Customer Reviews

HP Officejet 6000 Color Inkjet Printer (CB051A#B1H)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I am a very short time user of this printer, however, this is at least 16th printer I have had at since my first Centronics in 1979, and I have installed many more at work.

The printer is very well packed. The print head comes un-installed. I had a little apprehension putting in the print head. The gray bar that is raised has a stiff spring. It would not be the first time I have pulled something too hard, but there are no locks or catches. It just lifts up. The head went in smooth as did ink installation. The next step is to put power on and wait for the printer to align. This takes some time. The printer werrs, pops, grinds, sounds like it is trying to load paper, but eventually prints, JUST WAIT.

After plugging in the Ethernet cable, the network light came on, and pressing the light got me a network printout. (However, it was not necessary). From here you put the disk in the computer and follow instructions. I installed the printer on three computers, a desktop wired to network, and Asus EEEpc, wireless (copy all files to a usb and run setup from the usb), and a laptop also wireless. The desktop with Vista required me to except port 427, the Asus running XP required nothing, and the Laptop running Vista and Zone Alarm required reconfiguring Zone Alarm. The good thing is the firewall changes required were somewhat explained by the software. The Zone Alarm instructions were better than the Windows FireAlarm instructions.

I have read many of the 'professional' reviews on this printer. Now that I have it installed and have printed several test prints, some thoughts. Print speed, is well within acceptable limits. In fact I read one review that said it was too slow. I disagree with that. I also read that the 'Photo' quality was not good. Well it is certainly good enough. It does make noise, however, it is no worse that most other HP ink jets I have dealt with. It is not a factor for me, but it it were I would pick the Wireless model and stick the thing in a closet somewhere.

I would highly recommend this printer to anyone looking for no frills printing. I particularly like the cost of ink! While I have refilled carts before, at $9.99 for color carts, for 300 pages and $14.99 for 700 pages, I don't think I will mess with it. The black XL cart is suppose to print 1,200 pages that is almost 5 reams of paper!

This printer is very pretty and the cartridges for it are really cheap, but it doesn't get very many pages per cartridge and when I tried to install it on my Windows 7 machine, following the instructions that came with the printer didn't work. It says not to plug in the printer until you've installed the software, but the disk that comes with the printer does not have Windows 7 drivers. I was going to send the printer back until I tried just plugging it into the computer and letting it go. Luckily the computer was smart enough to find drivers for the printer without the disk.

Once the printer was installed and I tried to print something, I noticed the printer takes its good sweet time printing things, so if you're looking for something super speedy you may want to look elsewhere.

Also note: THIS PRINTER DOES NOT COME WITH THE USB CABLE TO CONNECT IT TO THE COMPUTER! This printer does not have wireless capability so you need the cable to use the printer.

I didn't see that before I bought it. Luckily I had an extra cord lying around, but others may not be so lucky.

Overall for the price however I am very happy with this little machine. No major problems I can see so far, and I've printed a good number of things since I purchased it.

I've used the HP 6000 for only a short time (printing a hundred pages or so), but have found it excellent so far. Installation, though a bit slow, went easily. Printing speed in fast draft is exceptional (about 3 seconds a page) and the quality good. Communications between the printer and my computer could be faster, too, but once it goes to work it zips. One minor paper jam was easily fixed. I'm surprised at getting this much for the cost.

I replaced an older Dell 920 with this printer and have been very impressed with the ease of set up and installation. It's a little noisy but print quality is much better than I expected at this price. I like the 250 page paper feed tray.

This printer replaces my workhorse HP 895cse professional printer I have used for 6 or 8 years. Problem was, it was going to cost 75 dollars to replace the print cartridges - so I decided to spend a few bucks more and replace it with a new printer. I read the reviews and for the most part, knew what to expect. So I'm generally OK with the printer and it is working fine. Which is to say, it prints nicely, but as other reviewers have mentioned, installation is a bit of a pain, and the thing is very noisy. Not loud, but just really chatty. Tell it to print. It whirrs and clicks for anywhere from 10 to 35 seconds (one time it took a minute). Once it gets started, its fast - especially in economy/draft mode. In that or "everyday printing" mode it is at least twice as fast as my old printer. So that's good. But remember the whirring and clicking, etc. Well, it even does that about 30 seconds after you stop printing. Finally a minute after you stop printing - silence. Beautiful wonderful silence - until you want to print again and the whole episode repeats itself :-( Its not horrible - just annoying for someone who had a good printer before that didn't need to do all these gyrations. I'm guessing this is HP's way of getting good print quality at the most bargain-basement price possible. Let the firmware and auto-align stuff constantly grunt away to make up for not having provided a precise enough carriage to begin with?

