HP Officejet Pro 8500 -- It actually does everything the box says!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Speed, print quality, reasonably priced (esp on sale), multiple functions all work

Cons: Still jams with envelopes & memory card slots don't always find cards

The Bottom Line: 
If you're looking for good quality for a decent price, this will probably work for you.  It's not a perfect printer, but it performs pretty solidly.

Author's Review
Introduction
I read something the other day entitled "Why I believe Printers Were Sent From Hell to Make Us Miserable" which basically joked that paper jams and obscurely worded error messages were common in 1995 and are still frustrating us with approximately the same frequency today.  I can't say that I disagree with that thought.  In spite of that, I was getting very frustrated at the inability to print things at my house, so I needed to get over it and purchase a printer.

My fiance and I had been looking for a printer that could scan pages and make photocopies as well as just printing the occasional document or picture.  We will probably never use the fax feature as we don't currently have a land line as our home phone, but it's really difficult to get a printer-scanner-copier that does NOT also fax things.

We read several reviews for the HP Officejet Pro 8500--both wired and wireless models--and decided that wired networking was probably the less-frustrating way to go as several users seemed to have issues with the wireless models staying on the network.  Since our two computers needed to share the single printer, we wanted it to function well over a network.  The next time our local store had printers discounted, we went in and picked one up.

Specs and Features
(Information taken from product description on HP & Best Buy sites)
-Prints up to 35 ppm in black and 34 ppm in color
-Can be networked so you can scan a document straight to your PC
-Has four memory card slots which support a variety of media:  CompactFlash I/II, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Secure Digital, Secure Digital High Capacity, MultiMediaCard, and xD-Picture Card formats, Secure MultiMediaCard, MagicGate Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick Micro, Reduced-Size MultiMediaCard, MultiMediaCard mobile, MultiMediaCard micro, miniSD and microSD formats with an adapter (not included).
-Can do borderless printing up  to 8.5" x 11"
-Copies up to 35 cpm in black and 34 cpm in color
-Flatbed scanner with 48-bit color & 8.5" x 11.7" scan area
-High speed 33.6 Kbps fax
-35 page document feeder
-USB 2.0 Connectivity
-Comes with automatic 2-sided printing accessory, ink cartridges (black, cyan, magenta, yellow), software CD-ROM, phone cord, power cord & power supply, & owner's manual

Performance and Uses
So far, the system hasn't performed flawlessly but it has well outperformed my expectations.  Below is a detailed list of things I've done with this printer in the last 5 months we've owned it.

Things it has done well:
-Printed my wedding invitations and response cards (on cardstock) smoothly, quickly, and flawlessly
-Printed out copies of some of my engagement pictures to give to family
-Printed innumerable black and white / color documents and files.  The print speed on this machine is pleasantly fast in the "oh, it's done already?!" sort of way.
-Scanned (manually and automatically) about 2 milk crates worth of my college class notes so that I could get rid of the physical documents.  This equates to something in the neighborhood of 2,000 pages of notes, about 2/3 of which were scanned using the automatic feed tray.
-Scanned in many single-page documents which were sent straight to my computer so they could be used as email attachments
-Scanned recipes out of cookbooks, rather than having to copy them out by hand or retype them into my computer myself.
-Plenty of photocopying; it's not as flawlessly crisp as the photocopiers at my office but this machine didn't cost a couple grand, either


Areas where it could use a little improvement
-The card reader
We use a memory stick to store some of the documents/class notes as we're scanning them in and some days the machine sees the memory stick the whole time we're trying to use it.  Other days, we keep having to unplug/replug the memory stick when the machine "loses" it.  Since the stick works in both of our computers, we think it's the printer that's having issues, not the memory stick.

Fortunately, using the card reader isn't required when scanning documents; we installed the HP software on our computers, so we could control scanning from there.  That meant we can scan multiple page documents straight to our machine's hard drive.  We can even use the automatic document feeder on a couple of two-sided pages in the middle of a large set of single-sided documents by using the "add page" feature in the software to get the back sides scanned, too--that's not something that can be done to a stack of automatically fed pages using the printer's display.

-Printing envelopes
I needed the return addresses for the invitations, and doing that was about as smooth as it would have been on an inkjet in 1995.  If you put 3-5 envelopes in the paper tray and have it run them in small batches, it's fine.  If you try to have it run more than 10 envelopes at a time, it's about 90% likely it will jam on you.

Other notes
We have used the automatic document feeder for the scanner so much that it now squeaks its protest when we get it cranking away.  But it still works, it's just not quite as stealthy as it was at first.

The printer rarely jams when feeding regular paper, but the automatic document feeder for the scanner will jam more readily if left to its own devices.

The fact that this printer can do two-sided printing at my house as easily and readily as the printers I have access to at work earn it major bonus points.  I still remember when two-sided printing at home involved manually feeding the paper into the machine twice.

The initial ink cartridges have let me print all the wedding invitations (200 reply cards & envelopes) in blue without running out of ink.  I was fully expecting to get half way through and need to run to the store for more ink.  So far, that hasn't been an issue.

Summary
We were hoping for a "decent" printer, scanner, and copier.  This product has more than lived up to our expectations on all three of those functions.  It has great print speed.  It shows good quality on both color and black & white printing for photos and regular documents.  It copies and scans well in both color and black & white.  It networked easily with our computers.  We are pleased with our purchase, overall.