HP Officejet 6500A e-All-in-One (CN555AB1H)

• Print professional color documents for the lowest cost per page compared with in-class inkjet all-in-ones.
• Get a great value, using individual, high-capacity ink cartridges designed for the office.
• Use the memory card slots and 2.36-inch touchscreen to print without a PC.
• Connect to a network with built-in Ethernet or to your PC with Hi-Speed USB 2.0.
• Use up to 40% less energy than comparable laser products, with an ENERGY STAR qualified all-in-one.

I have used only Hewlett-Packard printers since I bought my computer a decade ago, in 2001. My choice was simple, as these printers earn high ratings year after year. I print out a lot of photography for both family photos and magazine photos, and also regular printing. I also write and print an abundance of family history pages and articles for a collectibles magazine. I use my printers heavy duty and I am on my second printer since 2001. My HP printers have a life span of around 5 years, which is unheard of, as the average printers lifespan is around 2 years. My printers have always been the HP Ink Jet Photosmart models as they give me the best quality photographs, both color and black and white, on my favorite HP soft gloss paper. Laser ink doesn''t come close in comparison to the rich saturated colors of Inkjet ink. Photographs, Art and Pictures come to life with an Inkjet printer. The only thing the average person should know is that inkjet ink runs if it gets wet, so for shipping labels always cover them in clear tape. For more permanently protected photos, go to an arts/crafts store and buy a can of photo protectant spray. The extra covering gives you a lifetime of protected treasures.

This is the first time I have tried a non-photo printer, using this HP Officejet 6500A All In One model. If you are wondering what the difference is between a photo printer and an office printerit''s the colors. With my Photosmart, I have 2 extra light ink colorscyan (blue) and magenta (pink) shades. These 2 extra ink shades give you a full array of even the slightest color variations. Working in art and photography, I noticed a slight color difference in certain shades. For a professional artist making photographs or great color prints, this is not the printer for you. For the average office or home use, non-professional photo prints or just needing a regular printer, this printer is superb.

This HP Officejet 6500A All In One machine includes 4 devicesa printer, copier, scanner and fax machine. What you get for the money is one great machine. This machine has earned the Energy Star, which means it will save you money, since it met the Energy Star program''s test method criteria. Energy Star''s savings rating on this machine, states you will use 40% less energy than on any comparable laser machine. I look for Energy Star''s ratings whenever I buy any appliance, as saving energy means saving both fuel and money. Another big money saver is buying the HP inks in the XL sizes. I''ve been doing this since HP came out with these extra large ink sizes with my HP Photosmart, and it is a huge money saver.

I''ve been using this machine every day for a while and I will rate each of it''s 4 devices separately so the consumer can see if this fits his/her needs. To begin with, this machine works with the supporting operating systems of Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP (with SP2) ,Mac OSX v 10.5, 10.6 and Linox. The machine itself measures 18.75 inches x 16.11 inches x 10.13 inches. It weighs almost 18 pounds. Inside the box is your 4 in one Officejet machine, the power cord, phone cord, booklet and cd software and all 4 ink jet cartridgesblack, yellow, cyan and magenta. Not included is the USB cable. Installation took mere minutes with the cd software on my Windows XP. As with all their printers, HP includes a limited 1 year warranty. Now I will rate the 4 devices.

PRINTER5 StarsYou can print anywhere with this machine using your computer, mobile phone, laptop or mobile device. The tray supported paper sizes are letter, legal, statement, executive, 3 x 5, 4 x 6, 5 x 7, 5 x 8, 4 x 10, 4 x 11, 4 x 12, 8 x 10, envelopes no. 10, monarch and envelopes DL. The input tray takes up to 250 sheets with a duty cycle of up to 7000 pages. Maximum printing speeds are up to 32 pages per minute with black ink and up to 31 for colorspeeds equivalent to laser printers. This does not have duplex printing features (2 sided). It does have borderless printing options. You can use your memory cards for direct photo printing. You can by-pass your PC by inserting a memory card in one of the slots and use the 2.36 inch touch screen to print. The memory cards supported are secure digitalalso high capacity, multimedia and secure multimedia card, reduced size multimedia card, mmc mobile and mmc micro mini (adapter not included), memory stick and memory stick duo and pro. The 4 inks used are the HP 920 cartridges and you can definitely save when you buy the XL sizes. With the regular HP 920 Black ink cartridge, you get approximately 420 pages. With an XL black ink cartridge you get up to 1200 pages. With all the XL color cartridges of yellow, cyan and magenta, you can get up to 700 pages. The cartridges are recyclable. This is not a wireless machine. When printing in color from your computer, using a good brand of paper, you will get the best resolution of up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi. You can get up to 600 from black ink. The printer, although not as good as my Photosmart when it comes to endless color variation, is extremely superb in printing both pages and photos.

COPIER4 1/2 StarsYou can copy in color up to 31 cpm and in black up to 32 cpm. The maximum number of copies is up to 100. The copy scaling is from 25 to 100%. The copier is quite good and rates above average.

SCANNER4 1/2 Stars I am quite spoiled with always owning an Epson Perfection Photo Scanner for the last 10 years. So I am comparing a truly perfect scanner with this HP one that is included in this All In One machine. This Scanner type is a Flatbed 8.5 x 11.7 and also an ADF 8.5 x 14. These are good maximum document sizes for general use and office use scanning. It does have real life technologies with a 48 bit scanner depth. The scanner resolution for optical is up to 4800 dpi. This scans above average, but not quite as sharp as my Epson Perfection scanner. I notice tiny minute details from spending decades fixing old photos from the late 1800''s, so the average person might call this scanner excellent, where I consider this above average as I am used to much more pixel detail I get from my Epson Perfection.

