First look at the HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus e-All-in-One
Mike Price is general manager at Proaxiom Holdings Ltd, which provides IT solutions for the credit industry.
Proaxiom is a dual-hemisphere consulting service provider and software-development organisation with offices in New Zealand, Australia and the UK.
"Our focus is to provide solutions that work for you, that integrate with your existing systems and company strategy, to provide real business benefits."
Expectation of the product
Being an HP product, we were expecting a quality product. As the printer is designed for businesses, we were looking for a robust product providing quality printing at a reasonable speed. The Scan feature would be useful, as our previous printer was also multifunction. We are unlikely to make use of the fax facility, as we no longer use faxes and do not have an analog telephone line, as we are a VoIP user.
Our previous MF printer was a large MF printer from Ricoh. It is now over seven years old and has reached EOL. This printer also provides scanning, printing, copying and faxing capability.
Unpacking the product was straightforward. On top was a Quick Start Guide, which is useful for those of us that do not want to read the manual first.
The instructions in the guide were simple and effective. The printer itself was unpacked, connected and ready for use within 15 minutes.
The next step was to set up a PC to print. This surprisingly took another 10 minutes, which seemed to be quite a long time to just install a driver, plus a few other bits and pieces. During this installation, it was noted that it appeared as though the process was complete, but then another window opened asking if you wanted scan to PC. After that set-up, it again appeared to finish, then a window opened and said it was searching for web services, which is interesting in itself, because you do not seem to get the option not to install web services.
We also noted that after the set-up was complete and we had successfully printed a page, that the printer itself had managed to connect to the internet. It had located our web proxy and advised us that we could print from anywhere just by emailing something to a specific email address. We feel here it would be good if we were given the option before the printer makes itself available to the outside world. We have now disabled this feature.
The pages we have printed so far have been of very good quality. Pictures are really good even on the supplied HP Everyday Paper. A 39-page document of mixed text and graphics took two minutes to print, which was acceptable.
Our week-one observations have shown that the printer is very easy to set up; in fact, too easy (with regards to internet connectivity).
We also set up Ubuntu Linux PC to print. Despite the Officejet Pro 8600 Plus driver not being installed, Ubuntu assigned the Officejet Pro 8500 a 909n driver, which seemed to work OK.
So far, very pleased.