Hewlett Packard Retail Box Officejet Pro 8000 InkJet Printer

The HP Officejet Pro 8000 inkjet printer comes in two flavors. One has built in wireless network support and the other does not.  Other than the wireless feature the two printers are identical.  Both versions can be connected to a wired network or directly to a PC/Mac via. USB.

This printer has some great features for a device that can now be found on sale for around $100.  You will be hard pressed to find another printer in this price range that has a duplexer, which allows for two sided printing.  It also has some strange behavior that I consider negatives.  

Positives:

This printer feels like it is built well.  It is solid and doesn't feel cheap.  

It prints very fast.  In color fast draft or black only mode it is faster than a lot of laser printers.  In "best" mode the printer has an acceptable text output speed.  If you are printing heavy graphics you may not be happy with the speed, or the amount of ink that is used.  The print quality of office type documents with some graphics is excellent for an inkjet printer.  I have not attempted to print photo quality prints.

The ink is cheaper compared to other printers offered by HP because the print heads are not part of the ink cartridge. 

I didn't have any trouble installing this printer on my iMac.  The included HP software found the printer on my network and configured everything.

I have yet to see the print head clog and require manual cleaning.

Negatives:

The printer spends a lot of time doing other things besides printing.  The first time you power up the printer it will spend 20 minutes going through a calibration routine.  Future power ups can take about 3 minutes.  Wake from sleep takes about 1 minute.  After a print job is complete the printer will do some other thing for about 1 minute.  I assume these "other things" involve cleaning and priming the print head.

HP advertises that their ink replacement cost is lower on this printer compared to the competition.  It initially appears so as long as you don't include the cost of print head replacements. If the print heads require replacement the cost of replacing both is well over a $100.  For that price you could buy a new printer.

My printer had problems loading paper.  This issue was corrected in a firmware update.  I haven't had a paper feed issue since I've update to the latest firmware.

I had a problem with this printer failing to wake from sleep.  I contact HP support about this and they suggested removing the printer from a surge suppressor that I was using and to instead plug it directly into the wall outlet.  I was amazed that this resolved the issue.

The printer is large.  It's footprint is 19.5"Wx16"D.  However the duplexer adds 3" to the rear and to fully extend the paper output tray adds 4.5" to the front.  If you do not fully extend the output tray the paper ejected by the printer will fall in front of the printer and most likely onto the floor.

The duplexer is a nice feature but greatly increases print time and is a bit noisy.

I don't believe the included ink cartridges are full.  Rather, they are "starter carts".  I only got about 250 pages of black out of the first cart.  The replacement cart is promising over 2,000 pages.

The ink cartridges have expiration dates that seem to be about 2 years after the installation date.  If they expire you will need to replace them.  The printer will refuse to print if one of the carts are empty or expired.

HP will install a lot of software on your computer if you let them.  You may find the features of the software nice but may elect that you only want to install the print driver only.  The included software can report on the status of the printer, such as ink levels.

The printer is rather noisy.