Big Mama takes care of us all

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent quality printing, cranks out the pages pretty fast...

Cons: ...once it gets going, which can take a while. Color can be wonky, too

The Bottom Line: 
A workhorse that speedily produces gorgeous B&W text; color isn't quite so pretty and takes a lot longer.

Author's Review
I work in a unit where we do a lot of writing and designing of flyers, brochures, pamphlets, banners, and so on. Most of us have the latest Pagemaker, Photoshop, Dream Weaver, and other software packages that we use every day. (Except me - I'm such a hopeless 'puterboob that I do the writing and leave the computer design stuff to my talented co-workers.)

An increasing amount of our output is jobbed out to a commercial printing house, but before it gets to that point, we need to print it out at various interim stages, so we can see what the finished product will look like. We each have color ink-jet printers on our desks (I've been trying for months to review mine but EP doesn't list it, and I'm about to get a new one, so they say...) But desk-jets tend to run pretty slowly when they are wrestling with color.

So about two years ago, we got a color laser, an HP 8500, to be precise. Big Mama sits in a corner, the undisputed queen of the section, accessible by all of us. (She used to be networked to the whole building - of 550 people - but when we got bumped once too often, she was returned to our exclusive use.)

As I said, I'm not very knowledgeable about computers or any sort of technology, so this will simply be a statement of my experiences with this printer.

The Pros

• She's fast. Boyoboy, can she crank out the copies. We've had to print 500 large-format color copies in less than a day, trim them to size, and fold them for a conference, and she just boogied all day until they were done. We met our deadline with time to spare. I haven't found any technical specs that indicate how many pages she can print in a minute, but it's easily more than 10 in black and white, and probably half that in color. (But see my second comment under Cons...)

• This printer has four paper drawers so you can print on all sizes of paper, depending on which drawer you select. The largest one, at the bottom, holds standard 8-1/2" x 11" bond, and we've fit four reams (2000 pieces of paper) into it. So it doesn't need refills very often, even with our busy group.

• For my purposes, Big Mama produces gorgeous, crisp copies. But remember, I do mostly word processing, not much color or graphic stuff. So my demands aren't as extreme as those of my co-workers. But when I revised my business writing book prior to publication, I needed a clean, crisp master copy and Big Mama obliged beautifully.

• I am the Chief Deputy Assistant Paper Jammer in my section. My Desk Jet jams constantly, probably because it's so old and can't grab a single sheet very well any more. But Big Mama never jams. Not once. Not ever. Since we got her in 1999, I can't remember a single time that a piece of paper has ever emerged in any but the expected way.

The Cons

• My husband was shocked when we got married and he discovered how slowly I wake up in the morning. But Big Mama puts me to shame; it takes her forever to wake up. And that's without turning her off at night - we put her in a sort of Pause mode. I've learned - the hard way, unfortunately - to turn it on first thing in the morning when I get in, on my way to my cubie. Big Mama takes ages - well, minutes, anyway - to wake up and smell the coffee. On the days no one remembers to turn it on before we need it, we stand around for at least 10 minutes while she warms up and clicks and burps and calibrates and and counts things and generally takes her own pulse every which way. And if you were foolish enough to click the Print command before noticing that she wasn't fully awake yet, she isn't gracious enough to tackle your print job once she is. Nope, her memory only works after she's had her coffee. Sort of like me.

• If you give her a big black-and-white job, she'll churn it out pretty expeditiously. But if you give her a big color job, especially on larger-than-usual paper, she'll produce a couple of pages and then stop, scratch her head, recalibrate, and try to remember what she was doing. Then she'll crank out a few more and repeat the entire process. She's a little better with standard-sized paper.

• Some of her colors tend to run to the dull side. I can often get better color reproduction, closer to what I see on the screen, from my Desk-Jet. But her color reservoirs are bottomless, so I guess that's the trade-off.

• Like every other printer I've ever seen, Big Mama doesn't count down as she works through a job, so you never know where you are in the process. The tiny screen only tells you that data is present or that she's working on it, but it doesn't give you any kind of count. Maybe I shouldn't expect it of her, but it seems like a simple enough feature to add, and would make my life easier.

We've had Big Mama for about 2-1/2 years now and she's taken some heavy use and keeps on cranking. I know there are newer models out there with more bells and whistles, and I'd sure like to get my hands on one of them, but that's not likely to happen. And frankly, for my purposes, I don't need much foo-foo. So I'm satisfied with her; she's not great, but she gets the job done. But I suggest that HP build a coffee-maker into the next model, so it gets moving a little faster in the morning.