HP Officejet 4500 Wireless review

HP’s new Officejet 4500 Wireless is a business MFP with scanner, copier, fax and wireless networking capabilities. Better yet, it’s cheaper than most comparable devices, temptingly priced at just £116.

It’s simple to set up via either a USB or wireless network connection. Although the MFP has just a two-line mono LCD screen, its presence means you don’t need to plug the 4500 into a PC to configure it for your wireless network. The built-in menu system makes it easy to search for networks and enter your password using the alphanumeric keypad.

Despite using integrated print heads and a tri-colour cartridge, the Officejet 4500 doesn’t cost much to run. 700 page black and 360 page colour cartridges are available for just £17 and £13 respectively, producing a mono cost of just 2.4p per page and a combined black and colour cost of 6p – one of the lowest page costs we’ve seen from an inkjet MFP.

We have no complaints about print quality, either. Even draft text is dark, well defined and easily good enough for everyday printing, with only slight fuzziness around the edges of lettering. This is particularly impressive at a draft text speed of 12.8ppm.

Standard quality mono text printed at a more sedate 5.2ppm and is very sharp. A slight flaw in the print head of our replaceable ink cartridge produced a couple of faint lines across the page. It’s not a very common problem, but we see it more often that we’d like. Our richly coloured business documents were slower still, at 1.7ppm, but every textual and graphical element looked perfect. Copy quality was also generally accurate, although mono copies were a little uneven on blocks of mid-tone colour.

Even photo prints, usually a weak area for business printers that lack a dedicated photographic black ink cartridge, looked excellent. Areas of subtle shading were smooth and detail was clear, although large areas of dark colour looked a little pale and bluish. A 6x4in photo on HP Premium Plus paper should cost around 28.5p.

Unfortunately, the TWAIN scanner interface suffers from problems common to many HP devices. It automatically carries out a 21-second 200dpi scan whenever you open it, it closes after each scan too, and the resolution settings are hard to find. If your scanning requirements are simple, you’re better off using the basic WIA driver. Scanned documents and photos looked great, though, with sharp text and bright, vivid colours. You can also use the MFP’s front panel controls to scan files at the touch of a button, which is far more convenient.

This MFP is brand new and, at the time of going to press, only available from directly from HP. That means that you should be seeing cheaper high street prices soon. In spite of a TWAIN interface that is senselessly hard to use, the Officejet 4500 Wireless is good value, conspicuously cheap to run, and performs all the tasks you’ll need from a home office MFP, from copying to faxing.