GET OUT OF MY OFFICE! The HP PSC 500
Written: Mar 25 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Fast, efficient, quiet and keeps my daughter out of my office!
Cons: Should have bought from the HP website, then it would have cost only $249.00
The Bottom Line: For a family, teenager this makes an outstanding scanner, copier and printer. The images are sharp, prints fairly fast and is quiet.
|
|
|
| djgeiger's Full Review: Hewlett Packard PSC 500 All-In-One Printer |
Say what?! Here I spend a day crawling on my hands and knees through the mud trying to get the perfect picture of a Sand Hill Crane to support an article I was working on. I needed the perfect shot, you know, where the reeds and cattails frame the bird perfectly. I’m cold, wet and shaking mostly because I have a deadline for the article by the very next day. I return home only to find my printer backed up with requests from my daughter for the next several hours. But I need my printer honey! But, MOM! I need it for my schools project that is due in the morning. Why and the heck didn’t you start it earlier? Why didn’t you start yours earlier? Because I couldn’t get the bird to pose for me in sunny conditions! Can’t you use George’s printer? I was, it is out of color ink now! Grrrrrrr. We’ve got to do something about this! My daughter needs a all in one unit. I send the family out to shop. Actually I had a double motive, find a new printer Erika can use and to have some peace and quiet to finish my article and get the photos ready.
We always seem drawn to HP products. Especially after the wonderful experience we had this last week involving warranties and customer service. George’s computer crooked. He called HP customer service. HP Federal expressed a box the next day. We pack the computer into the box and used the Federal Express shipping label. The computer was returned to us in 7 calendar days repaired. It is service like this that keeps us coming back as customers.
The HP PSC 500 is what they brought home that evening. It is an all in one unit for a pretty darn reasonable price. The price at Staples was $299.00. The price at the HP website is $249.99. This is a fifty-dollar difference. As usual we were pressed for time, needed the printer now, and we looked at the HP website the next day. Day late, dollar short again! This little beauty prints scans and copies.
The cartridges aren’t terribly expensive. The tri-color cartridge is $32.99 and the black cartridge is $29.99. The warranty is one-year parts and a ninety-day labor.
The scanning feature is downright nice. It has an image editor and OCR software included. The OCR software makes the text into editable text. Erika made some really sharp looking reports with the images worked right into the report. The report was very professional looking. The scanner is a flatbed scanner. My old HP Office Jet 500 has reached mandatory retirement only had a feed scanner and doesn’t even scan in color. It has been replaced but Epinions hasn’t gotten my latest few toys up into the categories yet. In fact before I made a purchasing decision I went to Epinions to check these items out and found they were not there. If they can’t keep up even in printer’s people will cease to even look here.
The scanner scans with 600 x 600 dots per inch with a 2400-dpi resolution. The 30-bit color creates a very life-like color matching from the original image to the scanned image.
Hp doesn’t use the DPI coloring system where it places blue dots next to yellow dots to create green dots. The Coloring Layering Technology that HP uses is Photo REtII. This system actually mixes colors to literally create millions of colors.
The copier, which can be used without a computer, is pretty efficient too. The feature I like most is if you want to reduce a picture and stick it in your wallet you can do it by just pressing a button. In fact a whole bunch of wallet size pictures can be made from one picture. Just ask Erika :).
The photos can be enlarged also. Mirror images can be created to make transfers for T-shirts. Another project I’m sure we will be doing soon. I wonder how a Sand Hill Crane will look on a T-shirt! The copy reduce and enlarge is 25% to 400%. I personally can’t see that she would need any thing more than that.
The Creative Photo Projects software comes with the printer. This software can do all kinds of nifty things. It can do greeting cards, newsletters, banners, t-shirts, resumes, place cards, name tags and a lot more!
This little 26.21-pound beauty is perfect for a teenager and for school projects. It keeps the school projects out of our office and that was what I was looking for to begin with. It prints pretty fast 9 pages per minute in black and 6.5 pages per minute for color. This is plenty fast enough for school projects. In fact I know it prints a whole lot faster than the printer that is over at the school, an old Xerox of some sort.
I’m sure this all in one machine will last plenty well through the rest of high school, college and then on to resumes. Hey, Erika this software does really nice resumes! :) Hint, hint!
The printer supports Windows 95, 98, NT, 4.0 and 2000. It comes with a power cord, a bi-directional parallel cable, color cartridge, black cartridge, scanning software, HP software and a very informative user’s guide. It’s not even overly noisy, in fact quiet even!
As I mentioned before the HP website has the best deal on the HP PSC 500.
http://www.shopping.hp.com/
The website offers free two-day shipping. There is a rebate available.
“- purchase between February 25 and April 28, 2001
- mail by May 28, 2001
Purchase any HP Pavilion desktop PC and MX or FX monitor and save $150. And with a qualified purchase of an HP PC and monitor or other manufacturers PC and monitor or notebook computer, you can save an additional $50 on each qualifying HP DeskJet or Photosmart printer, Scanjet scanner, inkjet All-in-One/Officejet/PSC, or Photosmart digital camera you buy.”
This all in one unit is quiet, inexpensive, does what you ask it to do with absolutely no argument. Printers argue with me a great deal! It prints fairly rapidly and smoothly. The memory is plenty sufficient. I wouldn’t recommend this unit for a busy office but it sure makes a heck of a unit for a teenage kid. It certainly succeeds in what I wanted it to do, keep my daughter out of my office!
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
djgeiger
|
 - Top 200 |
|
Member: Diana Geiger
Location: Huron, South Dakota USA
Reviews written: 150
Trusted by: 343 members
About Me:
I am a writer and the Exotic Pets Editor for BellaOnline.com.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.