HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 All-In-One Wireless

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The HP Officejet Pro 8500 All-In-One Wireless inkjet printer is a near-perfect solution for small businesses and home offices hunting for a device that can print, scan, fax, copy in record time, all with high-quality results. This printer sets the bar high in terms of all the features it manages to pack into a relatively small footprint: Automatic duplexing, 802.11b/g, a 3.45-inch touchscreen, 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), and a legal-size scanner are only some of the extras this machine has to offer. Some will balk at the US$280 price tag, but spend half an hour with the Pro 8500 and we're sure you'll want one of your own.

Editors' note:

This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some other products in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia.

Design And Features

The Pro 8500 is the HP Officejet J6480's older, more accomplished brother. The larger-capacity paper trays actually make it bigger than the J6480, measuring a meaty 494 x 479 x 331mm. Most of the bulk is due to the built-in features including the automatic duplexer, 50-sheet ADF and legal-size scanner bay, all of which contribute to the footprint. This isn't so unwieldy when you consider the average size of a heavy-duty color all-in-one laser.

The Pro 8500 retains the matte white and gray panels with a glossy black cockpit in the center that blends easily into a variety of decors.
(Click for larger image)

Like the J6480 and other HP printers in the Officejet line, the Pro 8500 retains the matte white and gray panels with a glossy black cockpit in the center that blends easily into a variety of decors. The center console is neatly organized with a 3.45-inch color LCD touchscreen display right in the middle. Although competitive devices like the Brother MFC-990CW do have larger screens, bigger isn't always necessarily better. In this case, HP proves the rule with a highly functional, easy-to-use heads-up display. The home screen shows all of the most commonly used option menus including Copy, Fax, Scan, and Photo preferences, a quick setup menu, and a graphical gauge that shows you almost precisely how much ink you have left in the tanks.

The rest of the front panel has a full telephone keypad for typing in fax numbers and a collection of quick access fax and copy buttons. There is also a Digital Filing Networking Folder button that lets you scan and manage your images over a network and a general Email button for one-touch scan delivery. Finally, the bottom of the front panel also has an external card reader that supports PictBridge USB, xD-Picture Card, Memory Stick, SD/SDHC and CompactFlash media.

HP gives you the option to pair the Pro 8500 to a host computer in three ways: Over a network with the built-in Ethernet port, direct connection through a USB 2.0 cord, and through 802.11b/g networking. We followed the onscreen instructions and successfully paired the printer with our desktop computer in less than 10 minutes. From there, we connected satellite computers to the printer by simply installing the driver onto the other desktops. The process of setting up a wireless network with your printer is typically a painful process, requiring special network configurations and system changes. However, the Pro 8500 slowly guides you through the setup with onscreen instructions that we found easy to follow and troubleshoot.

The large 250-sheet input drawer is fixed into the machine, but the top comes off when you have to refill your media. In addition, you can extend the tray outward to accommodate A4 and legal-size paper and it also has an arm to corral loose prints. We liked that the tray doesn't come out of the machine and is made of a sturdy plastic, but we found ourselves wishing for the dual photo and letter-size paper tray we had on the HP Photosmart C8180. We understand that few businesses will print more photos than straight text and presentations, but at this price point a more versatile tray would have been nice.

If you expect to print an astronomical number of documents, HP also sells an optional 250-sheet input tray for US$80 that fits directly underneath the printer. The top of the Officejet houses a 50-sheet ADF for scanning and copying, while a small auto duplexer installs in the rear for double-sided printing. Finally, since this printer is aimed at the business market, the duty cycle runs up to 15,000 pages per month, which should be more than enough to satiate any small- to medium-size business.

In addition to the drivers, the Pro 8500 also ships with HP's Photosmart Essential and Solution Center software. The former helps you import, organize, edit and share your digital photos, and the latter allows to you fax and scan documents. We used HP's XL print cartridges that offer the best deal and found that a full page of black-only ink will cost US$0.016 per page and US$0.019 cents per color; both costs are well under the US$0.03 per page average by today's modern printing standards.

The scanner on the Pro 8500 comes with onboard Optical Character Recognition software that allows the scanner to interpret graphics into editable text. The HP Solution Center software has a Convert to Text option as well as an embedded Save as Editable Text feature that automatically converts as it scans. We tested this function using several documents, including handwritten notes and simple text doc printouts, and we received mixed results. Large, clear text translated well and the software even matched the original fonts, but the algorithm couldn't recognize our smaller letters and any of the handwritten portions, no matter how uniform the characters were. Instead, the scanner changed our letters into a font that looked a lot like Wingdings. All in all, the OCR isn't perfect, but you can count on it to work for light editing on presentations and other large-format scans.

Performance And Print Quality

Once again, HP doesn't fail to impress us with its lightning-fast print speeds. In this case, the Pro 8500 registered competition-stomping results in three out of the four benchmark tests, most notably in text where it printed 11.35 pages per minute--double the speed of the next fastest (and still impressive) Epson TX800. The rest of the categories proved equally impressive with the exception of the photo speed test which scored 1.39 pages per minute--by no means disappointing, just average. Regardless, busy offices that have little to no time to waste waiting for a document to print will undoubtedly appreciate the performance speeds of the Pro 8500.

We also couldn't be more pleased with the output quality of the photos and documents. It's true that most offices won't put as much importance on the quality of prints as the speed, but it's good to know that no matter what the settings say, the device will still give you pinpoint color accuracy. Our test photos exhibited evenly saturated colors and thorough shading that few other printers can achieve. Our litmus test for all printers is how the ink lays out on plain 75gsm paper, and the Pro 8500 easily passed this test, showing an impressive range of dynamic detail. The skin tones in our portrait shots blended well with their backgrounds and showed a rich color palette, including dark purples and lighter shades of blue and green.

Tags: Printer, Pro 8500, All-in-One, Printing, optical character recognition