Customer Reviews

HP Officejet 6500 All-in-One Printer

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(67)

 

 

Don't bother using the disks that came with the printer. Better to go online at the hp site and download the driver software to this model.

I went to the HP site (per one reviewer's suggestion) and installed the smallest "for IT professionals only" version (I'm still using XP OS) and found I could not use the scan function with that slimmed-down driver. As some users have noted, the scan function breaks - a bug in the software. (I discovered the web scan feature - just enter the printer's IP address into the browser url bar. Many thanks to the helpful customer who commented on my review.)

Use the custom install option (uncheck the Photosmart, HP Purchasing junkware). To disable the incessant looping Update nag message popup after reboot, I deleted the HP Update application (via Add/Remove utility) after installing the driver. 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. Also, if you don't want to wait for the printer to warm up and print heads cleaned every time at startup, just leave the machine on all the time.

To have the ink cartridges last longer, I set the print resolution to "Fast Draft" for most of my projects.

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.

Update (7/16/11): I still have this HP All-in-One and found several refill kit vendors to replace the ink for both the slim and XL sized cartridges.

The kits are sold on Amazon - Inktec - color set or black refill sold separately. Also, there's the good-valued 600ml color & black combo ink refill kit. Links on reviews get blocked so do a search on Amazon for "Inktec refill HP 920XL" and "600 ml refill hp 920 XL" to find those items.

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!

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.

I just installed the printer/fax/scanner/copier in just over 4 hours. I know a fair amount about computers and printer installation, so I assume my difficulties were not user error. To be short, the main problems were:

- _Do not_ use the installation CD. I tried to install the information on the CD, and the scanner would not fully work. Per a suggestion of another reviewer, I went to the HP.com and installed the software directly from there (Go to hp.com > select "support & drivers" > select "download drivers and software" > for product type "officejet 6500" > select your type of printer (mine was E709a) > select your operating system (mine is Vista) > then select "HP Officejet Full Feature Software and Driver (English Only). Then follow the instructions from there.

- Unless you have a dedicated fax phone line (one land line for phone calls, one land line for a fax), you MUST be at your machine to receive an incoming fax. The caveat here is if your phone service has some type of fax-ring that you can purchase, but I did not care to do this. This is frustrating, as this new Officejet 6500 is replacing my 10-year-old fax machine which has the capability to receive incoming faxes when I am not at home. I do not understand why technology that existed 10 years ago no longer exists now.

I have the printer up and running, and the scanner, fax, printer and copier all work (that is, after I uninstalled the CD software and reinstalled the software from hp.com). I am frustrated with how much effort it took to get this up and running, and frustrated that I have to be present for the fax machine, but it seems to be working well.

Hence - have patience when installing! (and install from hp.com!)

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.

I bought this to replace a 6 year old HP 7100 series printer that started to have mechanical problems. I was hesitant to buy the C6500 based on some of the reviews I had read about set up problems.
I was amazed at the ease of installation! I have it connected via a LAN to my wireless router. I used the provided CD to install it and the install took maybe 20 minutes on my first computer. It is almost automatic in that it found the network and came online quickly. Make sure you shut off Norton Security firewall first. On my second computer I forgot to do that and the install SW could not find the printer.
Print quality seems very good and printing is quick. I have only had it a week so I cannot speak to ink use yet. The provided utility provides easy access to all the functions and ink status including scanning in a simple fashion. Much easier than the old 7100 which was slow to open up the scan function from my laptop. Noise is not a problem as I have it maybe 20 feet from my desk at home

This is not an industrial grade printer as the plastics are lite compared to the 7100 which weighed almost twice as much. But the thing is compact and easy to use and seems to print and fax very well. It even has a function to check your fax phone line set up which is great, since I only have one wired phone line now and so previous fax check meant sending something from work.

I paid $110 for it from PCCONNECTION with free shipping. I later saw it at Best Buy for $99 this week.
Based on value, print quality and very easy set up I gave it a 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!

