One of the best all-in-ones you can get (HP Officejet G85)

Member Name: KerriLou

Product:	HP Officejet G85
Date:	12/04/03 (2568 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A decent piece of machinery.

Disadvantages: Probably not for home use.

The only reason I know about this piece of equipment is because we used it at work, and yes it did do an awful lot of work.

SETTING UP

--Software First or Connect First?--

My first piece of advice is to read the instructions ? do not do what we did at work and plug the printer in, let windows find it as a new device, finding the drivers on the cdrom and hope it works ? it wont. Always install the software first and let the cd run its course.

--USB or parallel??

The next piece of advice I could give is to decide on whether to use a USB or parallel connection. I would choose a USB connection as this definitely runs faster and is much more reliable. PLEASE NOTE only a parallel lead is included in the box but for the sake of £5 I would suggest getting a USB lead.

Make you choice of connection and stick with it because believe me changing it makes life very difficult ? you have to uninstall the software ? which as I have found out, does not uninstall properly and then to get rid of any parts of the software that did not uninstall properly you have to go through the registry deleting keys etc, and this is not pleasant.

INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE

Install the software first, installation leads you step by step through the process, depending on the type of connection there are two different installation processes, make sure you follow them to the letter, because the process can get quite jumpy and you can end up going round and round in circles. Also another tip ? make sure the fax set-up wizard appears at the end of the process, if it doesn?t then it means that the software will not work properly and then I would advice looking at www.hp.co.uk - technical support to view a solution to the problem.

Having said all of this if you follow the set-up poster to the letter, and you don?t want to change your connection type ? which chances are you wont, everything will install properly and you will b
e able to use the printer straight away.

INSTALLING CARTRIDGES

Two cartridges are included with the printer ? a black one and a tri-colour one, these are easily installed, open up the carriage door and the carriage moves to the centre of the printer, it?s then just a case of lifting up the green catch, snap in the cartridge, and push down the green catch to keep the cartridge in place. Once the cartridge door is shut, the printer will print an alignment page.

PRINTING

The maximum resolution of the G85 is 2400 x 1200 dpi. This lets you print digital photographs at photo quality standards, and it does, especially on photo quality paper.

The G85 is a fairly quick printer for a colour inkjet. It prints approximately 12ppm black and white and 9ppm colour (this is on normal quality).

COPYING

Copying is extremely easy with the G85, especially if you?ve got several sheets to copy, just put the piece of paper you want copied in the auto document feeder and press either black copy or colour copy, and select the number of copies required ? if more that one and let it get on with it.

You can also do other settings whilst copying like enlargement, reduction and cloning (reproducing the original several times on one piece of paper). There are also different levels of quality ? quick, normal and photo.

SCANNING

Scanning is done either via the font control panel on the printer or from the PC, which is probably easier as you can select more options like cropping the picture, the picture quality and the application you want to send it to i.e. Word or Outlook etc. Scanning several pages for an archive is also easy as you can put the original pages in the auto document feeder and it will keep scanning the pages until its finished.

FAXING

There is an internal modem on this printer and therefore you are able to do standalone faxing (without using the PC), there is black and w
hite and colour faxing available ? although you can only send a colour fax if the recipient machine also has colour fax. The G85 is also able to receive faxes without any need to click on a button from the PC. You may also fax from the software applications on the PC which will send the image to a printer driver which will in turn send the image to the fax modem in the printer.

INK CARTRIDGE REPLACEMENT

As always this is a major problem, the cartridges are extremely expensive and this is the reason I would not recommend the G85 for home use. The high yield cartridges can cost up to £45 each ?not cheap.

ACCESSORIES

You can get a double side printing accessory to put on the G85, which we had at work, and although it takes longer to print it does save paper. We ordered ours from Dabs.com

VERDICT

The G85 is a very good all-in-one, but I would not recommend it for home use as it can get complicated with the installation issues, and it is very expensive, but for a small office this might just do everything you want it to.

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