HP K8600 Office Jet Pro Color Printer

• HP K8600 Office Jet Pro Color Printer

If any graphic design artists need to print in CMYK and wide format, this is probably the best printer you can get in terms of cost and quality. The 88 ink is super cheap and it pumps out a LOT of pages. If you plan on doing a lot of printing but don''t wanna pay as much as a laser jet printer, you should use a printer that uses the 88 ink. For 20.99 this cartridge can give you 1200 pages. What other cartridge on the market can do that for so cheap??? What''s even better is how 34 bucks you can get the XL and the XL can do 2400 pages. Again, what cartridge do you know of can give you 2400 pages for 34 bucks? It''s a great printer at a great price when you can find it on sale.

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I gave this a low rating, not because it is a poor printer, but because it can''t do everything I expected it to from it''s description and specifications without a lot of messing around. And maybe not even then. Not as near as good as the older HP 1220 that it is to replace.

I use it to print model aircraft plans and the included instruction booklets. I develop the plans in both raster graphic and CAD programs. Some pages are up to 24 inches long. The vast majority fit on 11 by 17 inch paper.

This printer is great for printing the photos and instructions I include, and was hoping I could do everything with this one that I could do with my old 1220.

However, under some conditions, this printer seems to want to ignore the margins assigned to the printout, and create either wider or narrower ones on its own. After three weeks of daily printing with this printer, I have yet to figure out how to get around this.

The margins are important for these plans, as the drawings MUST be reproduced full size, with no enlarging or shrinking of the images so that the parts constructed from them fit together.

I have noticed that it will print full size, IF a paper is used that is significantly larger than the drawing. For example, a 10 by 16 inch drawing will be enlarged somewhat (about 1/16 of an inch)if I try to print it on 11 by 17 inch paper, but prints exactly right by just changing to 13 by 19 inch paper. The problem is that the 13 by 19 inch paper is much more expensive, and I have to trim off a lot of it to fit the folders. It also doesn''t look very professional to have wide, blank margins.

One more example is when printing a drawing that used to fit on legal paper (8.5 by 14) I now have to print on 11 by 17 for it to print full size without being enlarged! Adjusting the margins on HPs printer setup, and/or the programs'' print setup, does not help, but usually makes it worse. Selecting the "Print At Actual Size" option does not help.

Also, in booklet mode, it wants to print much smaller than the 1220 printer did and the word processor defines. The old 1220 would print the actual size as defined in the Wordperfect program. But the K8600 increases the margins and shrinks the print about 20% making some of the print almost unreadable. It does format the pages correctly though.

However, in duplex mode, or single page print of the same text, it prints normally on the same paper! It''s just when trying to print text in booklet mode that it shrinks the page. Or when trying to print full size drawings as I used to with the 1220.

Unlike the 1220 (which could print up to an unadvertised 50 inches long) the K8600 won''t print anything longer than 19 inches. So, for a few of my drawings, I will still have to use the 1220 until I redraw them to fit on 19 inch paper, if I can. And use the 1220 to print the booklets until (or if) I ever figure out how to prevent the shrinking of images despite the settings.

So, for the time being, I am still using the 1220 for many drawings and the booklets.

But, the duplexer is great! No more turning the paper over to complete the booklet print or print on both sides of a sheet...it does it automatically! I can just walk away and come back when it is completely finished.

In favor of the K8600, the ink cartridges are MUCH cheaper, and with 4 of them , I don''t have to toss out an entire cartridge when just one color is out, as I did with the 1220. The print is super fast, and very high quality, even in draft mode...and the photos and drawings are superb...when they are the correct size.

