.

The two memory card slots, at bottom left of the front panel, take SD, MemoryStick and xD cards, but not CompactFlash.

At the back are sockets for USB and Ethernet, as well as for a phone line and a handset, if you want to connect one. The reason for paying extra for the wireless version of this machine, though, is to use its 802.11g Wi-Fi connection, and this is easy enough to set up, using the USB cable supplied. Once connected, the entire setup procedure is automatic.

HP likes to be versatile with its connections and this machine can run with any version of Windows after 2000 and Mac OS X from 10.4 on, out of the box. Snow Leopard's install-when-needed printer driver mechanism supports the 6500 series.

There's also downloadable support for Linux via HPLIP, which is already included in many Linux distributions. More information here.

HP OfficeJet 6500 Wireless

A duplex is built in as standard - hence the bulge at the back

Thanks to the new ISO standard for speed tests, HP claims this machine can print black pages at up to 8.2ppm and colour ones at up to 5.4ppm. Our five-page, black text job gave 4.2ppm, but when we printed a 20-page document, the speed went up to 9.0ppm. This must be the first time we've had a printer outpace its speed specification in years and it's a good speed for a machine in this price bracket.

Next page: Verdict

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