Installation was somewhat problematic - as others have mentioned. But if you follow the directions (mostly pictures with few words), and you are brave enough to lift the really stiff bar to put the print heads in, and then twist the levers on the cartridges until they snap off (yes - you are supposed to break them off !), then it goes OK. Just notice the 10-minute symbol in the section of the instructions where you let it do its initial auto alignment. It sounds like its trying to feed paper many, many times. But its actually doing its alignment (or something) dance all that time. The hint is the 10-minute clock symbol in the picturial instruction sheet. Miss it and you will think the thing is having trouble loading paper. Don't force feed it more paper. It eventually brought in the paper (after about 10 minutes) without any problem. Then its time to install the software.

The software spends an absurd amount of time doing seemingly nothing. (What in the world can a printer driver software set be doing for all this time ?! Half the time it is not even accessing the disk - just chewing on the processor...) Once it finishes "checking the system", it then wants to install lots of utilities (and marketing stuff). I told it to not do most of them. Just the needed ones that were not possible to de-select, and the "solution center" which I wanted. After a few more minutes, it was finally done.

So - how's the print quality? It's good. Somewhat of an improvement over my old 895cse, in both fast-econ, and in normal (everyday printing) modes. So that's a good thing.

In summary, this is probably an OK, or maybe even good printer for the price, for the home environment where I'll be using it. But I would NOT recommend this for an office. It's not a business grade printer in my opinion and I would go nuts if I was periodically printing small batches and had to listen to it all day...

I originally purchased this for someone else, and in the past for HP products, "OfficeJet" was used to define all-in-one products (print/scan/fax) and "deskjet" and/or "inkjet" was used for printers only. Well, I ordered this, not realizing it was a printer only. So if you want an all-in-one, make sure you double check. OfficeJet is now the same as a deskjet/inkjet, and deskjet is now a multipurpose machine. Go figure.

With that said, if you are looking for a printer only machine, this is a good one. It was easy to setup, although you have to be sure to follow the installation steps. The machine is quiet, although you must place it on a sturdy table or desk. The print head moving generates a lot of shaking. The unit prints quickly and so far has not generated any error messages.

Print quality is very good - pretty much standard for an inkjet. No complaints. Color rendering is good, although I'm no color expert - I'm happy with the results.

I'm using this printer with a laptop, running Windows 7, and so far no issues. Only recommendation is be sure to order your printer cable as well, because it does not come with one.

Overall, I'd recommend this printer. You can't beat the price and the print quality and ease of use. I'll update this review once I know how long the print cartridges last for.

....I have had an HP 5400 Officejet for two years now and have been very happy with it (cost to operate, performance) but I am REALLY sick of manual duplex. I got excited about the HP6000 w/automatic duplex, bought one, set it up, and discovered that the printed image when the sheets are run through the duplexer can't cover more than 9 inches on the long side (11 inches) of a sheet of letter-sized paper. This meant that my bookfold-formatted newsletters, with a 10.5" image than reaches up to .25" from the edge of the paper on the 5400, was shrunk by the 6000 to 9 inches - fonts, photos, what have you, all made narrower, not to mention the impact on a bookfold formatted document that still has a .25 inch "page" margin on the spine - NOT ok!!!
....Getting HP to confirm this required over 90 minutes on the phone. They had no specs, no equipment on hand to verify the problem I was trying to describe, and it was exhausting for all concerned. This was similar to the 3 hours I spent with service reps when I bought a K550 Officejet. The 550 had no duplexer but had a similar problem. It would not print to the magic .25 distance, and would print to .47 inch then simply CLIP a small slice off the printed image, not shrink it). Except in the case of the HP K550, the customer service braintrust convinced me to swap the unit I had for a SECOND printer to get the result I wanted. This which meant ANOTHER 3 hours on the phone with a second 550, before I sent the second unit back as well.
....Luckily with the 6000 I (almost) knew when to give up.

This is the last time I will trust HP. I give this one star because someone might need a large heavy paperweight. Here is the list of problems.
1. Installation instructions were faulty. I followed the instructions EXACTLY from step 1. An early step included check to be sure all connections are correctly made, but later it said do not connect until instructed to do so. Therefore the installation was faulty and failed to work.
2. Reinstallation was time consuming and took three attempts. It finally seemed successful, but only worked tempoorarily.
3. Thinking the problem might be my computer, I took it to the shop and paid several hundred $ to have them check the computer. They said there were a number of serious viruses and had to reformat. Thus HP 6000 was completely deleted.
4. Second installation [after cross checking with the more accurate on-line directions] appeared to be working well, until the software installed several copies of the printer ID. After several tries I found that selecting the first copy and not the others would work.
5. USB problems. Having solved the other problems I attempted to use a USB storage device on another USB socket. The printer crashed. I removed the other device and the printer continued useless, giving me the error notice that some USB device has failed.
6. Making a print, when it works at all has required turning the printer on and off several times. This does not always work.
Maybe this is a lemon, maybe it's just trash. I advise not trusting HP with your money.