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I have had a HP Deskjet 1220c for about 4 years and never had a problem, except for having to clean the platinum and guides a few months ago.. very reliable, fast, and excellent, photo quality prints with permanent Vivera inks. The only problem with it was it used a lot of expensive ink because of the single, 3 color cartridge plus singe black. The Office Jet K8600 has separate Vivera cyan, yellow and magenta cartridges plus a black cartridge and they are available in the very large 88-"XL" size (up to 1700 color pages for about $25 and 2400 black pages for about $35). You only replace the cartridge color that runs out first and they are cheaper because the replaceable print heads are separate as well (they should last a life time using HP inks). The 8600 is compact, quiet, fast, and I''ve had no jams so far using a variety of paper types. It will print on heavy 76 pound paper in the front tray or rear slot. Comparing it to my old 1220, here are the things I don''t like, in order of dislike: There is no separate single sheet front slot, so if you want to print a few 11x17 tabloid drawings and the input tray is loaded with letter paper, you have to remove the letter paper, put the tabloid paper in the tray and adjust the guides, then reload the letter paper when you are through. The design of the out put tray clicks into a angled up position with a bit of force, but is still a bit in the way of loading paper easily in the input tray below it, but you soon get used to it and it becomes easier. The specs say would suggest that manual duplex is possible, but it isn''t in the printer software like on the Deskjet series, so doing duplex is complicated and error prone unless your external software includes the ability. I ended up getting the optional duplex unit and it''s well worth it, so I would suggest getting the K8600dn with includes it for not too much more. This unit doesn''t have PhotoRet like the 1220 and Photojet printers do, so color matching to your screen is not quite as good, you may have to experiment a bit with the printers color adjustments to get the desired results on different papers and then saving it into one of their user savable presets. Once you do that, the color photo prints on HP photo paper are excellent.. they look like commercial prints and are as good as my Deskjet could do. I had some initial tech questions/problems and I had very good service. After a bit of wasted time talking to their techs in India, I was called by their USA follow up and they worked my problem out. All in all an excellent printer with low ink costs and fast printing. I print all text on draft setting, HP Bright White paper and they only take a few seconds each and look almost as good as the regular setting. For graphics, the normal setting is excellent and very fast. Even photo prints at normal on HP glossy brochure paper are very fast and near photo quality.

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The last printer I purchased for this one was an HP Deskjet 6980. I decided not to buy HP again, after numerous network connection issues. But this time I was in the market for a cheaper larger paper size printer. There is not much out there, so I ended up buying this K9600 Office Jet Pro. I only intended to use it sporadically.

It started off with the inability to print any other color than magenta. After spending hours with customer support and buying new ink cartridges even though the ones that came with it indicated full, "Well Sir, the cartridges come with very little ink and it is probably all used during set-up", finally it was concluded that one of the print heads must be bad. I received a new printhead a week later, and indeed the issue I had was resolved. Using it over the first weeks after however was a stackup of annoyances. But now, when printing paper that is a little bit thicker than normal paper (such as HP photo paper, not even the thickest kind), the image gets either smudged at the bottom of the paper or the whole image prints half an inch closer to the top that it is supposed to. a day later it keeps telling me that it ran out of paper. Tried all sort of paper and adjustments, turned off the paper width sensor. I cannot believe how much time I wasted just trying to print something.. If my office windows could open, it would have landed on the parking lot below it...

I have had very poor success with HP products on my Mac Tiger operating system and should have known better than to order the new K8600 wide format printer. It connected okay and said the software loaded okay. The printer performed test functions as it should but that is were things went bad. When trying to print from the computer it would signal that there was no paper. I uninstalled the software and reinstalled it and it printed a page from the computer beautifully. Next time I tried I had the no paper signal again. Once again I tried reloading the software. This proceeded to trash my ability to download anything. I finally had to erase my hard drive and rebuild my computer operating system to get my computer back on line. This was on a Mac-mini 1.42 GHz with 1 GB of memory and plenty of hard drive and memory space. I tried the printer on my iBook to be sure it wasn''t my computer and got the same no paper signal. I quit right there before I trashed my iBook. I suspect an HP software problem. I have returned the K8600 through Amazon''s excellent no hassle return policy and am waiting the arrival of an Epson Stylus 1400 wide format, also from Amazon. The Epson products seem to be very compatible with Mac''s OS 10 system.

Also of note is that all HP Customer Service has been sent overseas to India, Thailand, or who knows where. The tech people actually speak English fairly well but do not understand it that well. If your problem is anything outside of routine it is very likely that you will get transferred from department to department and end up having your time wasted and no resolution to your problem. HP now has a red circle around it with a line through it as far as I am concerned.