HP 8600 Pro Premium Review

We bought this printer in 2012 to replace a previous HP color printer purchased way back in 2003 and a failed Dell 1600 Multi-Function printer that gave us 7 years of very good service.

We also bought the 8600 for scanning 50 years of pictures and content for Ronda’s parents 50th Anniversary gift which it was perfect for. You want to input pictures, this is the scanner for you. You want to print something, get ready for lots headaches and color quality issues.

This is how the status screen is supposed to look. Fantastic, ready for printing right? Nope, the values for the estimated ink levels, except for the black, all wrong. All are new HP chipped print cartridges. When I view this on the printer screen, all values look correct, so why can’t the software show it properly? Who knows. I’m not going to go crazy with screen shots and pictures, I’m just going to explain it as best as I can. First complaint, it’s SLOW, VERY SLOW!

I configured the printer as wireless before this and when you went to print something, maybe 20% of the time it would work. That 20% of the time 100% of the time if there was a soft color like a soft blue it would be washed out or missing some of the words. Print a test page and Magenta is always blank so I called HP, “the printer is out of warranty, can’t help you”. Fantastic… as it turns out there are others with similar issues so I’m not alone.

I decided to run a long Ethernet cable to the printer, disable wireless and see how it goes from there. It still now sometimes prints even though it reports it erred out for an unknown reason. I run downstairs and see on the screen I am running incompatible paper, seriously? HP inkjet printing paper errors out?? I powered the printer off and waited a few then turned it back on, by powering off I mean unplugged since devices these days don’t really turn off.

When it finally was ready to print this time it was happy with the paper so I tried to run a Windows test print which worked, 5 minutes later I had the test print, yes you read that right, 5 frackin minutes. I tried to print the 5 page email I previously wasn’t able to print and 4 minutes later got the “failed to print” in Windows but I could see the printer was preparing to do something. The LCD screen said “Printing” but Windows said it failed, ugh.

Another 4 minutes later 5 perfect pages came out, I forgot to mention I changed the print set up to default to B&W. Printing now works even though Windows reports back it fails… so I guess I’ll take that. B&W printing is excellent, color, well color stinks and a single color print reduces the available ink by a noticeable amount and at $90.00 for replacements that could get expensive very quickly. So, we’ll be sticking to B&W from now on since this thing also stinks printing pictures.

If you’re in the market for a new Multi-Function printer, avoid this one, it’s not worth the high cost or the aggravation.