HP Officejet 6500 Wireless Review

Different vendors aim to give you different reasons to feel good about buying or using a product. In this case, there are two vendors for one product: The inkjet printer/copier/scanner/fax seen here is not only an HP Officejet 6500 Wireless but a Staples EcoEasy Edition, one of 3,000-odd inventory items which the office retailer has designated as worthy of environmental note.

Staples' reasons? The $200 printer's power consumption is low enough to earn an Energy Star sticker and its automatic duplexing helps you save a tree or three by printing on both sides of a page. It even comes in a plain brown instead of colorful cardboard box, in which you're invited to bring your previous printer back to the store for recycling.

It's nice of Staples to try to give customers happy green feelings. For its part, HP focuses on other green feelings -- as in greenbacks, boasting that the 6500 not only uses up to 40 percent less energy than under-$600 color laser multifunction products but delivers comparable savings in cost per page. And considering that inkjets are generally the spendthrifts of the printing world, the HP's savings are almost stunning.

According to our calculations, using what the manufacturer dubs its 920XL series ink cartridges (forget the smaller, regular 920 cartridges, let alone the samples or starters in the box that pooped out after about 230 pages of testing), the Officejet 6500's ink runs about 2.7 cents per black and white and 9.1 cents per color page. Laser printers can beat the former, but the latter is a bona fide bargain -- leaf through recent HardwareCentral reviews, and you'll find both lasers and inkjets whose color pages cost 12 to 15 cents or more.

Even if you up the consumables cost to include coated inkjet paper instead of cheap plain paper -- as with all inkjets, paper that resists seeping or blotting sharpens output quality -- the 6500 is one of the most affordable all-in-ones you can operate. If you want to sweeten the deal further, HP's online store currently has its $200 list price instant-rebated down to $160. Staples has a $50 rebate reward for consumers who buy a new and recycle an old printer through May 2, 2009.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

Taking a relatively compact 17-by-19 inches of desk space and weighing about 17 pounds, the HP holds four ink cartridges -- the familiar cyan, magenta, yellow, and black quartet -- which snap into place in a printhead carriage that you drop into place during initial setup. The 920XL yellow, magenta, and cyan ink tanks are rated for approximately 700 pages and priced at $15 each; the jumbo black cartridge is rated for 1,200 pages and costs $32. The printer's monthly duty cycle is 7,000 pages.

The 6500 can print borderless 4 by 6-inch photos (in about 70 seconds using best-quality mode) and has two slots to print pics from a digital camera's SD/XD/MMC or Memory Stick/Duo flash cards. But its bearing HP's Officejet rather than Photosmart brand indicates its occasional-use-only status as a photo printer: It doesn't have a PictBridge USB port to print images directly from a camera (or a USB flash drive), and while it can print an index sheet of thumbnails from a card, the two-line text LCD on its control panel is strictly for instruction prompts rather than photo previews.

Nor can you replace the black ink with a photo cartridge for six-color printing. And while our review unit was usually quiet in operation, it made an annoying squeaking sound when printing glossy photos.

Speaking of names, we applaud HP for calling the multifunction simply an Officejet 6500 Wireless to indicate its standard 802.11g Wi-Fi as well as USB 2.0 and Ethernet connectivity, rather than giving it a less intuitive label like Officejet 6500W or Officejet 6510.

But while that's a step forward in understandable product nomenclature, we found that you must check the fine print on one of the box labels to make sure that you're getting a model E709n -- there are E709d and E709r versions that lack desirable features of our test unit such as collated output and walk-up (no PC attached) copying, not to mention the rare gift of a USB cable in the box.

Skip To Page • 1 Nice and EcoEasy 2 What? Realistic PPM Numbers?

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