HP OfficeJet K80 All-in-One

by HP

Product Details

Product Manual [8.82mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 14.6 x 19.2 x 9.2 inches ; 22 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 27 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00004YZCQ
• Item model number: K80
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 10, 2000

Product Description

From Winmag®

At first glance, the specifications for the OfficeJet K80 look much like those of OfficeJet G85 we looked at in September. It’s a color printer, scanner, copier, and color fax all-in-one unit with a built-in sheet-fed scanner (the G85 has a flatbed scanner). It comes with a twist: you can use it to send and receive e-mail, though the feature’s constraints may make it impractical.

The front panel offers the typical set of buttons that control the major functions so the machine can work without your PC -- number of copies, paper type, “Color” and “Black” for fax, e-mail, and copy functions. The two-line LCD display panel’s menu is easy to navigate.

Printing

In print tests with our 20-page text-only document, draft mode (300 x 600 dpi) documents printed at 7.9 pages per minute (ppm), while normal mode (600 x 600 dpi) ran at 4.3 ppm. This compares with the manufacturer’s rating of 12 ppm and 6.5 ppm for draft and normal (respectively). The mixed-text-and-graphics test document was produced at 6.7 ppm in draft mode (600 x 300 dpi) and 2.8 ppm in normal mode (also 600 x 300 dpi), compared to HP’s 10 ppm and 5 ppm ratings for color documents.

Black text was crisp and easy to read, though we wish the ink would dry faster (it’s easy to smudge if you remove it from the output tray too soon after printing). Solid color boxes were rendered well, clip art was produced in the right shades, and draft mode, while lighter than other HP models I’ve tested, is acceptable for judging alignment or font size before final printing.

Photos also looked good, thanks to HP’s PhotoRET III color laying technology. A 6 x 7.5" photo on plain paper looked fine, up to the usual HP standards. Using glossy photo paper, the K80 uses its top resolution (2400 x 1200 dpi) and output looked good considering it doesn’t use photo ink cartridges.

The 22-pound printer offers a 150-sheet input tray and 50-sheet output tray.

Fax

Fax performance and quality is very good. The unit includes a 20-page automatic document feeder, 100 speed dials and 10 one-touch keys. You can also create a single speed dial to send faxes to 20 different recipients. The K80 can work as a standalone fax machine or you can use the printer driver that comes bundled with the machine and fax directly from your Windows application. The K80 includes 90 pages worth of fax memory for storing incoming faxes if you run out of paper or for storing outgoing images queued for later delivery. Another nice feature: a legal-size document is automatically reduced to letter size for transmission.

The standard fax features, such as auto redial of busy numbers and auto answer mode are part of the K80’s feature set.

Scanning and Copying

By default the scanner can handle up to 600 x 1200 dpi (3600 dpi enhanced) scans in 36-bit color and 8-bit grayscale. There was one problem, however. While copies of several text-only documents resulted in acceptable, but not great, output (the resolution drops to 600 x 600 for copies), using the scanner with the included ReadIRIS OCR package gave poor results. In fact, despite changing a variety of scanner settings, I wondered if typing the text from scratch would have been faster. That’s very unusual, as ReadIRIS is quite accurate.

You can “scan to” a variety of destinations, including e-mail and Word, either using the OfficeJet software’s on-screen menu or the on-panel “Scan To” button. The TWAIN driver, for acquiring images from the scanner, was easy to use from the Windows applications I tested.

The Web Connection

Another distinctive feature of the K80 is its ability to work with Netdirect, letting you print e-mail messages (so much for the paperless office), send documents to an e-mail address, and print web pages without a computer. There are several limitations to Netdirect; you get a 60-day or 25-minute (whichever occurs first) trial, then you’ll have to sign up for the service, paying on a cost-per-minute basis (there are also three plans that reduce the per-minute cost and carry a minimum number of minutes each month, like cellular phone plans).

