The HP Office Jet 4500 All-In -One is one of the smallest available printer in the market with a Flat bed A4 sized Scanner. It is very compact and can be easily placed at any corner of the office or home. It is priced at just Rs 7999/- and can be connected through the USB or the Ethernet interface which makes it worth an investment. The printer is a target towards small offices.
FEATURES AND CONNECTIVITY
The HP Office Jet AIO has a 4800×1200 dpi color inkjet printer, a 1200 ppi, and 48-bit Flat bed scanner with an automatic document feeder. It has Copier and a 33,600 bps color Fax machine which can hold up to 20 pages of fax messages. Apart from these it also has a Power Adapter, a USB Cable, and an Ethernet Patch chord along with two standard cartridges for black and color prints respectively.
Connecting the printer is very easy and simple using the networking option. You simply connect the printer with the Ethernet patch cable and set up the printer using the control panel. The control panel is simple and very easy to use and configure as the user interface is pretty simple to follow.
DESIGN
The HP Office Jet 4500 AIO looks very beautiful with an all-black case in a small-size package. It has glossy body which keeps you busy all time because it easily attracts dust and fingerprints. It measures around 434 mm in width, 217 mm in height and 402 mm in depth. The Control panel is well designed with well-spaced and sized buttons along with a large and bright LCD display screen. It has a good build quality but it is prone to damages in the long run if not handled properly.
The scanner’s Lid is a bit heavier due the presence of ADF unit and it may cause damage to other parts if not used properly. It has a paper input tray and a cartridge access door which looks a little delicate. It lacks a paper output tray which might create a problem when printing large volume of papers at once.
The printer comes with only two cartridges instead of the usual C, M, Y and K ink tanks. But the added advantage is, these cartridges have their own nozzle head assembly and a new cartridge would involve a newer nozzle head ensuring high-quality prints with every new cartridge installed.
PERFORMANCE
The printer can print basic black documents and combination documents at a speed of 17 ppm and 10 ppm respectively using the fast draft mode. We have to wait for quite a long time for best printing mode as the printer struggles with a maximum of three pages and 1 page in text and combination prints respectively. The printer gets initialized in 15 seconds at power-on mode and the first print can be obtained in just 22 seconds after spooling.
The quality of prints obtained in draft mode is legible with clear graphics and text.
The photo printing quality is excellent with a great blend of sharpness, contrast and detail. A regular 4×6 photo prints in around 70 seconds and color and black/white prints take 46 and 24 seconds respectively. Scanning photos and A4 sized documents can take around 28 seconds in 300 dpi resolution mode. The black and color cartridges are available at a price of Rs 1512(XL tank) and Rs 1243 which has a yielding capacity of 700 and 360 pages respectively. It has a duty cycle of 3000 pages.
CONCLUSION
Overall the HP Office Jet 4500 AIO looks a very impressive printer with an array of rich features and excellent print quality. From the perspective of speed, the printer does not look so impressive but produces a print quality which is sharp, crisp, and of high detail. Features like ADF, Networking and Color fax makes it a good pick for small offices and home environment. The addition of the card reader/pictBridge and the automatic duplexing function would have contributed to the value of the product to great deal.