HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus e-All-in-One (CM756A#B1H)

I am somewhat perplexed by the large number of negative reviews for this HP All-In-One Printer. After having owned an older HP C7100 for nearly five years and giving me great reliability and service, when it came time to update I did not hesitate in purchasing another HP Printer. This Officejet model is a premium high end AIO Printer with perhaps only the Canon MG8120 having simlar features. Although the Canon has received excellent reviews, it is more of a photo printing unit than the HP. For home or small office users printing a large volume of text documents,the HP with its larger paper cartridge and automatic document feeder is more robust.Setting up the 8500A Plus was a breeze with the initial loading of printheads and ink catridges taking only about 15 minutes out of the box. The Printer sprang to ife upon powering it up with test printing and alignment working flawlessly. Loading the Windows 7 drivers from the CD-ROM was again extremely easy and took about 5 minutes. I ran into one small problem with setting up the wireless network for my home office latops but that was quickly rectified by making a call to HP Support.Thus far I am extremely happy with the 8500A Plus. Printing speeds in black and white and color are well above average for an inkjet although not as fast as a laser. Print quality seems very good with nice bold black texts. The copier/scanning functions also work very well with excellent speeds and print quality. Printing costs as advertised by HP for this Printer should be very low though I have not verified this as yet.In summary , the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus seems to be an excellent AIO Printer that will handle all office tasks with ease while giving you some very nice features for the price.

I've had this printer for 14 months now and printed maybe 1500 pages during this time. For those of you contemplating an HP Printer, they seemingly are plagued by erroneous 'paper jams' that stop printer functioning. It's more than annoying, it often has impacted my small business during printing of invoices or paychecks. I've had the FAKE "Paper Jam" (aka HP's blue screen of death) twice and been able to fix both times by monkeying with the printer. Before buying ANY HP printer, please do a Google search on the model and 'paper jam' and 'poor design' -- even if you end up buying an HP product, at least you will go into it informed.WHAT TO DO: Simply stated. Jam a pencil or other into the 'open' top monitor. This will fool the printer and you will see the clutch, a black object with a small white 'gear' surrounded by springs. This gear engages and dis-engages with several of the geared wheels that turn the paper, loading it under the print head for printing. There are several great pictures on the internet if you search on this model -- easily discoverable in 2 or 3 minutes.Next Spray WD40, or (as I did) enviro friendly bike chain lube all over the white thing pictured -- in the clutch. It's about 1/2 an inch long though covered by the thing housing the springs. Using a thin screwdriver or other similar instrument and work that white thingy back and forth. (It can be tough because it's surrounded by springs, the cover down't open very wide, it's dark, and you have to have strong fingers)... work that white thing left and right. It takes several times.Be careful not to force it. Remember you are countering HP's incredibly poor engineering. It's take them decades of tinkering to get to this level of planned obsolescence. Be patient, but keep working it. Each time clearing the jam on the display, working the white thing, spraying lube. At some point the printer will go through it's internal checkup -- meaning you'll soon be printing (again). At some point this will break/crack and you really will need to buy a good printer.... which is probably not an HP Product.WHAT NOT TO DO: 1) Call HP Tech Support. You will waste hours (and pay for the pleasure) on doing things that you've already done, are inane (hard rebooting a printer, installing software updates, resetting to factory default). NEVER call tech support unless you are contemplating harming yourself, and probably not even then. In actuality a better solution is to call tech support, but keep them on the line as you ignore their advice and follow this. This way HP is at least paying you somewhat, and you're getting some satisfaction of sharing the pain.2) Do NOT keep turning the printer on and off. It doesn't work.3) Do NOT rely on this printer long term. Once this happens you'll never know when it will stop printing and you'll have to fix this issue --> takes about 15 minutes once you figure out what to do. But like a bad relationship, once it goes bad, it's irreplaceable. You're better off cutting your losses on your terms (e.g. when your toner runs out, when you there is a great sale at a competitor printing company, etc...).I hope this helps. Clearly to portray myself as a content HP customer would be to radically define 'contented' downwards. I will NEVER buy an HP product again. Period. Full Stop. And as I own an IT company, while it's not a make or break sale for HP (and I stopped buying their servers years ago), I have to believe this repeated bad design, support, and customer alienation will impact their bottom line. At least I hope it does.

I have had this printer for a little over three weeks. I had previously had a HP Laserjet AIO that I bought in 2002, and it never let me down. I have a feeling that since I have finally configured this beast on my network correctly, it will perform just as well. Great speed, nice features and ease of use (once set up) are all pluses. Print quality is excellant, just keep in mind that if you print duplex, you in for a wait while each side of the page dries.Just so you know, I asked everyone and their brother prior to making this purchase and not a single person or online resource that I could find could answer this question. The question is "When you scan a document through the document feeder, will it scan the document into one whole PDF document, or does it scan one page per document?" This was absolutely the critical decision point for me when making s decision to buy this printer over a competing one. The answer is that you can do it either way, with the default being to scan the entire document into one PDF.Now for the nightmares on the set up. 1) The printer insisted for like 3 hours that I had left some packing material in where the print heads are located when I had not. I removed and reseeded the print heads at least four times before the printer decided that I must know what I was doing (of course while on the phone to HP). 2) Norton Security Suite 4.3 and 2a) recycling the power on the printer after each install. When setting this printer up, you basically have three options. USB, internet wireless, or internet wired. Using USB set up will work without issue, but it will not enable you to take advantage of the ePrint functionality, and you will only be able to scan documents from the computer which has the USB cable.I realize that my home network is a little more locked down than the average person, so I knew that I might have a challenge with a network printer install. For starters, I use opendns for my DNS servers. I also have port forwarding set up on my router to service incoming HTTP requests to my Windows home media server. Finally, all other computers run Windows 7 and Norton Security Suite. After many, many trials I finally figured out what you have to do to be able to use this printer on the network when using Norton.1) If using the Norton firewall, reset the firewall settings for Norton to "Default" prior to the printer installation. 2) After you add the printer to each computer, you must recycle the power on the printer in order for the new computer to see it on the network, especially the scanning functionality. You will get errors if you try and run the scanning software on a new install without previously recycling the power on the printer. You must do this after every install of the printer software on each PC. My theory is that there is something in Norton which is throttling the UDP requests to wake up the printer. Your experience might vary depending on what kind of antivirus program you run.Prior to making this purchase, you might want to consult the list of testing antivirus software that HP has made with this printer.[...]Here is a reference that HP has for troubleshooting the issues with wireless printer setup.[...]Some other things to be aware of is that HP will by default install a software update program on your PC which you can disable through MSCONFIG. Also, don't be surprised if the first 10 times you try and set up the eprint functionality that you get an error that the printer could not connect to the server. THE ISSUE IS PROBABLY NOT YOU. I called HP on this, and apparently their eprint servers are down more than they are up, or at least that is my impression since I always seem to find them down.