K8600

The HP Officejet Pro K8600 color printer consumables consist of four inkjet cartridges and two printheads, it is sold with standard HP88 ink cartridges.Cartridge Concept recommend that you purchase the HP88XL ink cartridges as replacements, although more expensive they offer much better value, we offer here all ink cartridges and printheads for this printer at discount prices.

The HP Officejet Pro K8600 Colour Printer series is designed for small/micro business users looking for a versatile, high speed A3+ printer capable of printing professional-quality documents of all kinds at an extremely low cost per page.

HP Officejet K8600 Review

The HP Officejet K8600 is a wide carriage, A3+ printer.

The printer's black and silver styling, with highlights in high-gloss clear black, probably would not look odd inside a graphics studio. Handily, if you're solely making use of the printer's larger sized format paper handling occasionally, the input and output trays are able to be telescoped back, so they stick out merely a small way out of the front.

There are indicators at the right end of its front panel for paper jam, cover open and also paper out, as well as control keys to stop a project and feed a sheet through. In the left-hand end of the unit is a pull-down cowl for the four distinct ink cartridges.

In the backside, there is a solitary USB 2.0 socket as well as one intended for a low voltage input. Although you can get JetDirect Ethernet and Wi-Fi external adapters for the unit, there aren't any options to upgrade with a duplexer or further paper trays, as there happen to be with the K5400n. Presently there is the OfficeJet Pro K8600dn, that includes duplex as well as Ethernet as standard.

The first, actual setup is a two-stage operation, because you have to slot in the two-colour heads - one for cyan and magenta and the other for yellow and black - prior to plugging in the four, individual ink cartridges. The machine subsequently needs about quarter of an hour to charge its ink system and then to automatically align its heads.

The software is pretty rudimentary stuff, by way of HP's Solution Centre plus a decent driver, that consists of presets meant for common jobs, like plain paper printing, photos and duplex, although just manual duplex on this specific unit.

The broad ink swathes of the heads make sure this particular machine is actually swift with respect to an inkjet. A black five-page text print on normal setting took 33 seconds, or 9.1ppm with the HP Officejet K8600 printer cartridges. If we enhanced the page count to 20, we were treated to a normal setting rate of 11.3ppm. A five page A3 print needed 1:06, or 4.5ppm.

Things were not so good if we printed colour, however, as our five page text and graphics print completed in 53 seconds, or 5.7ppm. The machine generated a 15 x 10cm picture in 1:35 along with a full bleed 19 x 13 inch (A3+) in 3:37, that is actually really respectable. That is in ordinary print mode; should you whack the unit upto Best mode, the print period increases to 9:18.

Comparing the two prints, on the other hand, there was clearly little reason to implement Best option, except if print quality is extremely vital for a certain image. Normal setting is extremely similar while using the HP Officejet K8600 printer ink cartridges and both of these do excellent duties with colour disparity, fidelity of hues as well as image lucidity. The sole issue we discovered was a single, minor band near the left-hand edge of the Normal setting print.

Business graphics are generally precisely reproduced with plain paper while using the HP Officejet K8600 ink cartridges, having excellent bright colours and also outstanding registration of black text laid over them. Text by itself is definitely thoroughly clean and exhibits hardly any sign of spatter or jaggies, thanks to the printer's normal resolution of 1200dpi.

HP's OfficeJet Pro K8600 is very much a wide-carriage version of the K5400n, but devoid of the upgrading possibilities together with a substantially higher selling price. Even though lesser market for A3+ units sets a certain premium on them, when you look at the actual distinctions - improved carriage width, a different paper tray as well as altered firmware - it does seem to be just a little costly.