Review: HP Officejet Pro 8500 A909g Wireless, Color All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier and Fax

Having put over 8,000 pages on my new HP Officejet Pro 8500 A909g All-in-One in less than a month, I can highly recommend this little wireless, color workhorse. It is wonderful as either a home office or small business machine.

HP Officejet Pro 8500 - Wireless:

Without a doubt, this is one of my favorite features! My family's three desktop computers have been gathering dust for several years now as we've long since switched to using our laptops. We love to keep our computing mobile, working in different rooms of the house, from the kitchen table to the family room couch, from the back patio to bundled up in our beds when skies are grey. The downside to this freedom and mobility was having to haul our laptops to the office to plug in to the printer to print or scan a document.

But now, with the Wireless HP Office Jet Pro 8500, we are able to print from anywhere in the house or yard our wireless network can reach. Just like our wireless internet connection, the signal for the HP Officejet Pro runs through our Linksys Router. After a simple installation of the software on our laptops, we now need only press "print" from where ever we are and we will find our documents waiting for us when we're ready to go retrieve them. Should there be a problem with our print job, a dialogue box pops up on our laptops to let us know. But other than running out of paper, no problems have come up to date. Once you've experienced wireless printing, I doubt you will ever want to go back to the shackles of the USB cord!

HP Officejet Pro 8500 - Color:

I use a lot of color, printing flyers with pictures or colored graphics and printing family pictures as well. I am very impressed with the color output of my little HP Officejet Pro 8500 printer, copier. While I'm sure you could pay more and get higher quality, it is really very good and certainly adequate for regular home or small business use.

The HP Officejet Pro 8500 also helps keep the cost of ink down by packaging the colors separately. This way you are able to replace, for instance, just the yellow cartridge should you run out of yellow ink, rather than having to replace the entire red-yellow-blue cartridge when it is still full of red and blue. Along with a display that tells you exactly how much ink you have in each of the cartridges - black, yellow, blue and red - and the ability to buy them separately, the HP Officejet Pro 8500 saves you money in replacement ink.

HP Officejet Pro 8500 - Speed:

I found my little HP Officejet Pro to be plenty fast - most of the time. Rated for 35 pages per minute in black, 34 pages for minute in color, it performed adequately, even for the large volume of work I had to print and copy in a short time. The 50 page document feeder also performed flawlessly - a big plus to me.

The only thing that was a bit disconcerting was that my HP Officejet Pro 8500 would periodically pause and recalibrate itself, slowing my tasks when I least expected it. Also, while replacing ink cartridges is a snap, the machine does take a little longer than my previous printer/copiers to reset and get ready to use again. But these things were really minor.

Overall, I was pleased with the speed and consistency of my HP Officejet Pro 8500 and would highly recommend it for either home or small business use.