Hewlett Packard Officejet Pro CM756AB1H Wireless Color Printer with Scanner, Copier and Fax

I am somewhat perplexed by the large number of negative reviews for this HP All-In-One Printer. After having owned an older HP C7100 for nearly five years and giving me great reliability and service, when it came time to update I did not hesitate in purchasing another HP Printer. This Officejet model is a premium high end AIO Printer with perhaps only the Canon MG8120 having simlar features. Although the Canon has received excellent reviews, it is more of a photo printing unit than the HP. For home or small office users printing a large volume of text documents,the HP with its larger paper cartridge and automatic document feeder is more robust. Setting up the 8500A Plus was a breeze with the initial loading of printheads and ink catridges taking only about 15 minutes out of the box. The Printer sprang to ife upon powering it up with test printing and alignment working flawlessly. Loading the Windows 7 drivers from the CD-ROM was again extremely easy and took about 5 minutes. I ran into one small problem with setting up the wireless network for my home office latops but that was quickly rectified by making a call to HP Support. Thus far I am extremely happy with the 8500A Plus. Printing speeds in black and white and color are well above average for an inkjet although not as fast as a laser. Print quality seems very good with nice bold black texts. The copier/scanning functions also work very well with excellent speeds and print quality. Printing costs as advertised by HP for this Printer should be very low though I have not verified this as yet. In summary , the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus seems to be an excellent AIO Printer that will handle all office tasks with ease while giving you some very nice features for the price.

I've been using HP printers for a long time. I'm aware of the fact that they use expensive ink and printheads. They could give away the printers for free and make a killing off of the supplies. When you get ink jets to work, though, the quality is decent and the cost per copy is fairly low. The key is getting them to work. I had the 8500, and right out of the box it wouldn't always pick up paper. For maybe a year it worked okay except for this, but you'd think you'd get better with a so-called 'business class' printer. I picked up the 8500a printer because it uses the same printheads and ink cartridges as the 8500, plus I got a continuous ink supply system that fits it. The 8500 just suddenly decided that the black/yellow printhead had a problem. I bought a new printhead, and it still has a problem. Got a replacement printhead from HP under warranty and it's also got the same problem. I'm going to try one more time, then take a sledge hammer to it to vent my frustrations if I can't get it to work. The printer is only about two years old. I've heard HP has a lot of problems with printheads. They advertise as a 'green' company, but pretty soon the landfills are going to be overloaded with these junk printers. Well, the 8500a looks nice but is also a piece of, um, something scraped off my shoe from the yard. Again, right out of the box it misses picking up paper, even though the paper supply is full. Every five pages it has to clean and check itself. The duplexer works okay, but slow (two sided printing). It wants to stay connected to the web and do it's own updates, but I think that is because HP just wants to track whether you are using their ink or not. The 8600 I've heard is an even bigger piece of that stuff from my shoe. They also changed the ink cartridges and printheads, just to keep people off balance I think. I've not purchased one of those, because this is my last HP. They've really gone in the (flushing device of my bathroom) over the last few years. Ink cartridges are ridiculously priced, and the printheads only last a few hundred copies. Between two printheads ($60.00 each) and four ink cartridges (over $100.00) you can buy a new printer. So that's what I recommend. Buy two or three printers, just for the supplies. Keep one as a lightly used backup, and one in the box. Or get a continuous ink supply system. The investment is worth it, especially if you bought two or three of the things. If you get into trouble with one of them, chuck it and set up the new one. Cannon is the way to go from all my research. You can buy after-market supplies for them a lot easier, and the parts last longer. Update 6/9/12. Yellow printhead plugged again. Having trouble aligning after merely removing the black/yellow printhead for a check. Constantly using paper to do an alignment that, so far after a dozen tries, still won't succeed. After it took 10 minutes this morning checking itself it still hadn't printed. So I did the most satisfying thing I've ever done with a printer. Took it outside and smashed it on the cement. Some images uploaded for your enjoyment if Amazon lets them post. 4 month old printer and now it's a piece of junk. Wait. It was a piece of junk when I bought it. I've had HP printers now for years, putting up with their shortcomings, but no more. Brand new printer, two-fifty paid, now in the toilet. You have fair warning about buying these pieces of bottom-shoe stuff.

