HP Officejet 6500A Plus Review

HP Officejet 6500A Plus detailed review

The HP Officejet 6500A Plus e-All-in-One is a part of HP's Officejet e-All-in-Ones (eAIO) and ‘ePrinting’ series. It's a one-stop solution offering a whole range of functions – Print, Scan, Fax and Copy – a good, old-fashioned MFD. The HP Officejet 6500A Plus e All-in-One is mainly targeted at the SOHO segment. Let's see how well it does.

Design and Build

The HP Officejet 6500A is a glossy black printer measuring at 18.75 x 17.72 x 10.17 inches. Though considerably light for its dimensions at 8.23 kg, the printer has a sturdy build quality. The glossy black exterior gives the printer a very upmarket but clichéd look. As long as the MFD doesn't attract dust or cleaned regularly, it will look classy in your home or office's desk.

A 2.3-inch resistive touchscreen is built into the front panel of the HP Officejet 6500A Plus MFD. To the right of the screen are alphanumeric touch sensitive buttons with backlight. These keys light up only when in use, but at other times remain dark. The only physical key on the printer is the power button and is present to the right of the alphanumeric keys. The Officejet 6500A Plus' 250-sheet input tray has a very robust build, whilst the output tray's a bit flimsy. To the left of the output tray is the multi-memory card reader slot. The scanner flap is well made and the hinge it rests on feels secure making it quite durable. Resting on the scanner flap is the ADF tray which can hold up to 35-sheets of paper at a time. The rear side of the printer has the slot for the duplexer. Other slots on the rear include – USB slot to connect to the PC, Ethernet port and the power slot. We like the overall looks and build of the HP Officejet 6500 Plus e-All-in-one.

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Features

The HP Officejet 6500A Plus e-All-in-One is stuffed with truckload of features. As the name suggests, you already know it can Print, Scan, Fax and Copy, but what it offers more is the ePrinting ability. This HP printer lets you print documents via e-mail. A simple setting up of HP ePrint email for the printer and voila! you are ready to print just by sending documents to the customised HP ePrint printer email address. For setting up the HP ePrint service, you connect the MFD to the Web either through a cable or wireless. The Officejet 6500A Plus managed to establish a wireless connection within five minutes. We would have liked if the printer connected more seamlessly.

Once connected to the Internet, you need to navigate to the Web service settings on the printer. Now, all you need to do is press Enable Web Services. That’s all! You are done setting up the ePrint service. The printer prints a page that includes a special code to use if you choose to register the MFD online. We recommend registering at HP ePrint Center as it gives you more control like customising the email id of the printer, choosing email ids from which the printer would accept print commands and much more. You can send any office document, PDF or image via email and the MFD prints it for you. Apart from sending print commands via email, you can also use HP Web Apps to print documents from Google docs etc thus eliminating the need to hook up a computer to take prints.

The HP 6500A Plus comes with few inbuilt apps that ranges from printing business documents to printing a tic tac toe game. You have attempt a soduku puzzle in 5 secs or print Yahoo’s top stories in 25 secs. The built-in Dreamworks app allows you to take 3D printouts but you will need a Red-Blue 3D glass to view the output paper. The printer lets you to scan documents, images directly to a memory card or to the computer. It also allows you to choose the file format to which the document or the image needs to be saved to. The amount of control and options the HP Officejet 6500A Plus eAIO provides is just overwhelming.

The HP 6500 A Plus has a 250- sheet input tray capacity, which is sufficient for home office use. It also comes with a 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF). Another notable feature of this printer is the inclusion of automatic duplexer. The automatic duplexer accessory lets you print on both sides of the paper without the manual need to flip the page. The printer comes with an Ethernet port and built in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. The printer also sports SD/xD/MMC/MS Duo memory card reader. A feature missing on the HP Officejet 6500A Plus is the PictBridge socket.

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Performance

Setting up the printer was very simple and quick. The HP Officejet 6500A uses four colours to print its copies: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Installing and removing the MFD's cartridge wasn't a pain at all, but a simple and easy task. The HP Officejet 6500A Plus all-in-one's touchpane isn’t smooth thanks to the resistive touchscreen, but the touch sensitive buttons make up for the loss by being very responsive. We did experience printing lag at times, especially while trying to connect to our wireless router. The on screen QWERTY keyboard takes getting used to for typing and we predominantly had to rely on the touch sensitive button for input.

Apart from best print quality mode, the HP Officejet 6500A Plus e-All-in-One manages to spew out 10ppm. The overall output quality for text, graphics and images of the Officejet 6500A was quite good. Whether it involved reading fonts (in our text documents test) or differentiating between several gradients (test images), the HP Officejet 6500A Plus did quite well overall. Difference between its normal and best quality print files isn't as great as we thought, and overall print quality at fast print mode was also better than average. All through our testing, the MFD wasn't unnecessarily noisy and operated at low noise levels.

Verdict

The HP Officejet 6500A Plus e-All-in-One retails for a price of Rs. 11,999. For that price, it's a unique MFD, offering a wide range of functions, apart from solid performance and overall print quality. The Officejet 6500A Plus is easy to use and comes with extra features like ePrint and HP Apps, stuff that's difficult to find on the product's competitors right now. If you want a slightly fancier version of a boring MFD which can print documents over the Internet, we highly recommend the HP Officejet 6500A Plus e-All-in-one.

Contact Information for Product Enquiry: 1800 200 0047 or 0124 387 7300 / http://bit.ly/w4R5Mw

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Aniruddh Subramaniam

Email Aniruddh Subramaniam