Officejet Pro 8600 Color Inkjet Printer

by HP

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 16.5 x 24 x 8.8 inches ; 27.1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 39.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• ASIN: B0017QPVG4
• Item model number: CB015A#BET
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 19, 2008

Product Description

Be your own print shop: the K8600 delivers professional quality results allowing you to produce high-quality brochures and marketing materials in-house. High page-per-minute speeds in color and black and white keep productivity up without compromising quality. Delivers over a wide variety of sizes and types of media, giving you the versatility to get the job done. Straight-through paper path for heavy media (up to 76lbs) and specialty papers. Professional quality color at 50% less per page than a laser printer when you use HP Officejet inks. Individual ink cartridges save you money; replace only the ones you need. Maximum Print Speed (Black): 35.0 ppm; Network Ready: No; Printer Type: Inkjet; Print Resolution (Color) (Width x Height): 4800 x 1200 dpi.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Consider other choices, January 18, 2010

By 

J. Lane (Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Officejet Pro 8600 Color Inkjet Printer (Electronics)

You should consider other choices before buying this printer. It has been troublesome for me.

After about five months of light use, the message "Cover open" would appear on the computer monitor screen, accompanied by flashing lights on the printer. The printer would not print when this occurred until I lifted the top cover and closed it again. The message would appear fairly often, sometimes every two or three minutes. Other times it would go a day or two without the problem occurring. I eventually called HP support and spent about an hour on the phone two separate times to try to solve the problem. Most of the time I was on hold. Both times I had to wait about twenty minutes to acually talk to a technician. I use the word "technician" loosly - the technician spent most of his or her time reading scripts about what I should try next.

When the replacement (refurbished) printer arrived, it was a bare-bones replacement - it did not come with a printhead, cartridges, or a back access cover. I had to transfer those from the old printer. When I did that, and tried the new printer, I got the same message, "cover open." But I now had a clue, and after a little fiddling around, I discovered that if I pressed inward on the back access cover, the light went out, so I studied the back cover, did a little bending on a fairly fragile-looking contact spring, and, lo and behold, the flashing lights and error message went off and stayed off. I kept my old printer, which also worked with the modified back cover, and sent the refurbished replacement back to HP. So far I have had no more trouble with the printer. I don't know why the error message doesn't tell you what cover is open or why the technicians didn't pursue that avenue in asking me to try various things?????

So here's my summary review of the printer:

PROS
Does a good job printing. It's better than the four-old wide-format Canon that it replaced, but printers in general have gotten much better in four years.

It doesn't mis-feed very often, but when it does, un-jamming is a real hastle.

CONS
HP techical support is very poor in my opinion. I tried on-line FAQ's and the HP forum before using the phone.

Ink cartridges are very expensive. A complete set of HP high-capacity repacement cartridges costs about $115.

It shakes the table when printing.

You might want to look at other choices although the price of the HP seems to be the lowest for printers of this type.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Worst printer I've ever used., July 2, 2010

By 

Eric H (Pittsburgh) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Officejet Pro 8600 Color Inkjet Printer (Electronics)

Odd, I thought I already gave this a 1 star review, but it seems to have gone away. Oh well, I hate this printer enough to warrant writing this again. We have gone through two in our main office, and the one in our remote office has been terrible too. The first suffered from mechanical problems from almost day one, even with only moderate use. It would misfeed as many as 15(!) pages at once. Swabbing the rollers with alcohol temporarily alleviated this, but hardly something you should need to do on an almost weekly basis.

As for driver issues, all 3 have suffered from these... such as, printing totally blank sheets, cutting off margins, etc. After a lot of trial and error and conversations with HP support, we found that using a deskjet 990c driver (of all things) at least fixed the blank page issue, but many issues with document margins being cut off (that looked fine in Print Preview) remain. Granted, this review probably doesn't do much good since this model has largely been pulled off the market by HP (with good reason)... if I was of a litigious bent, I'd be tempted to see about starting a class action against HP for everyone who bought this model--Instead, I'll just steer away from ever using HP in an office environment again.

For what it's worth, my HP 1020 B&W laserjet at home has been fantastic (still on it's starter toner cartridge after 3 years of light use). However, if the K8600 is any indication of where HP's quality has headed... I'll be very reluctant to look to them for a replacement if my 1020 dies.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No major problems for almost two years, November 15, 2009

By 

John Samadi (Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Officejet Pro 8600 Color Inkjet Printer (Electronics)

Like previous reviewer, I am using it for printing on 11x17. It has been close to two years. Aside from a few paper jams and replacing ink (the unit uses more ink than I expected), I did not do anything else to it. It has already paid for itself considering the undr $200 cost, two years ago.