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HP Officejet Pro 8000
by Vialdana
HP Office Jet Pro 8000
This was bought because my husband runs a business from home and every three months needs to send out a mass mailing. We had until recently (actually it's still sat on the floor near me waiting to be re-homed), a Lexmark laser printer which although very good in terms of quality was costing us an absolute ... fortune in toner. For this reason we decided we needed to replace it, and looked around at the options. Hubby's preference was to look for another laser printer, mine to go back to using Hewlett Packard who I'd always found so incredibly reliable in the past. In the long run after lots of shopping around, talking to people, reading reviews etc. this was the printer we settled on.
Technical Spec
Although this is not a laser printer, it is up there mixing it up with the laser printers in terms of its abilities and specifications. In fact, HP built this with the small business folk in mind with the aim that it would be an inkjet alternative to a laser printer.
In its 'best' mode, the print quality on this is ISO, laser comparable and in black it manages 15 pages per minute and in colour 11 pages per minute. In draft however, it speeds up no end and can do 35 black or 34 colour pages per minute.
Print resolution for black is up to 1200x1200 dpi and for colour up to 4800x1200 dpi, and it has a monthly duty cycle of up to 15,000 pages which is pretty high for an inkjet and again is comparable to many laser printers.
This takes 4 ink cartridges - Black, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, HP940 cartridges are the standard for this, and there are many compatible cartridges available for this printer (one of the reasons we chose it in fact!).
Unlike a lot of printers this has two sets of print heads - one is for Black and Yellow, and the other for Magenta and Cyan. This makes the print heads last a lot longer than if there was just one, but means you're not paying for a new print head on each new cartridge as you used to for many HP printers in the past.
It has a 32mb memory, and a 250 sheet input tray as standard though you can change this out for a larger 500 sheet tray if you want to. It's output tray can handle 150 sheets at a time, and it does duplex printing as standard (another of the features that drew us to this printer).
Setup
Set up was very simple. You get a CD and a quick start guide with the printer, and the CD has the set up process on it as well as the full manual.
You start by following the quick guide and installing the cartridges and print heads. The print heads actually come pre-loaded with a little ink so you have to give them a good shake before installing them. The reason for this is so that you get far less streaking than you would otherwise on beginning your printing process with new heads and new cartridges.
To get going and set up the printer from this point on, you pop the CD into the PC and it guides you through the process step by step. As well as checking that it's correctly hooked up to your PC, it also takes you through aligning the print heads and checking that the colour is clear and defined on the print copy. It uses maybe half a dozen sheets of paper and a bit of ink to do this, but doing this means that everything is nicely sorted ready for you to do your first print run.
Using The Printer
When you first turn the printer on it takes a while to get warmed up - and chugs around a bit getting itself ready to do the print run. It's a bit irritating waiting for it to be ready if you're in a hurry, and although it's slower than most other ink jet printers I've used in the past I don't find it that much of a problem as we generally don't need to turn it on just to do one sheet. If you were doing this regularly then yeah I can see it might get a little frustrating.
Depending on the mode you have it set to for printing will depend very much on the speed of the print run, however, when we set it in draft mode to do a letter, we were very pleased with how fast it got on with things. It fires paper through very well, and tidily, and catches it well too, no spitting pages across the room.
The user interface on the software that comes with this is pretty good. You get a few nice options including print mode (draft, normal, best) a choice of resolution, the option to print colour documents in greyscale, and borderless printing all the way up to A4 size. It can also do poster printing too which lets you print the image across multiple sheets of paper in various sizes - 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 and 5x5 sheets. We've not used this yet, but the idea is certainly a good one, and may well prove useful to us in the future.
The duplex feature on this is brilliant. The duplexer attaches at the back of the printer and comes as standard with it. This means you don't have to faff around turning pages over, but can print onto both sides simply. Using it does slow the print run down quite a lot, but really you'd expect that, and its still faster and easier than having to turn pages by hand would be and a nice feature to have on a small printer.
A Few Other Thoughts
One of the first things that comes to mind to say is make sure you put this on a STURDY desk or table. This has got to be one of the most mobile small printers I've come across, and if you placed it on something that wasn't sturdy I can see it might get shaken apart during the printing process lol.
Noise wise, this is not a great printer. It is loud, and having a conversation over it is difficult. Having said that, the speed of the printing is so good that when we've used it, we've not had to have it on for very long at a time, so we've not really been bothered too much by the noise. I would think if you were printing things daily though it could get quite irritating.
One problem we did have was when printing a large batch of envelopes. At draft speed, it seems to get a bit cross about doing these and in a print run of 300 it ate about 15 of them. Each time it did this the envelope had to be cleared from it and we had to make a note of which it hadn't printed so we could re-print those at the end. I suspect however, that if we'd changed this from draft to normal mode it would have had less problems because it wouldn't have been sucking them through so fast, and when we do our next big print run in 3 months time we intend to try that. Doing just one or two envelopes in draft mode hasn't been a problem however.
