HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 Wireless

Colour laser killer?

Wed 20 May 2009 // 12:02 UTC

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. ®