Review: HP Officejet 6500 E710n-z Printer, Copier, Fax and Scanner

I work in a small office that shares one printer, fax, scanner and copier. After using the same product for the past couple of years and dealing with its many hang-ups (including the fact we couldn't ever get it to scan properly), we finally convinced our corporate office to let us buy a new one.

We did this last week, when my supervisor went to Staples and bought an HP Officejet 6500 E710n-z Printer, Copier, Fax and Scanner.

We have now had this product in our office for a couple of days and I do feel it is a pretty significant improvement over what we had before. But, at the same time, I have to say there are quite a few things about this printer that are a bit of a disappointment.

As far as the upgrades are concerned, one of the big ones is this prints (and scans) in color; something we didn't have with our previous piece of office equipment. Even though there are quite a few internal documents we still prefer to keep in black and white (to cut down on cost), I have to admit this makes the company logo on the letters and proposals I send out to customers look a heck of a lot better and I'm waiting to see if that results in more sales.

I should also mention the scanned documents are much clearer than what we had previously (our old scanner always made them seem faded) and is much easier to use. Before, I had to pick a format (PDF, etc) ahead of time and it was a pain to switch to another format later. Now, I can choose as I'm scanning.

Another thing I like about this printer/fax/scanner/copier is the paper doesn't jam up nearly as much in it. That was a huge problem with the device this replaced and, even though we still do have paper jams (I think that's more because of the paper itself than anything we use it in), they aren't nearly as high in volume.

There are, however, some things I definitely don't like about this product. First of all, compared to what we had before, this one is actually kind of slow when it comes to printing. And, if I want to print an envelope (something I do up to a dozen times each day), I have to pre-load the envelope and hope someone else doesn't print before I do. Before, I could hit print first and it would pause the printer until I loaded the envelope.

Another thing I noticed about this device is it is somewhat loud compared to what we had before. It's pretty easy to tell when someone is printing on it because you can hear it just about anywhere in the office. Fortunately, we have it in a common area because I wouldn't want to be sitting next to it while on the phone.

As I said before, this HP printer is an upgrade over what we had before. However, if our office had more money in its budget, I think we would have been better off with a different one.