Consumer Reviews

I was thrilled to get this printer through the Vine program. I needed a scanner and an inkjet printer and this really fits the bill.

The best thing about this printer is that it is a wireless printer. This means you can put the printer anywhere as long as you have a wireless router. You no longer need to connect the printer to the router or the computer. I was concerned that it would take much longer for documents to print wirelessly but it is as fast as the printer we have connnected to the router.

Setup was easy. The quick start guide had enough detail to do everything needed. You need to install two printer heads (each one for 2 colors) and install 4 toner cartridges (one for each color – the black is twice the size of the other one). When you first turn on the printer it takes about 20 minutes to align the printer heads. This is automatic and requires no user input. The quide suggests that you install the drivers on your computer while this is happening.

Once the drivers are installed you can connect to the printer directly, using wireless, bypassing the router. I didn’t want to do this; I didn’t want anyone else outside the house using the printer so I connected the printer to the router using the WEP key and network name. You can do this directly on the printer, using the touch screen.

Print quality is great, using generic paper or photo paper. It does a nice job scanning also. HP includes scanning software which does a nice job.

I recommend the printer. I love the wirelessness of it, the speed, and the fact each color has its own toner cartridge. You can replace each when needed, rather than replacing them all just because one is low.

I’m very impressed with this HP Officejet Pro 8500 (A909g) Wireless All-In-One Printer. As to the actual functioning of the machine, well, that word, “impressive,” pretty much sums it up. Printing, scanning, or copying (I couldn’t test the faxing capability since I don’t have a land-line) a full mixed page at Normal resolution takes about 20-25 seconds (additional pages are about 5 seconds each; each page of two-sided printing takes about as long as a “first page” because of drying and for the trips through the duplexer). A page with three 4×6 pictures on it comes out in about 60 seconds. Even at just Normal resolution, output is impressive. A color copy is indistinguishable from the original. Documents, graphics, and photographs are beautiful. The various connectivity options (USB to computer, wired and wireless Ethernet, and Bluetooth (with an adaptor)) are great. And the ability to do most things locally from the printer itself via all its input sources is icing on the cake.

Regarding problems, my biggest one is with “coil whine” (a loud, high-pitched whine that’s present whenever the machine is not sleeping). In a noisy office environment, that probably wouldn’t be a problem. But, if the machine’s in a fairly quite home office, then, depending upon your hearing, it might get to be very irritating (it could also be a sample variance). The only other complaint might be with using a USB thumb drive (or other media card). When I inserted a thumb drive with about 1500 pictures on it, it brought the machine to its knees (almost 4 minutes to be read). An SD card with only a few pictures took just a few seconds, so that’s probably an artificial problem. Also, trying to view a 5 MB PDF of a scan from that thumb drive while mounted in the printer took so long that I had to close the process. Bringing the same file up with the thumb drive mounted locally only took seconds.

Now, for some background material. The good impressions started with the physical setup. The printer was very nicely and securely packaged. The Setup “poster” was complete and easy to follow. The only quibble I had with it is that at the point where it said to turn on the printer, it didn’t say to enter the language/location on the display screen. But, that’s easy enough to figure out since the screen prompts for that information.

In my setup, I used a wired Ethernet connection. So, even without installing any software/drivers, the printer at least showed up on all my computers’ Network pages (Vista Ultimate (x86 & x64) and the Windows 7 Beta) and was configurable via its built-in server. At that point, I could perform local actions at the printer itself. But, to do things from the computers, I had to install the drivers.

Under the Windows 7 Beta, I couldn’t install the full package of software/drivers either from the CD or downloaded from HP’s site. To get the package to run at all, I had to right-click on Setup and set the compatibility mode to Vista and Administrator. But, even then, it failed after 18 minutes (“Step 4 of 4 – Configuring Your Product (96%)”). I uninstalled everything and used the “scrubber” from HP’s site to clean everything out and then installed the Basic Print and Scan Driver from that same site (it’s just the drivers — no software). Again, I had to set Setup’s compatibility to Vista and Administrator. But, this time, it worked (5 minutes). Since Windows 7 is only a beta, I don’t count this against the printer. I’m just noting it here for others.

Under Vista (both x86 and x64), the full set of software/drivers and the basic driver installed just fine in 15 minutes and 5 minutes, respectively. Personally, the basic driver is all I needed: OCR and finer control of scanned documents is the only thing I really needed from the full suite. But, unless the computer is co-located with the printer, it’s really not practical (you don’t get those capabilities from scans started at the printer itself — only from those started from a computer).

