HP Officejet 4500

The HP Officejet 4500 All-in-One printer is designated for home or small offices, or it can serve as a personal multifunctional printer in a large office, that is, it is for those who need an inexpensive device capable of scanning, copying, and faxing with a built-in interface for the network. Having an affordable price ($99.99), the 4500 is rather economical in prospect, as it offers a low cost for a page wherein providing a professional color printing. In many aspects the HP Officejet 4500 resembles the Canon Pixma MX340, but it lacks the MX340 option to print from memory cards or cameras.

Being capable to fulfill its functions over a network, the All-in-One 4500 can also operate as an autonomous fax or copy machine. It is possible to scan directly to e-mail with attaching a scanned document to your message. Scanning performance is excellent and results are clear-cut and tidy. It should be noted that scanning is one of the appealing feature for the 4500.

The automatic document feeder (ADF) for 20 sheets is one more attractive feature of the device. It can easily handle your multipage papers even of legal size, not matching the printer’s flatbed. The ADF is driven by a carriage motor as it does not have its own driving motor. This unusual but sufficiently elegant solution is unlikely to affect the overall reliability of the device, although this increases the load on the carriage motor that theoretically reduces its resource.

There is the paper input tray in the 4500 with the capacity of 100 pages. It is quite enough if your daily norm of printed pages does not exceed 20 sheets, so that you can reload paper only once a week.

The Officejet 4500 does not have four cartridges, as it is now accepted, but only two ones: black and tri-color. The only advantage of such a decision is the price reduction of the printing system. The main drawback is a significant increase in the running cost of the device. The combined cartridge means that, if one or more colors dominate in the color range, their consumption increases, and you have to dispose non-empty cartridges as one of the colors is sure to end earlier.

The quality of the printed documents meets the required level to solve business tasks and can be defined as acceptable. In draft mode you can notice slight irregularity of some characters. When printing in laser-quality mode, such problem does not occur. The printing speed is significantly below the promised one. In draft mode it is 12 and 10 pages per minute for document monochrome and color printing respectively, in laser-quality mode the speed is 4 and 2 pages per minute. The quality of photo printing is a pleasant surprise. The inexpensive office multifunction HP Officejet 4500, as it appeared can produce photos qualified at a decent level.

In general, if you are not too picky about the main features of the HP Officejet 4500 (the quality and speed of printing), but you wish to get an All-in-One for all occasions, the HP Office-jet 4500 is a good opportunity to implement this desire into reality at low cost.