Now this may sound odd, but one of our main reasons for choosing this printer was due to which cartridges it took. The Lexmark that we had before was impossible to refill the toner, and when I spoke to someone who works at a refill shop, he said to me that some brands like Lexmark there just isn't the call for, so no one works out the chip codes etc. so these are rarely refillable. HP however being so popular people make lots of compatible cartridges for them, and the HP branded cartridges are easy to refill. In terms of saving money and also being environmentally friendly, we believe that being able to buy refilled cartridges is a very good thing so we wanted to make sure that this would be possible with whatever printer we chose. The HP940 cartridges which this takes we can do this with and that makes us very happy.
So far we're very happy with this printer, and in the time we've had this, the only slight problem we've had was as I've said with envelope feed in draft mode, for this reason I do recommend this printer and think that for many people it will serve very well. However, if you're going to have it printing a lot of the time and will have to sit next to it while you do, I would not recommend this printer to you because of the noise factor. Because of this, I'll rate it as three stars as it very much depends on your personal circumstances whether this would suit you or not.
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HP Officejet Pro K5400
by KatieNeish
INTRODUCTION
As a student, I know the value of a good printer, and just how impossible it is to carry on with life when it breaks/ runs out of ink/ needs something replacing and this is exactly why I love this printer.
INSTALLATION
I am always worried about the installation of all the extra bits that I buy for my ... computer. However I was very impressed with this. The instructions are so clear as to what you have to do, and what order you have to do it in. Within about 20 minutes of beginning the installation process I was done and ready to go.
PRODUCT
There are only a few simple buttons with very explanative symbols and so its pretty much impossible to get confused. The instructions to use it are also very short and simple. They don't go into too much complicated detail, and just tell you what you need to know.
The ink is a doddle to change, and takes two seconds, and in the year I have had this printer the paper has not jammed once.
Its also pretty quick at printing, and the ink seems to last forever, even after the "low ink" light has come on.
I also think the look of it is very practical and professional. Theres plenty of space for the paper, so you can load it up and forget about it.
FEATURES
It is a very simple to use printer, which I think is its best feature. You dont want all these fancy add on and features. All you want is a quality printer that works.
Another great thing about this printer is that you can buy add ons for it. My parents have exactly the same printer, and they have bought an extra piece of kit that fits onto the back and allows them to do double sided printing. This is great as it means if you do decide that you want to extra things, you don't have to go out and buy a brand new printer.
The paper is loaded horizontally at the base of the printer, which I think is great. A lot of other printers I have seen you load it at the top vertically so it ends up flopping all over the place.
PRICE
I am not sure how much mine cost, as it was given to me as a birthday present, however a quick look at google shopping and I have found it for around about the £100 mark (plus postage and packaging)
Once you have bought the printer, the main expense is ink. There are so many sites to choose from, and so many different prices. Cartridges are normally about £10 - £15 each when bought of ebay. I don't deny that they are quite expensive, but they do last forever (I think each cartridge prints around 2000 pages)
CONCLUSION
All in all a very pratical, speedy printer that will serve you well for years. It is not expensive at all, it seems to use ink very efficiently and it hardly ever goes wrong.
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HP Officejet 6000
by brinkk
This was at first the most annoying printer I have ever bought. The setup took 15 minutes and the back of this thing turned into a serious rats nest. The manual was helpful but did not provide diagrams. But one after it has been set up, it is probably the most practical printer.
this however is the only fault because what it ... lacks in setup and ease of installation is made up or in the efficiency and also the value for money. It is highly economical, something in the range of A, or B efficiency, and because it uses LEDs and has an auto off function for power saving, it won't cost much to run.
There is also an ink economy setting on your computer that will work with this. It can print fast economy, fast normal or fast draft. It can also print in greyscale to a high standard. It says it takes up to 250 sheets but this is seriously not recommended. I have tried putting 200, 50 less than it can hold, and it just jammed because it wanted to feed in two sheets to print at once.
It has lasted a long time and in the two years I have had it the whole ink jet row has been caked in dried ink and dust, yet when cleaned it worked perfectly. It's a fantastic printer, and I will not be buying another anytime soon. I know everyone says this but this really is the best value printer today. It is cheap to buy, and even cheaper to run for both electricity and ink supplies.
For accuracy when printing it is perfect. Here is a small margin problem when printing from a webpage because pictures and adverbs can be cut off by a giant White block, which did not happen on my old printer, but printing word documents, it will align the margins perfectly. So this is more recommended for those who print from word rather than a webpage.
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