Spec Data

Printer Category Ink Jet

Type All-In-One

Color or Monochrome 1-pass color

Ink Jet Type Standard All-Purpose

Connection Type USB, Ethernet, Wireless

Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal

Number of Cartridges 4

Number of Ink Colors 4

Direct Printing from Cameras No

Direct Printing from Media Slots Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Secure Digital, MultiMedia Card, xD-Picture Card, MiniSD Card

LCD Preview Screen No

Scanner Type Flatbed with ADF (Standard or Optional)

Scanner Optical Resolution 2400 pixels per inch

Maximum Scan Area 8.5" x 14"

Standalone Copier and Fax Copier, Fax

Duty Cycle 7000 pages per month

Input Capacity (printer input only) 250 sheets

Network-Ready Yes

Print Duplexing Yes

Cost Per Page (Mono) 2.7 cents

Cost Per Page (Color) 9.1 cents

Claimed lifetime for photos - dark storage 100 years

Claimed lifetime for photos - framed behind glass 60 years

Claimed lifetime for photos - exposed 30 years

Water/smudge proof or resistant yes

Tech Support http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html 1 (800) 474-6836 24/7 phone support; 1 year

Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Adobe Acrobat 8 - 4 pages, text and photos (landscape) 1:13 (min:sec)

Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 1 page, table A (with grid) 0:20 (min:sec)

Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 1 page, graph 0:25 (min:sec)

Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Excel 2003 - 3 pages, charts and graphs 0:55 (min:sec)

Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 - 4 full-page slides 1:35 (min:sec)

Business Applications - DEFAULT SETTINGS - Microsoft Word 2003 - 2 pages, text 0:27 (min:sec)

Photos - HIGH -QUALITY SETTINGS - Adobe Photoshop 7 - Average output time per print: 4" x 6" prints 1:12 (min:sec)

As the all-in-one (AIO) variation of the Editors' Choice

, the HP Officejet 6500 Wireless All-In-One Printer ($199.99 direct) had some high expectations to live up to when it showed up for testing. And, indeed, it did well as a printer, with speed, output quality, and paper handling suitable for a small or home office. Unfortunately, it also fumbled a bit on other issues, which adds up to making it a less than compelling choice, but still a reasonable one.

The 6500 Wireless offers a full set of AIO features. It prints, scans, and faxes, even over a network, and it works as a standalone copier and fax machine. The paper capacity is 250 sheets, which should be enough for most small or home offices; the 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF) makes it easy to scan, copy, or fax multipage documents; and the built-in duplexer for printing on both sides of a page is a welcome extra.

According to HP, the 6500 Wireless is nearly identical to the other model in the 6500 series, the HP Officejet 6500 All-In-One printer ($149.99 direct). HP says the key differences between the two are the addition of the duplexer and WiFi in the Wireless model. (One other noteworthy difference is non-volatile memory in the 6500 Wireless, so it can retain faxes in memory in case of a power outage.) In any case, most of the comments in this review should apply to both models.

Setting up the 6500 Wireless on a network is typical for an AIO. Set the 10.2- by 18.7- by 18.6-inch (HWD) printer in place, remove the packing materials, plug in the power cord, and turn it on. Then snap in the print head and four ink cartridges (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black), load paper, connect a cable, and run the automated installation program from disc. I used a Vista system and Ethernet connection for my tests. According to HP, the disc also includes drivers and a full set of software for Windows 2000 SP4, Vista x64, XP and XP x64, and Mac OS X 10.4 and above. In addition, you can download print and scan drivers for Linux and for Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 from HP's Web site.

Specifications

Printer Category: Ink Jet
Type: All-In-One
Color or Monochrome: 1-pass color
Ink Jet Type: Standard All-Purpose
Connection Type: USB, Ethernet, Wireless
Maximum Standard Paper Size: Legal
Direct Printing from Cameras: No
Standalone Copier and Fax: Copier, Fax
Print Duplexing: Yes

Performance and Output Quality
The 6500 Wireless turned in reasonable, but not particularly impressive, results on the PCMag business applications suite. I timed it (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing, ) at a total of 11 minutes 52 seconds. That makes it faster than the less expensive Editors' Choice , at 14:17, but significantly slower than the similarly priced , at 8:30. Photo speed was much better relative to other ink jets, averaging 1:12 for each 4-by-6 and 2:27 for each 8-by-10.

