Reasons We Purchased
Why did we get this printer now? I think a review is pointless if you don't know what the purchaser was looking for or expected. The same machine may work well for one person or horribly for another depending on what they expect to use it for.
We were looking for a replacement for our bulky HP color laserjet. We wanted something smaller, but especially we wanted something that took less power. We are in the middle of converting our home to an off-grid power system with DC circuits and a whole-house inverter. UPS (Uninteruptible Power Supply) and inverter systems all say they do not support laser printers. Laser printers cause serious power surges when starting up and will throw spikes back down the line, damaging sensitive equipment such as inverters and power monitor panels. So we were looking for low wattage both when printing and especially on standby, but we run a small business, so we still needed good color output, low cost-per page, and network support. The cost-per-page requirement meant we were looking for something with decent-sized toner or ink cartridges and separate cartridges for black and color so they need only be changed when completely empty.
We use Macintosh computers, a desktop Mac-Mini and an older MacBook. We may be setting up an additional Linux box as a server. We occasionally have people come over who may have a Windows laptop and might want to print something, so decent support for multiple operating systems was also important.
The HP 6500 Wireless
We started looking at the HP 6500 OfficeJet All-In-One Wireless because of its small desktop footprint and very low power usage. In addition to printing, it had copying, scanning, and fax. We digitize receipts and records on a regular basis (using a digital camera in document mode), and a flatbed scanner would make that task easier. In addition, in our handcraft business, we often need to scan pages from books while researching traditional craft techniques so that we can document historical reproductions (e.g. http://mistymanormercers.com/index.php/200...-Stockings.html). Copying was also of some use to use, but faxing, given that we have no land-line phone service (the lines out here are terrible, so we use cell phones for home and business), was of no use to us whatsoever. More importantly, however, the 6500 Wireless had 4 ink cartridges for black, cyan, magenta, and yellow, and had an option of buying longer-lasting "XL" cartridges for more economical printing. Unlike the slightly less expensive OfficeJet 6500, the 6500 Wireless had, not surprisingly, wireless network support, but also had two-sided printing and support for scanning from a 35-page document-feeder. The two-sided printing would allow us to save paper and make it much easier to print fliers, brochures and similar sales-materials in house. It printed faster and took up less space than the slightly more expensive 8500 Pro Wireless. It supported Windows and Macintosh with no major problems uncovered by a Windows search. It also looked like Linux drivers were available for Ghostscript.
We were able to find this in several stores, including Office Depot, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy where we were able to look at the the machine and check out its printing ability. The 6500 Wireless ranged from economical high-speed black printing on normal paper to stunning color on glossy or photo paper. It also would print T-shirt transfers. Ink cartridges were also in stock at quite a few stores and were easy to recycle and exchange. Oddly enough, Best Buy had a much lower price than Wal-Mart. Office Depot started a trade-in rebate for a laser printer to an ink jet the day after we bought at Best Buy (anyone want a used laser printer?).
Getting It Home/Setting It Up
The printer came in a number of pieces and some assembly was required. HP carefully labeled and color-coded all of the pieces so that you can assemble it correctly without too much trauma. I did lose one of the small parts in the box for a bit, however, and the instructions for preparing the ink cartridges for insertion were frighteningly vague: they did not make it clear that turning the small lever on the bottom was supposed to cause it to break off. This caused a bit of consternation until I was able to get the printer working and convince myself that I had not broken anything!
The AC adapter is external. Many people get annoyed at having a separate power brick, but this was an important feature to us: we can potentially use a transformer to feed DC directly to the printer without going through an inverter. We [will] have solar and wind going into a battery bank, direct DC circuits for things that will run that way, and then an AC circuit for those things which must run off of AC. We have a DC adapter for the Mac-Mini and the Macbook, for instance, and there is no reason we cannot do this with the printer. Inverters are not 100% efficient, and you lose power going from DC battery to AC inverter to AC adapter to DC printer. It is much simpler and more efficient to just use DC all the way.
Software installation was quick and painless. The printer spent a good bit of time initializing the first time and it took a few minutes to configure it for wireless use (we plugged it in via USB initially) but it appeared on the network and appeared to work perfectly. A test document popped out and I was reasonably satisfied.
The Software
The 6500 Wireless needs the included special drivers to support double-sided printing and its other special options as well as to support scanning. Two printers appear in your printer-selection dialog, one for normal printing and one for faxing (which we do not use). Scanning can be done by sticking a piece of paper on the machine and selecting "Start New Scan" from the HP printer support app. It is supposed to be possible to select SCAN on the printer front panel and select a machine to send it to, but I have not yet gotten that working. The HP drivers allow you to see supply levels and information more easily than past HP printers on Mac OS X and the print dialog allows access to quite a few options to control output quality and color matching.
A "Hewlett Packard" folder is created under Applications with a bunch of small utilities, including photo stitching and printing. Much of this duplicates functionality in iPhoto but allows some interesting options, including more versatile printing of photo albums that allows us to do better looking and organized product portfolios for instance. We have not done much with these utilities yet, but there are definitely some features to explore. Overall, the software seems much more polished and stable than previous HP printers for Mac OS X.
