Review HP has a difficult game to play. It wants to increase usage of its inkjet printers and all-in-ones by selling them small business, but in doing so it risks hitting the colour laser printer market, in which it’s the major player. The OfficeJet Pro 8500 Wireless is a case in point. It's a fast, high-capacity inkjet all-in-one which could directly undercut sales of colour lasers.

HP's OfficeJet Pro 8500 Wireless: laser beater?

Folk who still view inkjet printers as devices where the ink cartridges clip into the print heads and need replacing often, with ink costing more per cubic centimetre than vintage champagne, should think again. The OfficeJet Pro 8500 Wireless cartridges last for thousands of pages, plug in conveniently at the front and the ink has nothing on a good Chateau Lafite.

This isn’t the world’s most attractive all-in-one, with a high-angled feed tray to its automatic document feeder (ADF), a jutting control panel and an obtrusive paper tray sticking out the front, but HP has tried to relieve the lines with some generous curves.

The ADF can take up to 50 sheets and lifts to reveal a full A4 flatbed for single-sheet scanning. The single paper tray – there’s no separate photo tray as there is on many of HP’s Photosmart all-in-ones – can take up to 250 sheets and is easy to fill, once you’ve removed the cover, which also acts as the output tray, in typical HP fashion. A second 250-sheet tray, fitting underneath the machine, is available as an option.

At the right-hand end of the front panel is a group of four memory card slots, covering all the current types, and a USB socket for PictBridge devices. There's another USB port at the back, but no Ethernet. This is slightly strange, as the machine does include Wi-Fi networking, which can be set up easily from the machine’s 88mm touchscreen. That’s ‘easily’ once you’re used to the fairly insensitive touchscreen, which produced a number of miss-hits during testing.

There's but a single input tray for plain and photo paper

Perhaps HP realises its touchscreen isn’t as tactile as it should be. There are a lot of physical buttons on the control panel, too, for fax dialing – a 33.6Kb/s fax modem is built in – scanning and copying.

To set up wirelessly, you scan for networks from the OfficeJet Pro and enter whatever encryption key is necessary. Then install the network driver on a PC or Mac, which spots the machine on the network and completes the connection. There are drivers for versions of Windows from 2000 on and for Mac OS X 4.11 and above. There are no HP Linux or Unix drivers.

Each drop-in head handles two colours

HP includes its own software bundle with the machine, which includes optical character recognition (OCR) for use with the scanner, as well as basic photo editing through Photosmart Essential.

Setting the device up physically is also fairly easy. Two removable print heads, each servicing two ink colours, have to be slotted into the head carrier and the four ink cartridges plug in at the front of the machine, behind a fold-down cover. There’s a prolonged charge cycle, which needs to be run through on each cartridge change, and the device is then ready to print.

HP quotes the speed of the OfficeJet Pro 8500 as 35ppm and 34ppm respectively for black and colour in draft mode, and 15ppm and 11ppm in "laser comparable" mode. We printed in normal quality and completed a five-page black-text document in 29 seconds, a speed of 10.3ppm. This rose to 12.8ppm for a 20-page job, so pretty close to the quoted speed - and pretty fast for an inkjet.

A five-page text and colour graphics job took 52s (5.8ppm) so not as close to the specs, but still quick. Print duplex, though, and print speeds plummet. A 20-side print took 6m 08s, or 3.3spm. This is largely due to waiting for the first side of each page to dry before printing the second and is common to most duplex inkjets, though it’s exacerbated here by the slower drying pigment inks.

The ink cartridges are very easy to replace

Since HP's Vivera inks are pigment-based, they are much more resistant to water and light fade than more commonplace dye-based inks, and while prints are not as clean as they are from a typical dry toner printers, the colour gamut is a lot wider, meaning photo prints are a good deal more natural.

In fact, given that this isn’t primarily a photo printer, the image quality is pretty good. Colours are a little over-vivid, but there’s plenty of detail and colour gradations are smooth.

The duplexer looks like an afterthought

Moving onto plain paper, there’s a slight fuzz around emboldened characters, but text is generally clean and sharp. It’s not as die-cut as the ouptut from many modern lasers, but is easily good enough for day-to-day correspondence. Colour graphics make more of the vividness of the inks and solid colours are smooth, without noticeable stippling. Registration of black text over colour is spot-on.

A colour photocopy lightens colours from the original, but not by much. This is primarily a test of the scan head and in this and in straight scans, it does a good job of capturing both detail and tones. The scanner has a hardware resolution of 2400 by 4800ppi, which is unusually high for a scanner in an all-in-one, so is suitable for scanning photos, even for enlargement, as well as being fine for OCR text scans.

The print heads should be lifetime components in the OfficeJet Pro 8500 Wireless, barring any physical damage, and the ink cartridges each last for plenty of ISO pages. The standard yield black cartridge lasts for 1000 and the high-yield one for 2200. The high-yield colour cartridges – standard yield ones aren’t freely available – should manage 1400 pages.

Not compact

These relatively high capacities for an inkjet – compare them with colour laser printers in the same price range – give costs per page of 1.2p for an ISO black page and 4.8p for colour. As HP claims, this is noticeably lower than many colour-laser equivalents. For example, the Dell 2135CN laser multifunction has costs of 2.1p and 9.5p, respectively, for the same pages, and costs for the Samsung CLX-3175FW are 2.8p and 12.9p.

Verdict

Most of the claims made for the OfficeJet Pro 8500 stand up. It costs about the same as a colour laser, is surprisingly much cheaper to run, prints quickly – as long as you don’t duplex – and produces good plain paper print. To cap it, it consumes just 55W of power when printing and pumps out photos lasers can only dream of. ®

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