HP OfficeJet 6500 Wireless all-in-one inkjet

Nice print quality, great running costs

Wed 9 Sep 2009 // 11:38 UTC

Colour print doesn't quite better the headline rate, but we still got 3.9ppm from a five-page document, which is a fair speed. Part of what holds up the machine is the amount of ‘fiddling around’ it does before starting. It's presumably priming it's print heads, though these are fed from four separate ink tanks plugged directly into the head carrier. It's not as if it's having to keep connecting tubes full of ink.

A neat ADF keeps the overall height of the machine down

Duplex print is hampered, as with most inkjets, by the need to wait for the first side to dry before printing the second. A 20-side duplex document took 7m 15s to complete, which is a speed of 2.76 sides per minute. Quite a jump down from the 9ppm for single-sided print.

Photo printing is quick, with a 15 x 10cm print taking just 41s – an impressive time for a machine not geared primarily to photo output. The quality is also there, with our test landscape photo sharing very smooth gradations and colour across areas of open sky and natural colours throughout. Although some detail in darker, shadowed areas is lost, it’s still a very sound performance.

Colour print on plain paper is also good. Though not quite up to the standard of a toner-based laser printer, there’s still very little sign of ink-run into the paper nap, so there are good, clean edges to characters and bright colours from the improved gamut of liquid inks. The only place this isn't quite true is when copying, when the machine over inks, particularly on black text. Fortunately, this can be adjusted for from the control panel or driver.

The ink cartridges are the only consumables in this machine and they all have a healthy capacity. The three colour cartridges should yield 700 ISO pages and the black cartridges, available in standard and high-yield versions, offer 420 and 1200 pages. The black and colour cartridges have SRPs of £21 and £10, giving costs per page of 1.75p for black and 6.04p for colour. These prices compare very favourably with those for colour laser printers in the £100-200 range, so HP's claims of up to 40 per cent reduction in running costs aren't outlandish.

Verdict

The OfficeJet 6500 Wireless is a very well-balanced all-in-one. It has a strong feature set, including photo printing and full fax functionality, as well as fast document scanning using its ADF. Speeds are pretty much what it says on the box - unusual in itself - and print quality and especially running costs make this is a very desirable small-office machine. ®