HP Officejet 6500:Be careful with this product it only gets 2 stairs from me

Author's Rating:

Pros: Good quality out put and descent control panel layout

Cons: Models not clearly marked, questionable print-copy speed rating, questionable cost savings, slow duplexing.      

The Bottom Line: 

I would not recommend this product. Also had issue installing the complete software on a new XP pro system so I installed just the print driver.

Author's Review
I have done my own testing on this product and there are 5 items that should be mentioned. The one I tested was the 6500 wireless model number E709n this comes with duplexing

1)There are 3 variations of this product all with the same name but not all come with the same feature set so the end user has to pay attention to the model number to make sure they get the one they want.

2)HP advertises a print speed of 32 ppm black and 31 ppm color with a “Laser Quality Speed” of 7 ppm black and 7 ppm color in my testing using the default setting (automatic 600 X 600) it came out to approximately 7 ppm black and 5 ppm color. But not all HP venders state the laser quality speed.

 3)The HP datasheet it states a copy speed of 32cpm black and 31cpm color. No mention of laser quality speed. During the copy testing it became very apparent that this product could not even come close to that stated speed using default settings and real world documents.

4)Because my unit comes with duplexing I also tested this feature. HP does not quote a duplex speed and this is good thing for HP. Because if a person were to buy this product hoping to get a simple 3 page duplex document out in about one minute The end user would be very disappointed. As the product took over 2 minutes to do this. The reason is the unit waits about 18 seconds before it starts to print the other side of the document so the ink can completely dry.

5)As far as achieving any savings on a cost per page,  this is a guessing game with HP as there is no indication on the front panel or on the status page regarding a percentage or page count remaining. So it would be very dificalt to estamate any cost per page savings. In my testing using equivalent page count based on approximate known page coverage. Comparing that information with the visual boxes HP offers as a usage rate. My guess is the end user using default settings for most documents would get approx 30% less then what HP states the yield should be.