New York, NY -- Are you a small business owner looking for a multifunction that does it all? Do you have a limited budget? Then HP may have the answer for you. Reviewed in July 2010 by PC Magazine’s M. David Stone, the HP Officejet 4500 AIO is reasonably priced at under $100, and offers the convenience of four machines in one: printer, scanner, copier, and fax. You will find the machine about average size for a printer at 8.5x17.1x15.8” (HxWxD).
The Officejet 4500 is very similar to Canon’s Pixma MX340. However, for the same price, with the HP machine you get the fax, for an additional office-centric feature and memory card slots as a home-centric feature. In addition, the 4500 also comes standard with a 20-page ADF which sits on top of the machine. The ADF can handle pages up to 8.5x14” in size (legal) which do not fit on the letter-sized flatbed scanning surface. It should be noted that for an additional $30, you can buy the same printer, but add wireless capability, which is a nice added functionality. However to get that wireless capability, you lose the ability to hardwire your printer onto the network via Ethernet. Both machines do have USB connectivity, and the wireless version even includes a USB cable!
The Officejet 4500 is capable of outputting pages at a maximum of 28ppm for monochrome jobs and 22ppm for color jobs. Where it falls short a little bit in terms of office use are its paper trays. The input tray holds a maximum of 100 sheets and the output tray is rated for only 20 sheets.
The output quality for this HP printer was just okay. He did note that in terms of printer speed for photos, it fared better than some other models he had tested. That said, the quality of the photos was at the lower end of the range.
In terms of ink, it is worth noting that because this printer is at the lower end of the price scale, it only offers a two-cartridge system. The standard black cartridge is the HP901 (CC653AN) and Castle Ink sells a remanufactured OEM replacement for $14.99. The tri-color cartridge is an also an HP901 (CC656AN) which is available for $22.95. If you know you will be printing a lot of black text, there is an HP901XL (CC654AN) which will run you about $19.95 and we offer free shipping on orders of $39 or more.
Overall, the Officejet 4500 will likely meet most, if not all of your needs for a home, home office, or small office printer (especially if you have a low print volume). If you need a more photo-centric printer, you may be better off going with the Pixma MX340, or Epson’s NX515 which is much faster but costs more money. One additional item worth noting is HP’s one year warranty on the printer which will get you a replacement from HP as well as the shipping paid for in both directions.
