By E. Schilling
This story might sound familiar to you: I needed to replace our networked HP Photosmart family inkjet printer; it suddenly gave up despite our light and careful use for less than three years. Swearing not to buy another inkjet printer let alone another HP product any more I started browsing through the vast number of tempting colour laser printer options around. I tried hard to make the "colour laser printer option" work for me but I struggled, badly: I simply did not see myself in a few months time paying almost twice the cost of the printer for tonner cartridges' replacements. So I was soon back into the inkjet arena, and took me a short visit to the local shop to reconsider HP as a possible choice: when I came across this Officejet 8600 among the sea of all other inkjet printers it was clear to me that this was the choice that best suited our needs.
The ink cartridges are very economical: you will not even blink when the time comes that you need to replace ALL cartridges at 1/5th of the cost of the printer. The resulting cost per copy is similar to the cost of a laser colour print made with the cheaper Samsungs, for example. Ink cartridges have a very smart snap-in system, with no protective caps or venting seals to be removed before insertion. When opening the lid for changing cartridges, a white LED illuminates the internals of the printer for you to see what you are doing, I thought it was a nice and thoughtful touch.
Print quality is very good. Black prints are as good as laser prints, amazing. Colour prints are also very good for all general purpose prints including photos -when using glossy photo paper. Photo prints are obviously not as good as those obtained from dedicated photo printers, but I do not really mind as in my case I always use Photobox for getting serious photo prints done anyway.
Print speed is quite fast for inkjet technology, although double-sided prints are naturally slower than average. In my case speed is not a determining factor.
The appearance of this printer is very sleek: dark grey/bronze textured colour and curved edges; this printer will not look out of place in your study/office (as opposed to the Epson that look like 10 year older in comparison with their cheap black plastic brick design). You will have to make prevision for its location though: the overall body size is on the big side -certainly bigger than my old Photosmart it replaced- especially when you think you will have to access the machine opening hatches and lids around it. A good thing is that the power supply is internal to the printer: good move from HP dropping the chunky external power supplies that were a nightmare to manage.
Ethernet networking works like a dream. None of our 7 PCs sharing this printer have ever had problems seeing the printer and sending jobs to it; very solid and fast drivers. (We have a mixture of Windows 7 64-bit/32-bit, Vista and XP). HP have simplified their software, for better: it works! (this was one of my worries from my previous experience with a large number of drivers and applications updating all the time, taking over my computer and failing frequently). I have not tried WiFi nor USB connections and do not intend to for the time being.
The touchscreen panel is big and clear, although I feel that "hard" buttons for some functions would be nicer. The "touch" action sometimes lands on the wrong option on screen, possibly because of my chunky fingers.
The 250-page feed tray is a bliss (a feature I was looking for); it gives you plenty of time to check it and replenish before running out of paper; also the automatic double sided print and scan are a bonus. NOTE: you need to check when buying as not all models include these features. When printing your job you can configure your layout format, e.g.: booklet, multi-pages per page, etc.
The scanner is very impressive: you can trigger a scanning session from the printer's touchscreen or from any of your networked computers. You can save your scanned document in different formats (jpg, pdf, doc with OCR, etc) and store it in different locations: memory card or memory stick on the printer, or the Documents folder in any of your networked computers, or in a pre-saved network folder, e.g.: in your NAS file server. Oh! There is a whole FAX function and all which I did not even looked into; I find it hard to beleve that Faxes are still among us these days!
There is no limit for Web/Cloud connectivity and applications, but I must admit I lost interest and stopped exploring them fairly shortly; however, I managed to enable a web service that allows you to remotely printing jobs by email and monitoring progress from the web (how much use one can make out of such feature is still to be seen!)
In all, I am greatly delighted with this product. For being more reliable and cost-effective than our previous printer, family are using it quite regularly, with no compains raised to the "IT department" so far.
I am very pleased that I gave HP and its inkjet technology a second chance!
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