On an informative note, the printer ships with 4 HP 940 ink cartridges: one each of Black (~$26, 1000 pages), Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (~$20 and 900 pages, each). I can’t find a capacity for the two printheads, but replacements would run about $60 (all prices are from HP’s site).

Overall, I’m very impressed with the printer and am rating it a Very Good 4 stars out of 5. If mine didn’t have that annoying coil whine, I’d easily give it an Excellent 5 stars out of 5.

This is a great wireless color all-in-one. I’ve had other all-in-ones from Samsung, Cannon, and other HP models, and this HP is my favorite so far.

The first thing you’ll probably want to know about is >>PRINT QUALITY<<. No complaints here! Black and text-only documents print clean and crisp, even on inexpensive copy paper. Color printouts, particularly photos printed onto photo paper, are accurate and have no banding.

>>SETUP<< was a breeze. The installation software walks you through the steps, and I haven't had any issues accessing the printer wirelessly. Also, the on-screen menus on the printer itself are extremely well-laid out and easy to navigate, and it responds quickly to each press of the finger.

>>PRINT SPEEDS<< are pretty fast, especially compared to other units I've had in the past. I also love the auto-duplex function for printing to two sides of the paper. I actually changed my default settings for the printer to auto-duplex when I print unless I tell it NOT to since a lot of my printing is text only and I prefer to save sheets. This way, I don't have to manually turn auto-duplex on every time I print.

The >>COPY<< speed is decent, even when copying in color. So far, the quality of copies are as close to the originals as I could ask for.

The >>FAX<< features work good, although I did find that I had to reduce the baud rate in the printer settings for the fax so it would work over my VoIP line. Once I reduced the baud rate to "Slow (9600)", I haven't had any issues sending or receiving faxes. And I love the ability to fax 2-sided documents and the built-in address book for commonly used numbers.

>>SCANNING<< speeds are also decent, and again the quality is as good as I could ask for. And the “Scan to Digital Filing Network Folder” and “Scan to E-mail” buttons on the printer itself save me from having to go through all the steps of manually opening the scanning program and selecting my preferred settings and scanning and saving. You can even set up your digital filing locations so when you scan to one particular folder that it saves as PDF in high quality, but when you scan to a different folder it saves as a JPEG instead. Very cool.

Now to the one small complaint that I have: every time I turn the printer on after it has been completely powered off (not just in power save mode), the printer goes through a “checking device… this may take several minutes…” stage, and sometimes is followed by an automatic “cleaning printhead” function. This entire process takes about 2 minutes total so it’s a bit obnoxious, so I no longer turn the printer off completely anymore and instead have it go into power save mode automatically (which is energy star compliant). Resuming from power save mode does NOT require those two time-consuming functions to repeat.

All-in-all: a great all-in-one, especially under $250 (as of the time of this review). It actually makes me look at HP a little more like I usually do Samsung… with love in my eyes! :)

This printer is fabulous. The more I use it, the more I love it and keep saying so. I replaced an older all-in-one HP from about 5 years ago that still worked well, but just begged to be upgraded.

The set up took a little bit of time, but I was prepared for it by reading previous reviews, but I expected it to be much more painful than it was. The set up instructions were a little big vague, but quite honestly, the installation software pretty much told me whatever I needed to know and do. Whatever wasn’t on the monitor screen was either on the printer screen or on the print outs themselves.

I took the advice of others and set it on a very solid base so it wouldn’t shake, so I’ve had no issues there. I have not used the fax and won’t because I have no need for it, nor do I even own a land line. It would be great if HP built in functionality to fax through the wireless/PDF over the internet, similar to RightFax.

The clarity and quality of prints is excellent and the print speed is much faster than I’ve had in the past. This is my first wireless printer and I can’t believe I’ve lived with out it! The wireless set up was a snap and my boyfriend and I are both wirelessly connected. We can scan to separate emails, to a shared folder, in all sorts of formats etc, etc.

The only thing that I consider a negative on this printer is that it is absolutely huge! I had to reconfigure my “printer” space in my office to make it work for me. Remember when you plan for its size that you have to be able to lift the lid to put in scannable items. (Give yourself an extra 5-6 inches.) However it does have a feeder which reduces the amount of times I need to lift the lid.

I have not purchased ink yet, so we’ll see how painful that will be when I go to replace it.