HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus e-All-in-One (CM756A#B1H)

I am somewhat perplexed by the large number of negative reviews for this HP All-In-One Printer. After having owned an older HP C7100 for nearly five years and giving me great reliability and service, when it came time to update I did not hesitate in purchasing another HP Printer. This Officejet model is a premium high end AIO Printer with perhaps only the Canon MG8120 having simlar features. Although the Canon has received excellent reviews, it is more of a photo printing unit than the HP. For home or small office users printing a large volume of text documents,the HP with its larger paper cartridge and automatic document feeder is more robust.Setting up the 8500A Plus was a breeze with the initial loading of printheads and ink catridges taking only about 15 minutes out of the box. The Printer sprang to ife upon powering it up with test printing and alignment working flawlessly. Loading the Windows 7 drivers from the CD-ROM was again extremely easy and took about 5 minutes. I ran into one small problem with setting up the wireless network for my home office latops but that was quickly rectified by making a call to HP Support.Thus far I am extremely happy with the 8500A Plus. Printing speeds in black and white and color are well above average for an inkjet although not as fast as a laser. Print quality seems very good with nice bold black texts. The copier/scanning functions also work very well with excellent speeds and print quality. Printing costs as advertised by HP for this Printer should be very low though I have not verified this as yet.In summary , the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus seems to be an excellent AIO Printer that will handle all office tasks with ease while giving you some very nice features for the price.

I've been using HP printers for a long time. I'm aware of the fact that they use expensive ink and printheads. They could give away the printers for free and make a killing off of the supplies. When you get ink jets to work, though, the quality is decent and the cost per copy is fairly low.The key is getting them to work. I had the 8500, and right out of the box it wouldn't always pick up paper. For maybe a year it worked okay except for this, but you'd think you'd get better with a so-called 'business class' printer. I picked up the 8500a printer because it uses the same printheads and ink cartridges as the 8500, plus I got a continuous ink supply system that fits it. The 8500 just suddenly decided that the black/yellow printhead had a problem. I bought a new printhead, and it still has a problem. Got a replacement printhead from HP under warranty and it's also got the same problem. I'm going to try one more time, then take a sledge hammer to it to vent my frustrations if I can't get it to work. The printer is only about two years old. I've heard HP has a lot of problems with printheads. They advertise as a 'green' company, but pretty soon the landfills are going to be overloaded with these junk printers.Well, the 8500a looks nice but is also a piece of, um, something scraped off my shoe from the yard. Again, right out of the box it misses picking up paper, even though the paper supply is full. Every five pages it has to clean and check itself. The duplexer works okay, but slow (two sided printing). It wants to stay connected to the web and do it's own updates, but I think that is because HP just wants to track whether you are using their ink or not.The 8600 I've heard is an even bigger piece of that stuff from my shoe. They also changed the ink cartridges and printheads, just to keep people off balance I think. I've not purchased one of those, because this is my last HP. They've really gone in the (flushing device of my bathroom) over the last few years. Ink cartridges are ridiculously priced, and the printheads only last a few hundred copies. Between two printheads ($60.00 each) and four ink cartridges (over $100.00) you can buy a new printer. So that's what I recommend. Buy two or three printers, just for the supplies. Keep one as a lightly used backup, and one in the box. Or get a continuous ink supply system. The investment is worth it, especially if you bought two or three of the things. If you get into trouble with one of them, chuck it and set up the new one.Cannon is the way to go from all my research. You can buy after-market supplies for them a lot easier, and the parts last longer.Update 6/9/12. Yellow printhead plugged again. Having trouble aligning after merely removing the black/yellow printhead for a check. Constantly using paper to do an alignment that, so far after a dozen tries, still won't succeed. After it took 10 minutes this morning checking itself it still hadn't printed. So I did the most satisfying thing I've ever done with a printer. Took it outside and smashed it on the cement. Some images uploaded for your enjoyment if Amazon lets them post. 4 month old printer and now it's a piece of junk. Wait. It was a piece of junk when I bought it. I've had HP printers now for years, putting up with their shortcomings, but no more. Brand new printer, two-fifty paid, now in the toilet. You have fair warning about buying these pieces of bottom-shoe stuff.

I have had this printer for a little over three weeks. I had previously had a HP Laserjet AIO that I bought in 2002, and it never let me down. I have a feeling that since I have finally configured this beast on my network correctly, it will perform just as well. Great speed, nice features and ease of use (once set up) are all pluses. Print quality is excellant, just keep in mind that if you print duplex, you in for a wait while each side of the page dries.Just so you know, I asked everyone and their brother prior to making this purchase and not a single person or online resource that I could find could answer this question. The question is "When you scan a document through the document feeder, will it scan the document into one whole PDF document, or does it scan one page per document?" This was absolutely the critical decision point for me when making s decision to buy this printer over a competing one. The answer is that you can do it either way, with the default being to scan the entire document into one PDF.Now for the nightmares on the set up. 1) The printer insisted for like 3 hours that I had left some packing material in where the print heads are located when I had not. I removed and reseeded the print heads at least four times before the printer decided that I must know what I was doing (of course while on the phone to HP). 2) Norton Security Suite 4.3 and 2a) recycling the power on the printer after each install. When setting this printer up, you basically have three options. USB, internet wireless, or internet wired. Using USB set up will work without issue, but it will not enable you to take advantage of the ePrint functionality, and you will only be able to scan documents from the computer which has the USB cable.I realize that my home network is a little more locked down than the average person, so I knew that I might have a challenge with a network printer install. For starters, I use opendns for my DNS servers. I also have port forwarding set up on my router to service incoming HTTP requests to my Windows home media server. Finally, all other computers run Windows 7 and Norton Security Suite. After many, many trials I finally figured out what you have to do to be able to use this printer on the network when using Norton.1) If using the Norton firewall, reset the firewall settings for Norton to "Default" prior to the printer installation. 2) After you add the printer to each computer, you must recycle the power on the printer in order for the new computer to see it on the network, especially the scanning functionality. You will get errors if you try and run the scanning software on a new install without previously recycling the power on the printer. You must do this after every install of the printer software on each PC. My theory is that there is something in Norton which is throttling the UDP requests to wake up the printer. Your experience might vary depending on what kind of antivirus program you run.Prior to making this purchase, you might want to consult the list of testing antivirus software that HP has made with this printer.[...]Here is a reference that HP has for troubleshooting the issues with wireless printer setup.[...]Some other things to be aware of is that HP will by default install a software update program on your PC which you can disable through MSCONFIG. Also, don't be surprised if the first 10 times you try and set up the eprint functionality that you get an error that the printer could not connect to the server. THE ISSUE IS PROBABLY NOT YOU. I called HP on this, and apparently their eprint servers are down more than they are up, or at least that is my impression since I always seem to find them down.