Officejet Pro 8600 Color Inkjet Printer

• Borderless Printing - No
• Catalog Publishing Type - Printers-Inkjet/Photo/Mobile Inkjet
• Compliance, Standards - ENERGY STAR Qualified
• Connector/Port/Interface - USB
• Depth - 16.54 in

You should consider other choices before buying this printer. It has been troublesome for me.

After about five months of light use, the message "Cover open" would appear on the computer monitor screen, accompanied by flashing lights on the printer. The printer would not print when this occurred until I lifted the top cover and closed it again. The message would appear fairly often, sometimes every two or three minutes. Other times it would go a day or two without the problem occurring. I eventually called HP support and spent about an hour on the phone two separate times to try to solve the problem. Most of the time I was on hold. Both times I had to wait about twenty minutes to acually talk to a technician. I use the word "technician" loosly the technician spent most of his or her time reading scripts about what I should try next.

When the replacement (refurbished) printer arrived, it was a bare-bones replacement it did not come with a printhead, cartridges, or a back access cover. I had to transfer those from the old printer. When I did that, and tried the new printer, I got the same message, "cover open." But I now had a clue, and after a little fiddling around, I discovered that if I pressed inward on the back access cover, the light went out, so I studied the back cover, did a little bending on a fairly fragile-looking contact spring, and, lo and behold, the flashing lights and error message went off and stayed off. I kept my old printer, which also worked with the modified back cover, and sent the refurbished replacement back to HP. So far I have had no more trouble with the printer. I don''t know why the error message doesn''t tell you what cover is open or why the technicians didn''t pursue that avenue in asking me to try various things?????

So here''s my summary review of the printer:

PROS

Does a good job printing. It''s better than the four-old wide-format Canon that it replaced, but printers in general have gotten much better in four years.

It doesn''t mis-feed very often, but when it does, un-jamming is a real hastle.

CONS

HP techical support is very poor in my opinion. I tried on-line FAQ''s and the HP forum before using the phone.

Ink cartridges are very expensive. A complete set of HP high-capacity repacement cartridges costs about $115.

It shakes the table when printing.

You might want to look at other choices although the price of the HP seems to be the lowest for printers of this type.

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Odd, I thought I already gave this a 1 star review, but it seems to have gone away. Oh well, I hate this printer enough to warrant writing this again. We have gone through two in our main office, and the one in our remote office has been terrible too. The first suffered from mechanical problems from almost day one, even with only moderate use. It would misfeed as many as 15(!) pages at once. Swabbing the rollers with alcohol temporarily alleviated this, but hardly something you should need to do on an almost weekly basis.

As for driver issues, all 3 have suffered from these... such as, printing totally blank sheets, cutting off margins, etc. After a lot of trial and error and conversations with HP support, we found that using a deskjet 990c driver (of all things) at least fixed the blank page issue, but many issues with document margins being cut off (that looked fine in Print Preview) remain. Granted, this review probably doesn''t do much good since this model has largely been pulled off the market by HP (with good reason)... if I was of a litigious bent, I''d be tempted to see about starting a class action against HP for everyone who bought this model--Instead, I''ll just steer away from ever using HP in an office environment again.

For what it''s worth, my HP 1020 B&W laserjet at home has been fantastic (still on it''s starter toner cartridge after 3 years of light use). However, if the K8600 is any indication of where HP''s quality has headed... I''ll be very reluctant to look to them for a replacement if my 1020 dies.

Read Best Reviews of Officejet Pro 8600 Color Inkjet Printer Here

Like previous reviewer, I am using it for printing on 11x17. It has been close to two years. Aside from a few paper jams and replacing ink (the unit uses more ink than I expected), I did not do anything else to it. It has already paid for itself considering the undr $200 cost, two years ago.

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I got this to replace an HP 1220 large format printer that HP had decided to not support in Windows 7. The 1220 printer would still print, but in Windows 7 was no longer capable of printing booklets, duplex or large format.

Thinking the HP 8600 would do the job (it advertised booklet and large format printing), and since it was supported in Windows 7, I bought it.

But, it was a big disappointment. It would not print booklet format in any page size larger than 5 by 7...it would print on any size paper, but only 5 by 7 inches if in booklet mode. The settings would say that it was printing four 8 by 10 inch pages on 11 by 17 inch paper, and the preview would show it correctly, but would only be 5 by 7 when actually printed. It also would scale any large format print to the paper margins, even if borderless was selected, making my scaled drawings useless. I never was able to figure out a way to print my drawings full scale without some shrinking by the printer. Never had that problem with the 1220.

I solved my printing problems by resurrecting an old XP computer, and using it with the HP 1220 for the large prints and the booklets.

The final straw was when the 8600 started dribbling black ink all over the table and the floor. It proved to be a crack in the carriage (not a leak in the print head or the cartridge) and unrepairable without costing as much as a new printer. So after only two years, it went in the garbage.

I replaced it with a Canon iX7000, and that has proved to be everything I want from a printer. See my review with that printer if interested.

The HP 8600 was (actually now IS) junk.

We are a company who has several color inkjet printers. It gets to be such a hassle when you have to stock so many different ink cartridges, so we have tried to centralize on models that take the same ink cartridge. We had one of our printers die and we were looking high and low for a printer that would still take an 88 color cartridge. We found this one on Amazon.com and we are very happy with it.