I have had this printer for a little over three weeks. I had previously had a HP Laserjet AIO that I bought in 2002, and it never let me down. I have a feeling that since I have finally configured this beast on my network correctly, it will perform just as well. Great speed, nice features and ease of use (once set up) are all pluses. Print quality is excellant, just keep in mind that if you print duplex, you in for a wait while each side of the page dries. Just so you know, I asked everyone and their brother prior to making this purchase and not a single person or online resource that I could find could answer this question. The question is "When you scan a document through the document feeder, will it scan the document into one whole PDF document, or does it scan one page per document?" This was absolutely the critical decision point for me when making s decision to buy this printer over a competing one. The answer is that you can do it either way, with the default being to scan the entire document into one PDF. Now for the nightmares on the set up. 1) The printer insisted for like 3 hours that I had left some packing material in where the print heads are located when I had not. I removed and reseeded the print heads at least four times before the printer decided that I must know what I was doing (of course while on the phone to HP). 2) Norton Security Suite 4.3 and 2a) recycling the power on the printer after each install. When setting this printer up, you basically have three options. USB, internet wireless, or internet wired. Using USB set up will work without issue, but it will not enable you to take advantage of the ePrint functionality, and you will only be able to scan documents from the computer which has the USB cable. I realize that my home network is a little more locked down than the average person, so I knew that I might have a challenge with a network printer install. For starters, I use opendns for my DNS servers. I also have port forwarding set up on my router to service incoming HTTP requests to my Windows home media server. Finally, all other computers run Windows 7 and Norton Security Suite. After many, many trials I finally figured out what you have to do to be able to use this printer on the network when using Norton. 1) If using the Norton firewall, reset the firewall settings for Norton to "Default" prior to the printer installation. 2) After you add the printer to each computer, you must recycle the power on the printer in order for the new computer to see it on the network, especially the scanning functionality. You will get errors if you try and run the scanning software on a new install without previously recycling the power on the printer. You must do this after every install of the printer software on each PC. My theory is that there is something in Norton which is throttling the UDP requests to wake up the printer. Your experience might vary depending on what kind of antivirus program you run. Prior to making this purchase, you might want to consult the list of testing antivirus software that HP has made with this printer. [...] Here is a reference that HP has for troubleshooting the issues with wireless printer setup. [...] Some other things to be aware of is that HP will by default install a software update program on your PC which you can disable through MSCONFIG. Also, don't be surprised if the first 10 times you try and set up the eprint functionality that you get an error that the printer could not connect to the server. THE ISSUE IS PROBABLY NOT YOU. I called HP on this, and apparently their eprint servers are down more than they are up, or at least that is my impression since I always seem to find them down.

This printer is not small, but this printer is great. It is very comprehensive for a home office or anyone who wants a multifunction machine. The text quality is great, the printer is pretty fast although not as fast as a laser printer. I have not yet printed a picture. There is automatic 2 sided printing if you want it. That slows it down a bit because it waits for the ink to dry, but it does save paper. The document feeder works well. The web portal for the printer works pretty well and one is able to quickly see the settings. Scan to email feature works very well although it is not the easiest thing to setup. You set it up from the web interface. Then it will scan to email addresses without a computer. It has a very handy address book feature. The scan to computer function works very well also. I don't use the fax function. It works on both our Windows computers and our Mac. It is airprint enabled for iOS devices and this feature works well. The ePrint feature lets you send documents to an email address specific to the printer and this is actually very handy. The applications are not all that helpful but might have some uses. In short, I had an Epson Workforce 840. It was fast but honestly a pain to use and could not do scan to email without a computer. This HP is so, so much better. Highly Recommended.

