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HP Officejet Pro 8500A e-All-in-One Printer

The HP Officejet Pro 8500A e-All-in-One Printer ($299.99 direct), the junior member of HP's 8500A series of small-business multifunction printers (MFPs), brings to the table most of what the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus e-All-in-One Printer ($399.99 direct, 4 stars) offers. It has a smaller touch screen, and lacks some of the Officejet Pro 8500A Plus's (which I'll hereafter refer to as the Plus) multifunction features. Whether the Officejet Pro 8500A (which I'll call the Pro) is worth the $100 savings may depend on how much scanning, faxing, and copying you plan to use it for. Regardless, the Pro is a very respectable choice as an MFP for a micro or home business, or the dual role of home and home-office MFP.

The Pro prints, scans, copies, and faxes. It can scan to a PC, memory card, email, network folder, or. It can act as a standalone printer, printing photos from memory cards, USB keys, and PictBridge cameras as well as content from the Web using HP's Web Apps.

The Pro has a 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning or copying multi-page documents, while the Plus's ADF fits 50 pages, and lets you duplex (automatically scan both sides of two-sided pages). Although the Pro prints at up to legal size, it is limited to letter-sized scanning, while the Plus supports legal-sized scanning as well as printing.

HP says that the Pro is the slower of the two models at scanning, with rated speeds of 5.1 and 5.2 pages per minute (ppm) for black-and-white and color pages, respectively, compared with the Plus's 7.5 and 5.6 ppm. (I was unable to compare the two products' scanning speeds, as we don't test scan speeds for MFPs unless they seem unusually fast or slow, which wasn't the case with the Plus when I reviewed it in January.)

At 1.1 by 19.8 by 16.5 inches (HWD) and weighing 25.4 pounds, the Pro is large enough that you'd probably want to set it on a table of its own. The Pro is clad in a mixture of matte and glossy black plastic. The front panel holds the touch screen, which at 2.4 inches is considerably smaller than the Plus's 4.3-inch screen. The Plus's touch screen was disappointing when I tested it, as despite its generous size it was not very responsive. The Pro's screen suffers from its small size, making tasks such as entering fax numbers on its virtual keypad more of an ordeal than a chore, at least for a big-fingered person like me. So neither model's touch screen was anything special.

The Pro has ample paper capacity for most small offices, with a 250-sheet input tray, and an automatic duplexer lets you print on both sides of a sheet of paper. If you need more paper capacity, the third model in the series, the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Premium e-All-in-One ($499 direct) adds a second 250-sheet paper tray.

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