HP Officejet 4500 All-in-One Printer

The HP OfficeJet 4500 Wireless is not exactly a speed demon, but for the price (I saw it as low as $129.99, and cheaper if you don't want wireless), it's a very good deal. For that price, built-in wireless, an automatic document feeder, fax, and (manual) duplex come as welcome surprises. Print quality for text documents was not the best I've seen, and duplex pages will bleed through, but color photos looked lush and wonderful.

The good news is that for a small amount of money, HP is offering a whole lot of printner with the OfficeJet 4500. Not only does it have built-in wireless, it also offers a fax, a 20-page document feeder, and manual duplexing. The functions are available through a fairly plain interface (no fancy touchscreens here), but they get the job done nicely.

That is, with some caveats. Photos take a bit more than average to print (about 1:11 for a 4x6 color photo), but it's well worth the wait. The colors were lush and true, and I was impressed by their sharpness as well.

Tests on Word documents and PDFs showed the printer's few shortcomings. Warm-up time is fairly high; it took nearly 23 seconds for the first page of a three-page Word document to print, with the total job taking over 50 seconds. That's a lot of warm up, but still, it averages out to a fairly respectable 14 seconds per page once it (finally) gets going. It took even longer (32 seconds) for the first page of a four-page PDF to come out, with a total print time of 1:35, or roughly 21 seconds per page. That's not awful, considering it was over the wireless network, but it's not the best I've seen either.

Black fonts looked clean on the HP 4500 but up close there was a bit of bleed into the page; and pages printed using the duplex feature didn't look that good--the other side of the page was clearly visible, making it a bit hard to see the front. So you won't be printing out critical presentations for the board, but maybe that's not why you were shopping for this printer anyway.

Scanning worked fine when I used the Windows interface, but I wasn't able to set up the printer to scan simply by pressing the start button. Apparently there was a lot more set-up to do, but I couldn't find the relevant information in the digital guide provided with the unit. However, I've no doubt that with a bit more snooping around, it could have ve been configured to work with one-touch scan to a file. And don't go looking for the memory-card slots--there aren't any.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.