I am on my second unit - the first had a defective touch screen - Amazon was great about replacing the unit - no hassle and fast. The bad: Both units have had a problem staying connected to my wifi (as indicated by the brief flash of an error code C026000). I have used HP support to no resolution, 3 hours in all - although their call center folks escalated me to a case manager who offered to again replace my unit and offer a 2nd year warranty. Nice of them, but it doesn't help me to go thru yet another configuration cycle etc, if they can't figure out the recurring problem. I could hardwire the unit to the router as its only 10 feet away, but that defeats the whole wireless printer thing. When it fails, the front panel lights all flash and you need to turn the printer off then back on - not a good way to get anything done. This occurs at random, and when printing from either a Mac or Windows7 machine. I think that troubleshooting this would indicate a problem in combination with my router - a Cisco E3000, but HP has said that they are not aware of any router incompatibility and all the settings are per the HP specs. Print jobs from the Mac can sometimes hang in the queue for days, or not.... (Gee, why did that just print??) The Good: How does it work when it works? Very well. Its fast and prints clean. I am not really impressed with photo printing on this unit but it is significantly better than other office inkjets I use. For whatever reason, this unit sometimes can't pick up the paper in the drawer - my experience is that this is usually a paper problem - so I will buy a different paper brand and expect this problem to go away. Its makes lots of noises when it works but I don't find that to be a problem. Scan quality is very good from both the flatbed and the document feeder. The driver software includes easy control from the computer and makes it easy to route scans to the folder you want. Fax capability is what you would expect from a very mature technology - there just isn't much to report here. ePrint ROCKS!!! This works well from anywhere. Applications on the printer are kinda cool, but I question the usefulness. I dont really want to print a few headlines from USA today when I can get them online myself. The weather lookup would be more useful if the weather reporting was more specific - this is a lost opportunity so far - handy if you want to post the days weather on a board, or in our case, the kitchen table before school. The Forms app could be very useful if you had school age kids or if you need a steady supply of easily printed forms without having to go to a computer to do so. This will appeal to some and not at all to others. It prints two sided - but there is a surprise in that it does it really slow. The first page prints, then the printer pauses to let the ink dry - then it pulls the paper back thru to print the second side. Probably a limitation of the inkjet printers. If you want to save paper - it takes a long time to print anything large. I have not had any issues with either the document feeder or the page duplicator. My net take away (as your mileage may vary): I am disappointed with HP on this purchase - I am a loyalist, as I type this on my 3rd HP desktop, and printing my 3rd(4th) HP Printer; all of the other purchases I have been very happy with. My experience here is that they have a product problem that they don't admit, or they lack the ability to service the consumer market with actual technical support. As they told me - "we sell hundreds of thousand of these units, so it can't be a product flaw". I do suspect it has something to do with the combination of the 8500 and the Cisco router, but HPs diagnostic tools don't figure it out.

