Review on 🖨️ HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One: Wireless Color Printer with Scanner, Copier & Fax - The Ultimate Productivity Solution by Brad Schaefer

UPDATED 12/15/2015: Control panel no longer works (white screen). This is a known and well-documented issue. The printer is less than two years old. GARBAGE. HP isn't the company it used to be. UPDATED: See updates below. Hewlett Packard has always been a brand to turn to for quality print products and support. That well-deserved reputation could be in jeopardy. I bought this printer and second paper tray for a medium sized office job that involves frequent one-off mailings. Mailings are made in MS Word format in the form of a file with the content of the letter and an enclosed envelope. The printer information indicates that this feature is supported for envelopes in the top tray and letterhead in the bottom tray. There is no slot for manually feeding envelopes or custom paper. Therefore, after more than 15 hours (and many sheets of paper and envelopes) in support of HP's online research, the HP Officejet Pro 8600 still cannot perform the simple task of printing envelope information on an envelope and the text of a letter on letterhead, Testing, experimenting and reinstalling drivers. It can only perform the task correctly when the envelope is in a text file that only contains envelopes and a body of text is in a file that only contains things to be printed on letterhead or when printing a range of pages that contains paper contains only one size. Otherwise, the printer is excellent - the colors are pleasant, the speed is okay. You can get all of these and fix envelope printing with other printer brands for less money. HP has been ridiculously terrible at dealing with this problem. I started online support chat. I entered my problem and followed the steps to get support. The result was a blank screen. I repeated, same result. Tried in another browser. Same result. Then I called the helpdesk. I made my way through a seemingly endless tree of voice prompts. Eventually I got the ubiquitous "due to an unexpected number of calls". Message. That's a partial success, and hands-free phones are ideal for that. After 20 minutes of waiting, I was greeted by the musical tones of a man with a heavy South East Asian accent who called himself "Joe". It's funny why Indian phone support outsourcing agencies rename their agents to monosyllabic English names - do they really think I would be more comfortable and happier if his name was Joe? I spent 40 minutes with Joe, who began by insisting that the 8600 only had one paper tray. Eventually I convinced him there was an optional second tray and took advantage of that option. He walked away briefly to speak to the supervisor. Then he came back and said the 8600 couldn't print on envelopes. I assured him it was possible. He insisted it was impossible. I referred to the user manual. He left. He then said that it was impossible to print on envelopes and paper at the same time. I sent it back to the instructions. He said that I didn't understand the manual and that the 8600 could only print on envelopes or paper, not both. After some confusion, I realized he thought I wanted the printer to print the contents of the letter onto the envelope and the paper at the same time - literally at the same time. I absolutely couldn't explain to him that it is common to have a Word file that contains both the addressee information for the envelope and the content of the letter in the same file. I hung up. I then spent over 10 hours over several days trying to find everything I could find on the support forums and elsewhere. Much of this involved trying different drivers (e.g. using the Deskjet 450 driver instead of the printer specific driver) and experimenting with printer settings on the printer, in MS Word and with driver configurations. By my calculations, I spent about $17,000 on paper and envelopes during this process - okay, that's overkill. Probably just wasted 200 sheets and 200 envelopes. Sometimes success seemed close, but unfortunately it remained unattainable. I decided to keep my envelopes separate from the contents of the letter. It's far from satisfactory, but it works. An email from HP will then appear. It looks like the information I sent to start chat support was recorded somewhere and this agent took action. A glimmer of hope. The information provided in the email was almost entirely a subset of things I had already tried. It was very detailed and would have saved me a lot of time if I had had it before I started self catering. It suggested a driver which I didn't try. Unfortunately the result was the same. I answered and described everything I had done. And clearly indicates that the problem persists. I have attached sample files and screenshots. Half a day later I received an answer. I was excited - everything finally seemed to be working as advertised. HA! The reply was a thank you for working with the support team and showed that they were happy that everything was now working properly. I'll update this review if there's ever anything else in the saga. ON PAPER AND ENVELOPES - Discover many manual feed options from Canon, Epson, Brother, Samsung. stay away from it. UPDATE 6/1/2014: Well, I regularly use the printer in semi-manual mode for envelopes. In Microsoft Word I have to print the envelopes attached to the document separately by first clicking on the envelope and just printing the current page and then printing the rest of the document. It's annoying, but it works. UPDATE 10/06/2014. The envelope feeder (Tray 1) has stopped working properly. Envelopes are printed with a large "skew" in the orientation. Back to HP support (shudder).