Had it about 6 months now and went through several sets of ink and just under 400 pages printed.

Overall:
I like the printer and it does exactly what I bought it for. I actually like that it does NOT have all of the extra multifunction junk I don't need. Print quality is great; good contrast, no colors seem to be over saturated, and nice detail. I actually prefer the matte finish of an ink jet over the glossy finish of a laser for what I wanted to do. I disagree with other reviews about it being slow or noisy. I leave it on all the time but it goes to 'sleep' automatically; waking it up and printing is very quick. However if you shut it down all the way then yes it takes a minute or two for it to boot up. Noise is a mater of perspective and preference; my first printer was dot matrix with tractor feed; that's a loud printer! This printer doesn't bother me; it's quiet enough.



Pros:
Very happy with the print quality. I bought it mostly to print out card stock models which have detailed textures, lots of color, and I wanted good quality at a cheap price... this printer delivers just that.

Ink cost per cart is actually pretty low compared to most. Just buy the larger sized ones if you do moderate to heavy printing because you're going to blow through them. Honestly though if you're going to be printing a lot just go buy a color laser; the price per page is lower in the long run. I know HP claims this thing is cheaper to print with than a color laser but it's all a numbers game... it's really not when you come down to the reality of printing. I wanted an inkjet because most color lasers print too dark, magenta is over saturated, and I don't like the glossy finish for my cardstock models. If those things don't matter to you then color laser really is the way to go.

Handles heavy cardstock (110 lb) with NO issues. Automatically feeds it it and will even do the auto duplex with the heavy cardstock. This was a big deal for me and it does exactly what I need it to.

Auto duplex is neat. I rarely use it but when I do I really like it. Manual duplex is annoying!

Has four separate ink carts. I really like this because you only need to replace the color cart runs out. With ink carts that have all colors combined you have to throw out the whole thing when only one color is gone.

Wireless is nice; I didn't really care at first but I ended up having to use it because the software sucked so bad. I just couldn't get it to work reliably over the USB cable (maybe that's why they don't supply one!) It also has a regular RJ45 jack for an ethernet connection to.

Print head is separate. This is a huge deal for longevity. That's usually the first thing to kill your consumer level ink jets. The print head gets clogged up or burnt out, can't be easily cleaned, typically is integrated (not removable), and when it gets this way the whole printer is junk. With this one the print head can be removed and replaced; one of the most underrated features of this printer that should be pointed out every time. Read all of the other reviews on other inkjets that people loved for 6 months to a year, then the print head got clogged or burnt up beyond repair, and now the printer is garbage.


Cons:
Setup was a 4+ hour process and I'm not a novice when it comes to computers (software or hardware) or even printers. I've installed and operated Xerox plotters with their own servers and software, business class multifunction centers, lasers, ink jets, dot matrix, of all different manufacturers over the last 15 years.... NONE of them have been as annoying to setup the software for as this printer. Hands down, bar none, the most annoying and buggy software I've ever delt with for a printer. (second place would be the Xerox XES 54" plotter) The install software would just sit there for 30 minutes at a time doing nothing and then fail! Instructions CLEARLY said do NOT plug it in until asked... sometimes it would never ask me and then fail to install. Other times it would ask me to plug it in then fail to recognize the device and fail installing. I ended up just setting it up for wireless (which was it's own nightmare because the same crappy software needs to run to do this) and doing it that way when I would have preferred the higher speed USB connection. That said now it's up and running with no problems since so after a frustrating night it's been solid ever since. So this is what I mean by sacrificing time for money; it's cheap but you spend a lot of time setting up the thing.

It's an ink vampire to say the least. The ink carts claim you can get 300 pages under 'normal' printing. Now I'll be first to admit that I'm doing full page color prints (read: not 'normal' printing) but I'm only getting about 80 pages per cart. The quality is great but it really soaks the ink to make that quality. Thankfully there is a 'draft' mode if you don't care about quality and it spits out jobs VERY fast using far less ink. So far I see no difference in quality or ink consumption between normal and high quality.

I found the setup to be surprisingly simple. I have a normal wireless router with 4 ethernet ports. I used the enclosed CD's to hard wire the printer to my desktop (through my router). Then, I connected my laptop to my wireless network and clicked "setup printer" and the printer was basically already there...so cool! This thing is networked, so I can print to either my desktop (hard wired) or my laptop (wireless).

The printer uses 920XL ink cartridges, so printing cost is maybe half of some other inexpensive HP printers. Here's my opinion on HP printers. You can buy a $40 printer and pay $.10-12/page for black & white. You can buy a $200 printer and pay $.04-.05/page. This printer is pretty close to the expensive ones for ink cost per page. You'll need to do some research (HP cartridges are rated for number of pages) for accurate comparisons.

Thanks, Paul.