AirPrint Printer (Christmas return season)

I have the 8600 plus and like it a lot.
Check out HP.com they seem to have some great specials running.

I'm a happy HP 8500A Plus owner, as well

I've had mine for about 6 months (upgraded from an older HP Photojet AIO), and it works really well in my office. However, I'm looking at probably a Canon PIXMA for home (primarily photo printing and fast draft).

Cople of things. 8600 plus does auto duplex ( double sided printing )
Also, I had an issue with my set up. HP was very helpful.
To me the larger screen, speed and duplex printing was worth the little extra.

bruinsrme said:

I have the 8600 plus and like it a lot.
Check out HP.com they seem to have some great specials running.

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I too am looking into a new printer and this model looks interesting.
can you scan wirelessly with it? or does it need to be hooked up via USB? Have you tried printing from an iphone/ipad?
OP, did you buy the 8600? If so, how are you finding it?

I had an HP Officejet Pro 8500a plus and returned it, within the 14 -day period. It had some cons that I found I couldn't live with. I don't know if they have resolved the issues of the 8500a with the 8600 or not, but I wasn't willing to find out. I think many of HP's problems are HP, and I have had a lot of bad luck with their printers myself. My wife is having issues with her HP as well. We have purchased a few over the years, because the prices are good, but we have always ended up replacing them. Your mileage may vary and the 8600 may be an outstanding printer, but I am kind of leery of HP printers anymore.

I replaced the Office Pro 8500a plus with an Epson Artisan 837. I have been really happy with that printer. Setup was easy, and it updated the firmware OTA once networking was finished. The new firmware includes AirPrint.

Additionally it also prints, CD's, which I do fairly often for photography and other purposes. I used to keep an old Epson printer around just for that purpose, but the Artisan 837 replaced both, and they gave me a $50 trade-in for the old printer at OfficeMax to boot. $50 wasn't bad considering that old printer was about 6 years old and only cost me $125-ish at the time.

USMCGRUNT said:

I ended up going with the Epson 845 all-in-one. It had great reviews from everywhere that I read. It has worked incredible for me thus far. It easily hooked up wirelessly to my Mac and PC, and also prints in one touch from my iPhone and iPad. So far, very pleased with this purchase....

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Have you tried to scan wirelessly from your Mac? According to the web site it saves the file as an image file and not as a PDF? Can you confirm this?

I use Brother laser printers. I got really tired of HP software and all to frequent ink replacement. I also grew tired of "don't touch me" screens while HP printers trashed around for 30 to 45 minutes checking ink status EVERY TIME I HAPPENED TO NEED A PRINTOUT. What good was it if the print rate was 22 ppm if I had to wait 45 minutes for the first page to appear?

Of course I've been tempted more than once to go back to HP just to get Airprint. I held out and did without and I'm glad I waited because I now have Airprint. I use Printopia which is a preference panel that makes all my Brother network printers look like Airprint to my iOS devices.

Oh and my Brother all in one scanner doesn't rely on any off board software. It scans to either pdf or jpg and can ftp the result to any NAS drive that supports ftp or directly to my Mac once I enable ftp (after Lion took ftp away). Also I should mention that Image Capture works quite well with network scanners.

I'm not saying don't buy HP. I'm just saying you don't have to buy HP to get Airprint.

r0k said:

I use Printopia which is a preference panel that makes all my Brother network printers look like Airprint to my iOS devices.

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That looks very, very cool. Thanks.

Canon Pixma MG6250

Proceed with caution if you're thinking of buying the Canon PIXMA MG6250. My experience has been abysmal. Even after the firmware update on the printer which was required to give AirPrint support, I still cannot print. Works fine from all macs in my house but none of my iOS devices can print to it at all. Canon support say so long as I have the firmware there is nothing else they can do. Apple direct me to canon. So, it looks likeill be returning this thing to amazon...

I must say though the print quality is absolutely superb and I know some people have it working. Macworld also just did a review of it and their unit worked right out of the box. Why won't mine?!

The HP has been flawless. Well with one exception which was my doing, HP support walked me through the fix.
Printing from PCs, i devices and macs have been great.

Ink yes it's expensive however for a small investment you can get refillable cartridges.

Scanning I haven't tried it yet.

Today I am putting a HP AirPrint laser printer on line.

Also, I love the hpeprint function. My wife needed a couple of forms the other day. I sent an email to the pRinger and woolaa she had them.

r0k is correct about some of the HP printers. My cube mate at work complained about the same thing.
I haven't experienced any issues like that with the 8600

SuperCachetes said:

That looks very, very cool. Thanks.

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It is very cool. I also use Printopia for the non-AirPrint printers. It works very well.

Some of the things that I disliked about my 8500a Plus where (a) The sleep mode. It didn't always want to wake up from sleep. Yes, you can disable the feature, but for some reason it still showed as "unavailable," at times (b) print quality was so so. The black text did not seem particularly black and was not very sharp IMHO. (c) They spend more time cleaning the print heads and aligning cartridges than doing any actual printing (d) Mysterious and random "out of paper" error messages, despite the tray being full. I had to pull out the tray and re-insert it every time I received the message.

Edit: I forgot the mysterious header margin, which seemed to be an HP 8500a default with no way to remove it that I could find, but it caused me a lot of issues with the formatting of the booklets I was trying to print as it wouldn't print the left and right side pages wit the same spacing as a result of the forced header margin.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, those issues may have (hopefully have) been resolved with the 8600, but the 8500a Plus is a mess IMHO.

The Epson has been great so far though. I have put that through a lot in the 3+ weeks I have owned it, duplex printing of booklets, brochures, printing CD's etc. It has performed well.

Like r0k, I have a brother laser. That does work well with Printopia and has been a great printer as well.

I'm about to purchase an iMac and would like to get an all in one printer/scanner to go with. My current Dell model has been a nightmare from the start. Every time I use it ( which granted isn't very often) the jets have become blocked. I also waste a lot of ink this way as I end up having to buy new cartridges when they are 50% full. Can anyone recommend a good solution (preferably wireless for my iPad and iPhone as well) that won't do this even if it goes a month between use?