Hewlett Packard Officejet 6500 Wireless Printer Review

In the world of printers, several newer companies have made their claim to fame recently, increasing product diversity in the marketplace. Hewlett Packard, one of the older and more reputable companies in printer manufacturing responded by released the Hewlett Packard Officejet 6500 Wireless Printer. In this review, I take a look at this HP Printer, run various tests and give you the results.

First, let's take a look the printing speed. By running various speed tests, I've concluded the HP Officejet 6500 prints 11.7 text documents per minute. This is a great speed for plain text and sets a benchmark for competitors. Being able to print a 50 page document in less than 5 minutes is a great feature to have, especially if you run your own business.

The Hewlett Packard Officejet 6500 prints color documents at an average speed of 3.1 pages per minute. This is slightly lower than average but it doesn't hinder the overall performance of the machine. In terms of Color Printing, Canon is the leader in a comparable price range. If you're constantly printing photos or detailed full page pictures, this HP Officejet 6500 might not be what you're looking for.

Photo quality in black and white, text and color looks good. One of the great aspects about this machine is that it has a great contrast ratio, making edges of words and pictures fit flawlessly against a white background. The darker colors of pictures I tested seemed pretty powerful, if somewhat saturated and light browns seem to have a bit more orange in them than preferred. Overall, the printing quality is there and if you're anything short of a printer fanatic or perfectionist, you may not notice these flaws at all.

The usability with this machine comes with a bit of a learning curve. Though previous models of professional HP Printers didn't include all of the features and specifications that the Officejet 6500 has, the implementation of these new features causes confusion. The printing control panel groups button by "functions" (however unrelated) and it can be a bit tricky to navigate through the sea of buttons on this printer's LED control panel, but with time you get used to it.

In summary, the Hewlett Packard Officejet 6500 is a professional printer with all of the functions, speed and efficiency of a professional printer but with considerable usability issues and minor picture distortion. Printing simple documents with this printer is a breeze and the speed makes it worth the buy if you run a business or print a lot of text documents. For color photos, you might want to check out one of the comparable Canon printers.