FAX MACHINE5 STARSThis Fax Machine has a transmission speed of 3 seconds per page. The Fax resolution is up to 300 x 300 dpi. The incoming fax memory is up to 100 pages, with fax speed dials up to 100 numbers. You can fax fast at up to 33.6 kpbs. The connectivity is a standard built in ethernet with a USB 2.0. There is no wireless capability. You can quickly fax or scan to a PC or Email. With this built in ethernet, you can stay connected and share resources. The speed and smoothness on this efficient fax machine give it a high 5 star rating with me.

Overall, this HP Officejet 6500A All In One gets a 4.75 STAR rating from me, with it''s usual great printer, super fast fax, and better than average copier and scanner. Many of my friends have some of the latest All In One Machines that I have heard complaints about, from the bugs and how non smoothly they run. This machine is unbelievably smooth and fast and when more people use and review it, it will definitely rank high on the Hewlett Packard website. It is actually better than some of their other models I''ve heard about, and may prove to be their best model to date. Add to this Hewlett Packard''s great support and web site that helps you with any problems, downloads, drivers and manuals, and you have a great 4 in one printer, copier, scanner and fax machine for the money.

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HP sent me an email showing this model on sale. I already had an older Photosmart C7180 but I thought this one might be better it had an ADF for one thing. After setting it up, it wouldn''t print. Had to call tech support at India Central, and I spent four hours with a nice enough fellow who, alas, didn''t know much about the printer. Okay, so it finally would print.

But it wouldn''t scan. I then did some checking and found out most people had the same problem. The scan software didn''t work, or if it did, you had to reconnect it to the computer each and every time you wanted to scan something. If you have a big stack of photos to scan, this is impossible.

Today I spent two hours with tech support, and they finally admitted I had a bad printer. "But! We will send you another!" I just laughed and told him he was going to send me a return address slip and give me my money back. He finally gave in.

This printer is meant to be disposable. HP makes the big bucks off the toner.

Next time I want to buy an HP product, I''m going to read the users forums very carefully. I could have saved six hours, and at my age, that''s kinda crucial. And finally HP printer software usually provides you with an HP Solution Center that makes the various functions very easy. The 6500A does NOT have it, and from what the tech told me, it never will. It has, you see, this cute little color touchscreen that doesn''t do much at all.

Swell.

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This is a great printer and it served my needs well. I don''t have much desk space, so having an all-in-one product was a great solution. It takes up about 19 by 15 inches of desk space. It is a very good looking printer... sleek and all black. The printer came with a 23 page Getting Started Guide and also a quick start chart which made it easy to get everything up and running. I chose the network (Ethernet) connection to connect my printer and it was fairly easy to get started with my printing. It was a good thing I had a spare usb cable to connect the printer to my computer, because it wasn''t included. So far I have been really happy with the quality of the print outs, both color and black prints. I don''t know how long the ink cartridges will actually last, but they are supposed to be high capacity cartridges with "the lowest cost per page compared with in-class inkjet all-in-ones." Another great thing about this printer is that you can store documents on the web access them and then print them using print apps.

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We used HP 6150''s for years. Dozens of them. They worked great. We had a failure rate of about 1 every year of about 30 machines. Eventually, the 6150 was no longer available, so we switched to the 6500. Huge mistake. This printer is terrible. 2/10 fail straight out of the box. Several more failed with a few months. All 10 have completely failed within the 1st year. The ink system is garbage. The printheads, ink cartridges clog so easily it''s not even funny. HP has literally costs our business $1000''s in downtime, repair time, ink and replacement. I would not recommend this or ANY HP product to anyone again. We''ve had the same issue with the 7000 Large Format''s as well.

This is my first HP printer after many years of using only Epsons. I was using an older Epson all-in-one and an Artisan 810 (also an all-in-one) that is less than a year old and that I really like. When the opportunity arose to compare the Artisan to an HP, I decided to jump. To be fair, I''ll point out that the Epson''s list price is about $50 more than the HP, so I would hope for a bit better quality from the Epson. It also uses six ink jet cartridges as opposed to the HP''s four, making the colors richer in photos.

Where the HP really shines is in the printing function. It is quick and the print quality is really good. I printed some color photo cards on matte paper with both printers, and the colors were a bit richer and brighter on the Epson, but the difference was not dramatic. I also print out a lot of sheet music (I edit for several composers), and the HP does a beautiful job very clear, clean and crisp. I needed to print some concert fliers that included a photo of the artist as well as text, and those came out much better on the HP, which surprised me. Those were printed on HP Premium Presentation Paper. Normal everyday printing is also high quality.

The copier is also good for everyday usage and fairly quick. The color copying isn''t quite as bright as the original documents, but for normal use, it''s fine.

I was disappointed in the scanner. For single page documents, it''s okay, and you have the option of scanning to a computer or a storage device, but if the documents are several pages, you have to scan one page at a time and then put the documents in folders. The Epson asks after each page if you want to add more pages or save, so multiple-page documents are saved as one document rather than several individual pages. I also really like the preview function on the Epson which lets you see if you have the document centered correctly very helpful when scanning from books. I also found that the scans are not nearly as clean on the HP, with heavy black areas on the sheet music, so I''m not thrilled with that function.

''I could not test the fax function on either machine, as I don''t have a land line.

The Epson is truly a wireless printer, but the HP uses the internet to connect to various machines in a network. I print from four different computers, and they all work fine. There have been a couple of times, however, when I had to turn the HP off and back on to reset it before it would print. The HP is supposed to print from phones and iPads, but I haven''t tried that (my phone isn''t connected to the internet and I don''t have an iPad).

For a fairly inexpensive printer, the HP is a very good buy. If you do a lot of scanning of multiple-page documents, I''d recommend the Epson. Otherwise, I think you''ll be very pleased with the HP.