Netdirect’s limitations may make the feature more gee-whiz than practical for you. First, there’s the extra cost; you can scan a document and send it as an e-mail attachment now with very little difficulty, and unless your ISP or e-mail service provider charges by the message, there’s probably no additional cost to you, and there’s little speed advantage to using Netdirect. To send an e-mail with Netdirect you must have the recipient’s e-mail address entered into one of the speed dial settings (which you can do via software or tediously through the LCD display) and use that speed dial to send the message. Likewise, you must allocate a speed dial setting to any URL for Web pages you want to print. This strikes me as a lot of bother and expense for very little payback.

I also don’t want my e-mail automatically printed – I’ll be wasting paper and ink on spam. Having e-mail print automatically also means you can’t use an e-mail client to manage your messages or keep a message archive.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent & well-balanced multifunction machine., September 18, 2001

By 

Rheumor (New Orelans) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: HP OfficeJet K80 All-in-One (Office Product)

I've had MFs for a number of years, most recently a Brother MFC7200. That unit offered all the same features as this HP K80, but at twice the price. Despite that, it was only mediocre at performing its tasks, save its poor performance as a scanner. The K80 on the other hand is an excellent printer, fast, clean and quiet. Its fax features are also topnotch, with the 33.6 faxmodem allowing for 3 seconds per page faxing. The scanning clarity and speed is the best of any sheetfed unit I've seen, and copying with and without enlargement is also pretty darned amazing at this price.
However, what really makes the whole pkg so nice is the software that runs quietly in the background and only pops up when needed. When it makes its appearance, it really simplifies whatever task you're working on and obviates the need for any kind of manual.

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great printer with one or two limitations, April 6, 2002

By 

Doc JC (Beaverton, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP OfficeJet K80 All-in-One (Office Product)

We've had a K80 for about a year now for a small office. We use it to print everything from correspondance to brochures. In general its been a great multifunction machine.

Print speed:
Has been excellent with one exception. All the HP printers print vertical lines along a page extremely slowly. We print correspondance with a template containing a vertical line that runs the length of the page. Letters were taking several minutes to print because of it. Graphics speed is generally excellent, much faster than our HP 1215 even though they are rated at the same speed.

Print quality:
Excellent. Photos print beautifully (something we didn't really expect on a multifunction printer) and our brochures print with clear vivid color.

Copying:

Black and white copying is very quick and produces excellent results with text. Results with black and white graphics are not as good, shaded boxes are sometimes grainy or not shaded at all. We did return one machine because color copies all contained a light blue band, the replacement machine has had the same problem. We don't do enough color copies to worry about it.

By the way, the return was handled routinely with no hassles from HP's end.

Scanning:
We were not as disappointed as Amazon's reviewer with the OCR capability. I've scanned and extracted text from a number of magazine articles. Although the OCR is far from perfect, it was adequate to meet our purpose. Photo scanning is easy.

We were disappointed with the late support for the XP operating system and that we had to pay to have new drivers shipped on CD rather than have them downloaded. The HP drivers still don't support all printer functions.

The HP director software worked beautifully under Windows 98.

This particular model is starting one of HP's older ones now and may soon go out of production. The printer has generally served our purposes well. If we had to do it again, we might go for a flatbed model.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars USB Problem, October 3, 2002

By 

Driver Ed (Goldens Bridge, NY (USA)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP OfficeJet K80 All-in-One (Office Product)

I agree with all the positive reviews of this product. The quality of printing, copying and faxing is quite high. Even color copying worked quite well although the colors on the copy were slightly muted compared to the original, but still quite acceptable with decent speed.

I also agree with the Windows 2k user who spent hours trying to get the printer to work with a USB connection. I installed the printer first on my Windows 98 desktop PC. Everything installed easily and the printer worked fine. Then, I connected it to my Windows 2k Professional notebook PC's USB port and it kept crashing with a blue screen error message. It worked fine using the standard parallel port, however. I finally went to the HP support site and found a USB patch. I applied it and then I was able to use the USB port without any problems. Note: if you need to re-install the software driver, make sure you use the included uninstall program, first.

I have another slight quibble. When using the sheet feeder sometimes the copy comes out slightly askew. I think the problem is that there is only one roller in the middle to pull the original into the unit. It would have been better to put a roller on each side to keep the paper aligned properly.