- Color print, copy, scan, and fax
- Laser quality speed, up to 7 ppm Black/7 ppm Color, maximum 32 ppm black/31 ppm color
- Built-in Ethernet networking
- 2-line text LCD display
- 35-sheet automatic document feeder
Product Description
Boost productivity with this fast, networked all-in-one—save up to 40% per color page over lasers. Maximum print speeds of 32 ppm black, 31 ppm color. Speeds equivalent to a laser printer with up to 7 ppm black, 7 ppm color. Easily share this all-in-one and efficiently use resources with embedded wired Ethernet networking. Easy-to-use workflow tools let you scan to PC or memory cards plus digital fax options. Up to 40 percent lower cost per color page vs. lasers. … More >>
HP Officejet 6500 All-in-One Printer
About admin
Overall print quality is excellent. Price is good also.
Some points of interest:
1. When setting up the network printer I ran into a few snags and no two installs followed the same dialogue. It took 2-3 hours to set up 4 computers on our network.
2. The print cartridge empty light came on with 25-100 pages remaining. I typically use Fast Draft as a default and keep printing until ink ran out.
3. Text is regularly cut off from the last 1/2 line or so at the bottom of a page — seems to be a margin problem that floats around. Adjusting the footer and body margins sometimes, not always, corrects the problem. Print Preview always looks fine. I’m using Word 2007 – same problem occurs in previous versions of Word. Work around is to create a PDF and print the PDF — no joke! Several websites indicate that this is a problem with no real fix/patch available.
4. The printer is extremely noisy and has a habit of cleaning itself regularly. Hmmmm!
Say it ain’t so!
Rating: 2 / 5
I’ve had this printer driver installed twice.. first time on computer #1, driver on the CD took forever to load! For computer #2, I went to the HP site (per one reviewer’s suggestion) and installed the smallest “for IT professionals only” version and found I could not use the scan function with that slimmed-down driver.
I finally figured out I had to load the full-feature English only 191MB driver, using the custom install option (left out the Photosmart, HP Purchasing). To disable the incessant looping Update nag message window on machine after reboot, I deleted the HP Update application (via Add/Remove utility) afterwards. I agree HP software is rather crappy and bloated but the HP printers have been more reliable than other brands I’ve used. I bought the 6500 to replace my 6 year old HP PSC 1210 that died after years of heavy use. Before that, I bought the HP Deskjet 500 that still works after 20 years. I hope this machine lasts awhile, as well.
I’m surprised this newer-model printer isn’t faster than my old printer (equally noisy to my 1210) but the scanner is improved – more adjustment options, decent resolution. I wanted the flatbed copying and sheet feeder capabilities for my next multi-function machine and this one does the job adequately.
Had a power outage recently and was concerned that since I didn’t power off via the button on the printer, it might screw up the settings.. but there was no issue. It worked fine after power was restored, without me having to make any adjustments.
Now, if I can only figure out how to avoid paying an arm and two legs for those ink refills! For most documents, I set the print resolution to “Fast Draft” to make the ink cartridge last longer.
Addendum (5/16/10): Ignore the “empty cartridge” alert on the machine. The final warning will stop the print jobs from proceeding. Just take that ink cartridge out and re-install it back into the machine. This will override the “out of ink” status. You’ll get at least another 20 pages before the ink cartridge is actually empty.
Found out Walgreens cannot refill the ink cartridges for this HP model. I could try my luck with ink refill kits.
Rating: 4 / 5
I’ve had this printer for about a month now, and have printed and scanned several documents (have not tested the fax as I do not have a home landline).
Overall, I am pleased with the printer. The print quality, and speed are very good and the scanning couldn’t be easier. The only small complaints I have about it are 1 – it’s a bit noisy when it prints (and subsequently aligns the print after after each printing). In fact, when my wife sent something to the printer across the network from another room, my 2 year old was near the printer and it scared the dickens out of him!
The other drawback was (and I’ll readily admit I’m no IT expert) I was unable to get the printer to install without using the HP CD that installs all kinds of extra crap I did not want on my machine.
Anyway, despite some things I do not like, I am very happy with this printer.
Rating: 5 / 5
So far it’s been a very solid printer. It’s a little tall, and it’s “draft” printing still uses too much ink compared to other brands on the market, but when it comes to printing quality letters, and images it’s a solid printer.
Be forwarned however, that it is a noisey printer, on draft print it’s noisey from the paper being fed through the machine and then from the paper being ejected onto the tray, it’s done with such force that the paper will fly off the paper tray if you have not lifted the trailing edge of the output paper tray lip up, which you are supposed to do. But it’s also noisey after every document (document can be 1 page or 100 pages) is printed in that it seems to re-align the print heads and so the print basket goes moving back and forth along the print line, popping up and down here and there and just generally makes some noise while doing it.