The 6500 Wireless's output quality is reasonably typical for an ink jet AIO for text and better than most for graphics. Photo quality is within the range where the vast majority of ink jet AIOs fall, but at the low end of that range.

More than half of the fonts in our text tests were both easily readable and well formed at 6 points, and even highly stylized fonts with thick strokes needed only 12 points to pass both tests. One font you might use in a business document needed 20 points to qualify as well formed, because of a character spacing issue, but even it was easily readable at 8 points. I wouldn't use the 6500 Wireless for anything that needed to look fully professional, but unless you have an unusual need for small fonts, it's easily good enough for most business documents.

Graphics output is a strong point, with eye-catching colors, solid fills, and smooth gradients. The printer even handled thin lines well, retaining lines that tend to disappear on most printer output. I saw some relatively obvious banding, but only in default mode and only with full-page images. Image quality was easily good enough for output going to an important client or customer who you want to impress with a sense of your professionalism. One minor issue is that full-page images tended to add a curl to the plain paper we use in our tests. You can solve that by investing in a more expensive, heavier weight paper.

All of the printer's photo output in my tests qualified as true photo quality, but some just barely made the cut. The two most important issues were a relatively obvious tint in a black and white photo, and a tendency for dark areas in both mono and color photos to come out a little gray instead of black, leaving the impression of a slight haze. Photos on plain paper are certainly good enough for any business use. Whether you consider the output on photo paper good enough for, say, photos you want to keep in an album depends on how demanding you are.

Other Issues
One other plus for the 6500 Wireless is the relatively high yield, and relatively low cost per page, if you print enough to justify using the printer's high-capacity cartridges. The claimed yield of 1,200 pages for monochrome and 700 pages for each color cartridge (based on the ISO/IEC 24711 yield standard) is far better than usual for an ink jet printer, and it works out to 2.7 cents per monochrome page and 9.1 cents per color page.

Most of the 6500 Wireless's additional functions—copying, scanning, and faxing—work pretty much as promised, but I ran into several small problems with scanning. One was with the Scan to E-mail option in HP's Solution Center utility. In my tests it insisted on opening an Outlook message with the scanned document attached, even though I had the program set to use Windows Mail. (Not so incidentally, I've seen this same problem with the utility in combination with other HP AIOs I've tested.)

Another problem showed up when I tried to start a scan from the printer's front-panel menus. The printer found the PC I wanted to scan to on the network and let me pick the file format to use, but when I gave the actual scan command, it failed, with a No Connection error message. I had a similar problem trying to give the scan command from the computer, using HP's Solutions Center software.

HP says it has successfully reproduced all three of these problems and is working on ways to fix them. Until it does, fortunately, there are workarounds for each one. You can, for example, scan to a file, and then manually attach the file to an e-mail message, an approach that takes a little extra work but still gets the job done.

Similarly, you can ignore both the front-panel scan command and the HP Solutions Center, and use the built-in scan commands in programs like Photoshop and Word to call on the HP Twain driver—an approach that worked swimmingly over the network in my tests. Once again, this may take a little more work. In particular, if the AIO isn't on or right next to your desk, you'll have to walk to it twice—once to insert the document and once to retrieve it. But it still gives you a way to scan over the network.

Very much in the plus column is HP's one-year warranty. HP says that if you have a problem during the warranty period, and HP can't solve it over the phone, the company will ship a replacement along with a return shipping label and cover the cost of shipping in both directions.

Despite the problems I found, the Officejet 6500 Wireless is well worth considering. If HP had left these features out altogether, it would count as only a small oversight, so even though running into features that don't work can be frustrating, it's hard to count the problems all that heavily against the printer. Be sure to take a look at the Epson WorkForce 310 All-In-One and the WorkForce 600 also, but even with its software problems, the Officejet 6500 Wireless may well be your preferred AIO.

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