We use Mac OS 10.5.8 on both local machines.
Scanning has been excellent and painless. When you start a new scan (from the Scanner icon in the standard Macintosh Printer Status dialog), it will do a quick pre-scan to show you what it sees and select reasonable default settings, then let you override them if you choose. Output has been quite good with no tweaking, even when scanning identity documents for government/banking purposes. I have not tried OCR yet, but it is supposed to be able to save scans to text files.
There is a very irritating SNAFU with the wireless network support, however. If the printer is inactive for a few minutes, it will go into sleep mode to save power. It is supposed to continue monitoring the network and wake up when something tries to connect, but it rarely does so. If you force it to wake up from the front panel, it will seldom pick up and start printing any jobs you have already tried to submit. You often end up going through a little dance of pausing the print queue on the Macintosh, powering off the printer, powering the printer back on, and then resuming the print queue on the Macintosh. This pretty much always solves the problem, but part of the point of a network printer is to be able to print to it from across the home/office, print several documents without having to mess with the printer, and then pick them all up at once. That really does not work well in this case. It is possible that tweaking settings will fix the issue, but I have not figured it out (yet).
The Hardware
- Printer Output/Economy
The 6500 wireless prints very quickly, especially in economy ("fast draft") mode, even if you are used to mid-range laser printers. The limited size of the paper feeder makes it unsuitable for bulk jobs, however, and the 8500 is a better bet for that. The larger "XL" ink cartridges last a decent amount of time for an ink jet, but as I am used to a color laser printer, they seem to go very quickly to me. We keep spare cartridges on hand so that we do not run out just before a big event. Office Depot will issue credit for used cartridges returned for recycling, so we go in every so often to exchange them and this is much easier (and more reliable) than refilling the cartridges by hand. There are no 3rd party cartridges for this beast that we have found.
Double-sided printing either works perfectly or not at all, seemingly dependent on the document. The driver seems to depend on an even-odd numbering in the document that it can understand. If your document uses an odd numbering (e.g. Circus and Ponies Notebook™ http://www.circusponies.com/ can number pages by section: 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2-1, etc.), the printer will just print the front sides of the pages. With a bit of tweaking, you can sometimes save a printed document as PDF and then open it in Adobe or another program to tweak the page numbering, then send it to a printer. This is worthwhile in large documents but obviously not for everyday circumstances. The upside of this is that if you have a PDF which contains several documents stitched together (using Combine PDFs http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml or similar utility), the printer likes to start a new document on a new page which is usually what you want.
When it does decide to print double-sided, the first side will be printed, come half-way to the output tray, get gripped by a set of claws, then be retracted into the double-sided feeder to print the other side. The printer pauses to let the first side dry before retracting the page so that the ink does not smear. This greatly slows down printing but improves the output quality considerably. It seems to know to adjust the pause time according to paper settings in the print dialog, so be sure to set these if using special paper (e.g. glossy presentation paper). This is kind of cool to watch the first few times.
As mentioned above, output is crisp and clear. especially with quality paper and the quality ink settings. We use it to print double-sided business cards that are quite a bit better than what we were able to get with the color-laser printer. The color saturation is much better and more professional looking. I was surprised at this. True to advertising, the printing is generally quite resistant to water and smearing, depending on choice of paper.
- The Front Display/Hardware Features
The front display is well-organized, letting you have access to the major features without having to deal with deeply-nested menus and three-little buttons on other printers. You can copy, print, fax, and scan from the front panel (if I could get scanning to work that way), as well as printing photos directly off of a memory card (there are two slots in the bottom-right for memory cards). There is a bottom paper tray, an extensible output tray (I keep flipping the end tab down accidentally and it spews paper onto the floor...), and a separate document feeder for fax or scanning. The scanner is a full-page flatbed scanner. The top of the printer flips up for interior access and swapping cartridges is very easy. The print head is a removable component. As this is a common point of failure for ink jets, this makes the printer more durable and potentially longer lasting.
The printer has external ports for USB, 10/100 ethernet, and the memory card slots. The wireless is 802.11b/g and works well with the Macintosh. I have no idea how much RAM it has, but fairly large documents transfer smoothly and quickly, once you get the bloody thing to wake up from sleep.
The printer is lightweight, compact, but seems reasonably durable (I am not going to drop it to find out just how durable...). Paper loading seems reliable and jams are uncommon.
Conclusion/Summary
Overall, we are quite pleased with our purchase. The network/sleep problem is the biggest negative issue, followed by quirkiness with the double-sided printing. But good-quality output at relatively economical per-page cost lets us do quite a bit we would normally have professionally printed. We have even experimented with printing elegant gift boxes for Cathi's jewelry (she makes lamp-work beads) and specialty soap out of card stock. When we do get something professionally printed, we can experiment with it ourselves first and know exactly what we want when we go to the printer (with good CMYK color matching). The fantastically low-power consumption and DC option makes it perfect for a rural farm/off-grid situation. Copying and scanning is just added gravy.
I would definitely recommend this machine to others looking for a versatile small business device.