Now, if you need a printer that is actually going to be very productive in that you’ve got an office staff that is printing all day, and prints document after document (like we do here) then this is probably not the printer for you. You see after each document it does that print head aligning thing and during this time the printer is unusable, it can’t print the next document until it’s done doing whatever it is doing with the print head moving back and forth on the print line.
This is a shame for us as when we are working, we are printing 1 and 2 page documents continuously, one after the other, I will print a document, submit the document electronically, then fill out another document and send it to the printer where it has to wait for the printer to get ready again, then print it. On and on we go on a daily basis, and the printer eventually falls behind and we have to end up corolating the printed documents with the submission informaiton page that we have to put them together instead of being able to just stack them on the output paper tray.
So while I realize that not everybody needs the printer to the extreme that we do here at the office, is why it’s still rated a 4 in my opinion, because for a home printer, this is really a great printer if you don’t mind the noise and is only made better by it’s big brother printer that has the wireless option. For the price that we paid for this offices room of printers (18 of them) at $119 each, it’s still a solid buy even if the workers do have to corolate the pages at the end of the day.
Price of Ink:
The Ink is high, for a XL cartridge of black it’s about $35.00 to $40.00 at the local big box office stores. We use to run all brother printers where the ink cartridges could be easily filled with just a hole being drilled into the cartridge, a syringe and the ink bought at local big box office supply stores for a fraction of the cost of a new cartridge. We could refill the brother cartridges hundreds of times without problems. The HP from what I’ve been reading can be filled between 2 times and 16 times before some mechanism in it signals to the printer that it’s empty even when it’s full, so this is a big cost concern when each ink is $15.00 for the regular size and the printer uses so much of it even in draft mode.
As far as setup goes, the first time I ran the setup off the included CD, the setup did fail. It took aproximately 20 minutes to get to the failure point. The program suggested that I reboot the computer and try again as a fix for this. I did as instructed and rebooted the computer when informed to do so, and when the computer came back online I re ran the setup from the included cd and it went through in about 10 minutes or so and fully installed the software with no further hitches. We don’t generally reboot this particular computer as it also runs our phone lines as well as being one of the offices main workhorses, but a reboot did allow the included software to be installed without further incident.
There is one last thing that I should mention. If you have a digital camera that uses CF memory cards (like our Nikon cameras do), then consider that this printer does NOT have a CF memory card slot. They have chosen to include MS, sd, xd etc but not CF cards for some reason which is just a shame, now we’re back to getting the images to the printer the long about way of doing it through the computer since this printer has no CF memory card slot to use.
Actually, there is one more thing that I should mention, when printing documents in draft mode it *might* cut off part of the text at the bottom of the page. When this has happened to me, I switch to the general every day printing option and it prints all of the text as it should. My only guess on this is that the printer ejects the paper so fast in draft mode that the printer can’t print the bottom portion of the document. It doesn’t happen every time, but it does happen once in a while.
If anybody knows of instructions on how to refill the OfficeJet 6500′s cartridges please comment and let me know as I’d really like to go back to saving money by refilling the ink cartridges again, instead of printing our own documents at almost the same cost as taking them to the local printmart store when we have to buy new cartridges for this 6500 each time they run dry.
Update: We’ve now found out that these printers use a whole lot more ink than we had planned on. On one particular printer (assume the rest of them are the same here in the office) we’ve found that it uses up the initial black ink cartridge in less than 300 pages. Those pages are not even a 5% coverage and have always used the draft printing mode. I see now why they sell the XL cartridges, the smaller cartridges just don’t have enough ink in them to make this printer an “office” (like OfficeJet) printer. It’s better suited for a home printer and we are thinking about returning the whole lot of them and going back to brother printers. Even with all the faults of a brother printer at least we can keep our ink prices to a reasonable level for our daily black only text only print jobs.
Rating: 4 / 5
Evidently, whoever created the webpage for the HP6500 printer just copied the webpage from the HP6500 wireless printer, so the two were very confusing. I went back and forth several times to find out what the difference between them was that would constitute such a difference in price. I finally realized, one was wireless and one was not. Both of them were described as printing on both sides of the paper, which was what I really wanted, not the wireless, so I bought the cheaper model. When I received it there was no duplexer so it wouldn’t print on both sides. There was directions on how to insert the duplexer, so I called Amazon to find out what was going on. To make a long story short, it does not come with a duplexer and you cannot buy a duplexer to put on it (this learned from HP when I called them and talked to five different people!) I, therefore, returned the printer to Amazon and told them to change their webpage. Hopefully, it’s been changed by the time you read this and the problem won’t come up again, but beware!
Rating: 3 / 5