I have owned a dozen or more HP printers over the years and have been a loyal customer for many years. However, the software shipped with their printers is a resource hog and on this machine simply did not work. The software failed to detect the ethernet at our home. So, I went to a USB hookup which at least detected the printer. However, the fax button permitting received faxes to be stored on the computer never worked and the "configuring" portion of the software installation simply stopped at 96% at least 8 times, including the last three during a 3 hour conversation with HP tech support - which is TERRIBLE! This after 5 hours of attempting to install it myself, including reviewing the HP online support suggestions. EVERY time, including after the tech support person deleted everything pertaining to the machine from the registry and re-installed the software, resulted in the same error. Starting the installed software resulted in a message saying to re-install the printer. Completely unacceptable. Then, of course, HP referred me to the retailer for a refund, refusing to stand behind their worthless product.

In August, I foolishly tried again, this time direct from HP. Here are my experiences:
I purchased this direct from HP on 8/13/2010. Today is 8/26/2010. I have spent most of three days of my time attempting, without success, to install. I have had two lengthy phone calls with tech support. One guy tried installing the software for a DIFFERENT printer, likewise without success. The next guy was at the same level despite the assurances of the first guy that the matter would be "escalated" presumably to a higher grade support person. The phone connections were lousy as was their English. Two days ago I phoned in after they tried to phone me back over a weekend when, predictably, since it is August, I was away. I phoned back. The only number furnished is the general tech support number. After half hour on hold I was simply cut off. I phoned back and spent another HOUR on hold. I was then informed that someone would call back and install this within "24 to 48" hours. It is now more than 48 hours and no calls and, despite continuing efforts including level 3 and 4 uninstalls no working printer. Please note that the software leaves digital detritus EVERYWHERE on your machine and it is for all intents and purposes impossible to remove without a PhD and/or re-installing Windows. This is a shockingly bad printer. If I could give it a zero I would.

This is the second HP printer I've bought for my business. Our last one was an $800 monstrosity color laser printer that broke down within one year of use. After returning it and getting a replacement, we sold the replacement and got a Brother inkjet for $130. That lasted almost 2 years, with heavy use, and very cheap cartridges. When it died, I decided to give HP another chance, since they had this very sleek and very cheap (I paid $99 at Office Depot) multifunction printer. Unfortunately, I pay $15 to $20 for each color or black ink, which last only a few weeks with us, vs. paying that much for 5 cartridges of the generic Brother inks.

The scanning has been much easier on the Mac than it was with the Brother, but the copying already has a problem, only 2 months old, when I use the feeder. There's a big black line in the center, so I followed the instructions on how to fix it on their website, and it was still a problem, so they recommended having it serviced. Honestly, does anyone even service these printers anymore, when you can buy a new one for so cheap?

I'm pretty deeply regretting giving HP this second chance. Maybe if there were generic inks available for this model, I'd be more forgiving of glitches, but the savings up front I've made with this purchase have long fallen by the wayside in the face of overpriced inks and bad support sites.

I got a great deal on this machine from Office Depot. It was $100 on sale plus they gave me another $50 off for turning in my old printer, so I paid $50 for a nice multifunction! Everything went great until I installed the drivers. To make a long story short, everything installed easily but the drivers made my computer so slow that I couldn't work as fast as normal.

I use Excel and a construction-related software called Agtek. Both programs lagged so badly that it took me several hours longer to complete a project that I was working on. I ended up doing a system restore and everything went back to normal speed. Then, I reinstalled the printer drivers and it was back to a snail's pace again. I did this several times, even downloading the "drivers only" file from HP's website, all to no avail. I kept getting the slowdown. Since I can't sacrifice my work efficiency for a printer, I took the damn thing back. I didn't bother calling HP because I made an educated guess that if it was the drivers, there wasn't anything they could do. Plus, I didn't feel like spending an hour on the phone trying to explain to (what I assume would be) some foreigner (who's accent is so thick it's difficult to understand) what my problem is. I was going to get a Lexmark printer but the ink (by yield) was the most expensive out of all 3 brands that Office Depot had available (HP, Brother, Lexmark - the cost being in that order, cheapest first). I ended up getting a Brother MFC-5890cn. It was a little more expensive but it prints 11x17, which is great for what I do. Everyhting works like normal with the Brother installed.

In summary, the HP all-in-one is a great machine as far as print quality, speed, ink costs, etc., but the print driver sucks and made a wreck of my computer.