HP 8500 Toner
LaserJet 8500 Toner Cartridges

HP 8500 Printer Review

The HP LaserJet 8500 color laser printer is designed for the small to medium office environment. Its speed and print quality are both excellent, and it is very expandable, but its sheer bulk and high price make it difficult to recommend. If you just need a much more affordable printer, the LaserJet 2400 toner printer should be considered.

The HP 8500 color laser printer is an extremely bulky machine. With a height of 41.7 inches and a weight of 223 pounds, it is designed to sit on casters and be rolled into place. This type of model is becoming less and less common on the workplace, but that is not to say it doesn't come with some advantages. One reason for the machine's very tall height is its high paper capacity and high yield printer toner cartridges. With a standard paper capacity of 600 sheets, it has the capacity to handle a fairly large office, and additional trays can be added as upgrade options later.

The HP LaserJet 8500 also has expandable memory. The unit ships with 32 MB of memory standard, but it can be expanded to 512 MB to handle busier print environments. An optional 3.2 GB hard drive is also available as an upgrade, and gives the 8500 the ability to handle even more print jobs at once, as well as the ability to store documents locally for faster access and printing. Two models are available. The 8500N includes networking, and the 8500DN adds duplexing as well.

The HP LaserJet 8500 toner cartridge capacities are built for high volume as well. The black printer toner cartridge has a capacity of 17,000 pages, and each color laser toner cartridge has a capacity of 8,500 pages. With such a high capacity in both the colors and the black, the HP 8500 toner cartridges will not have to be replaced often. A third-party compatible HP toner cartridge is equal in quality to the OEM version but costs significantly less.

The printer's monthly duty cycle is 60,000 sheets. Print quality is excellent, owing to the 8500's 600 dpi resolution and ImageREt technology, which allows the unit to simulate 2400 dpi printing for sharper prints. Print speed is impressive, at 24 pages per minute for monochrome and 6 pages per minute for color.

Overall, the LaserJet 8500 will only fit the certain kind of office that can handle its high price and bulky size. For the office that can, however, there is a lot to like.