The HP OfficeJet 8500A Pro printer does have nice features and it does represent an advancement in technology. But it does have its drawbacks and its important for people to know about them prior to purchase. The unpacking and setup is a bit of a challenge if you are not tech-savvy. The instructions are in some ways almost too simple. If you can follow pictures you are probably okay. But if you ever ask 'why' questions or want to know what you're doing and why, you won't get anything like that and installation may be harder for you. The printer is 'smart', and not always in a good way. It takes a very long time - orders of minutes - to initialize. Many times I have had to turn the printer on because I forgot to do so in advance. And then had to wait several MINUTES while it initialized. This is not a one-time process. This is an everytime I turn the power on process. The printer is fond of cleaning its print heads often too, which may be unexpected if this is your first 'smart' printer. The HP Deskjet 6122 I had previously (another double-sided and image printer) was quieter, smaller and much faster responding to print commands. The 6122 dual-sided paper handling was done entirely internally. The new OfficeJet Pro 8500A Plus uses a separate mechanical dual-sided paper handler that frankly is very kludgy. And it often bends paper. The paper eject is quite forceful; it often lands on the table in front of the printer and not atop the document tray which I think is the intended design. Installing the scanner software seems to be a bit problematic. It does not work directly out of the box; at least it did not for me. This might be a setup error, although I tried to follow the limited instructions correctly. There seems to be a missing software component which I finally located and installed manually. Honestly, if I weren't a software professional I don't think I would have ever figured this part out. I cannot comment on the fax capabilities. Again there is a bit to the setup and I am not currently configured for it. I would be suspicious however given the other minor surprises that have popped up. I have to admit that overall I am NOT IMPRESSED with the HP OfficeJet 8500A Plus. It looked like a good idea. I wanted an 'all-in-one' printer, scanner, copier with fax capabilities. This particular printer DOES NOT DELIVER is my opinion. I would strongly suggest that anyone contemplating buying this printer (or any HP printer in the OfficeJet product line) demand to see every aspect of the printer demonstrated on a live system. Lacking that, I must RECOMMEND AGAINST BUYING THIS PRODUCT! Do so online with no prior evaluation AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Update: Careful: Doesn't work if you might want to print cards, labels, holiday greetings, calendars, announcements or other projects back-to-back using industry standard formatted stock like Avery. I got this HP 8500A because it was highly rated, and liked it fine (see original review below) until I tried to print cards back to back. The HP 8500A automatically shrunk the print image to force extra-wide and non-standard margins, which ruins such a project. Apparently, the duplexer unit that handles back-to-back printing requires 1 inch of blank margin on all sides, which means on a letter-sized page the print image can't be larger than 6 1/2 by 9. That's way too small for most of the pre-formatted stock you get at the office store. Other manufacturers sell duplexing units that don't have this problem. Worse, HP's approach to this engineering boo-boo is to try to cover it up! You won't find any information about the shrinking back-to-back print size on the pre-sale specifications. They're not even disclosed on the HP support site. In fact, HP's own technical support engineers claim they "don't know" what the specifications are for the duplexer print shrinking. I just spent all day trying to track down the problem with these engineers, only to find out it was a wild goose chase and that the problem was the printer itself. I guess they just don't want us to know they made an engineering mistake that the competitors did not make. That's unethical, so I reduced by grade to 1 star. And now you know what HP made me learn the hard way. Original review: Upgraded from a Canon Pixma I used and loved for several years, I'm pleasantly surprised by the HP Pro 8500A Plus. Easy no hassle setup. Copies are very high quality -- I can get away with "draft" print most of the time. It's super fast and handles duplex printing and extra-long paper with ease. Scanning works from either the computer or the printer. It's a little noisier than my previous printer and shakes more when it prints but that doesn't bother me. I didn't buy it for extra features like Eprint (in fact, I think it's a little silly all the stuff they pad onto printers these days), but since I've got it, I used it, and it's kind of cool. There are apps you wouldn't expect. For example, i just printed out a set of Roger Ebert movie reviews in a nice clean document I can read at my leisure, I guess that will be arriving once a week in my printer inbox. Free. That can't last forever, so I'll grab it while I can.

After a long, agonizing period of reading online reviews of various all-in-one printers and having run my old HP into the ground (it was so old there were compatibility problems with any new operating systems and Adobe, etc. and the feeder was beginning to have problems)and with intrepedation, in August of 2011 I purchased a new HP Office Pro 8500APlus. I had read all the online reviews moaning about how load it was or some compatibility issue or some other agravating problem. I purposely waited a few months to post a review to let any bugs or nagging issues show themselves. But I can honestly say I have had absolutley no issues with this unit...none! It scans, faxes and prints beautifully, is not as loud as people were reporting (it sits right behind my desk chair- and I am easily annoyed- so if it was loud I would definitely mention it here.) No problems with the feeder, no problems scanning, no problems!!! I was scared to death to buy this thing because of some of the bad reviews but I needed all the features. I actually delayed buying anything because I didn't want to be disappointed and have to either settle or exchange it. I run a consulting biz out of my house and I couldn't afford to have any printer downtime. I have to admit that since I'm not that tech savvy I had GeekSquad help me set it up and initialize everything. So, I can't address or give an opinion on ease of setup. But it did seem pretty fast. Overall, I got a great deal on it from Ammazon and I'm VERY pleased with the performance.

god happy