We are all familiar with HP’s personal consumer printers that are found in many homes. We use them every day for printing off documents, emails, pictures, and any other items that you may wish to share. Whilst these printers are outstanding for home users that do light printing, the question is, what exactly should a business be looking for?
In my opinion, HP has been a successful leader in the printer market as they have had a strong presence in both the home and business markets for many years. When looking at printers over the years, you’ll notice that they are becoming more and more multi-function, with many now coming with Wi-Fi, a Near Field Communication (NFC) reader, and the ability to copy, scan, and fax in addition to being able to print.
In the enterprise world, most printers are large and at times can be frustrating to use. Enterprise printers typically use a laser to to deliver high print speeds, but lack the color depth that you get at home. Whereas your home printer is smaller and uses inkjet technology, meaning slower prints but higher quality color documents.
So where do you find a printer that has the speed of a laser, and the color quality of an inkjet? Cue the enterprise all-in-one printer by HP, the Officejet Enterprise X585z MFP. This printer is far from being a personal home printer, but rather designed for a business environment. With its many business attributes and features, the X585z offers everything you may need in your business environment from encryption protection to ease of use. In my in-depth review of the X585z I will be covering the following subjects: build quality, printer usage, features, and finally my overall thoughts. I would like to thank HP for providing me with the X585z printer.
Figure 1 – The X585z’s front view.
Build Quality
The X585z is quite different from the dresser sized business printers that some of you may be familiar with. Weighting only 80 pounds and having a somewhat compact size of 31.5 x 26.4 x 23.8 inches,this can easily be placed on a desk or small table rather than inside a large print room.
The outside shell is an all plastic housing that is colored matte black and white. When looking at the X585z you will immediately notice that it does not have any physical buttons other than the power button. This is because the entire printer is controlled and run using a large touchpad. The touchpad gives the X585z not only a very premium look and feel, but simplifies the process of printing, scanning, copying, and faxing. More on the touchpad later on.
Being a standalone unit, the X585z has a two tray paper feeder which allows users to choose between two different sizes or types of paper. Tray one is a manual pull down tray, whereas tray two is an automatic paper drawer; tray two will be the most commonly used. When using the printer I did feel that tray two was a tad flimsy, but it held up well to repeated use during the period of the review that was carried out over several weeks.
Next is finding out how easy it would be to clear a paper jam in the printer. By following the easy on-screen guides showing you how to fix a paper jam, the X585z actually comes apart quite easily and will be working again in a matter of minutes. The printer even has a jam recovery function to automatically reprint the page that was jammed rather than skipping over it.
Finally, I was amazed at how well it was built. Apart from the flimsy paper trays, the overall construction of the X585z is excellent and should hold up in any business environment it may be placed in. Saying that, there is a one year warranty that is provided with the X585z which will cover any early issues.
Figure 2 – The X585z’s full body.
X585z Usage
have used my fair share of business printers in different work
environments and I have noticed that they are either outdated or are difficult to use for simple tasks, such as sending a fax. The touchpad on the X585z, has an intuitive user interface that clearly labels the functions of printing, copying, scanning and faxing.
When powering up the X585z it will perform a full system diagnostic test that keeps the printer in working order. Although this does take around 5 minutes, it’s nice to see that the printer will take care of itself rather than an IT department constantly checking up on the unit.
The X585z is more than just a printer, but also has the ability to copy, scan, and fax documents. Beginning with the printer, the usage is like no other printer. Having the X585z printer about 15 feet away from my desk; when printing a three page document the X585z finished printing before I could even walk over to the unit. This is where HP’s Pagewide technology comes into its own. In the general office mode, the X585z can print an approximately 70 page document in just one minute. I decided to test this by printing a 33 page report which finished in around 30 seconds. Represented in the photo below, the PageWide technology takes a single sheet of paper that passes over a static print head containing over 40,000 ink ejectors. This is how ink can be used at a laser speed. Now with 40,000 ink ejectors the printer will automatically perform self-diagnosis to make sure each ejector is right on target.
Figure 3 – HP’s PageWide technology in the X585z.
Moving on, there is the scanner and copier functionality of the X585z. The scanner and copier share a large scanning area that would be familiar to any user. When scanning a document, users can choose to have the scanner in auto-orientation, auto-cropping, and auto-tone modes. This provides nearly perfect scans that are effortless. The scanner also has Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing and can convert writing to text as well as an ultrasonic misfeed detector to see if two pages were picked up at once. The copier on the other hand can print the same copy multiple times without rescanning as well as send documents to emails, network folders, a USB, FTP server, or Microsoft SharePoint. Again this is all done on the easy to use touchpad and the full QWERTY physical keyboard (see below).
Finally, there is the faxing which can either use the scanner or top paper feeder. A fax needs to know where it is being sent to, which means you have to type on a keyboard. Most printers that have a touchpad use an onscreen keyboard that is typically slow and not very responsive, but the X585z uses a hidden physical QWERTY keyboard that can be pulled out to type in emails, names, etc. This keyboard is excellent to type on and provides a much better response.
Figure 4 – The X585z physical pullout keyboard.
Features
As you can tell by now this printer is packed with many different features to provide you with all of your business’s needs. First, there is the quality of the photos and documents. I decided to print a few full page high resolution pictures to check for quality and to see how the ink would blend together. Contrary to what others have found, the X585z produced some quality pictures to the original and when copying a front page magazine, it captured the color quality of it quite well.
With one of the main features of the X585z being the full touchpad, HP has made the experience and usage of the printer that much easier. Everything is displayed neatly and in full color. The touchpad is how you carry out all operations on the printer so the software and functionality of the touchpad had to be flawless. The touchpad is very responsive and is something both HP and other printer manufacturers should include on all their units.
Now, using an inkjet design it does mean sooner or later new ink cartridges will need to be purchased. It is not recommended to buy refill kits or use non-OEM ink cartridges, which means the cost of ink is high. However, with an impressive 6,000+ pages for all colors and 10,000+ for black and white pages, it should take quite a while before you need to purchase new ink. Having four ink cartridges, the X585z cartridges will cost around $100 each. Not too bad for a business printer, as some home printers could cost $75 per cartridge with nowhere near the output.
Moving on, there is the ability to print using different devices. As we know how to print from our PCs, what about if there were a document on our phones that needed printing? Nearly everyone has moved to the smartphone market meaning communications and documents have gone mobile. With most Android smartphones having NFC capability, the X585z has a NFC reader that can be used to print or open documents on your phone. You can also perform this wirelessly using HP’s ePrint if you are connected to the same LAN. There is also the function of printing through USB. With a USB 2.0 port on the side of the unit, the X585z can read documents and print them on the fly.
Being an enterprise printer, the X585z has some enterprise features such as having a 320GB encrypted hard drive that can be used to store documents on the printer securely. For businesses that require proximity badges, the X585z accommodates these as well, with the ability to scan the badges before allowing prints.
Finally, there are the duplex features of both printing and scanning. With the ability to print a double side document automatically, the X585z takes the duplex ability to the next step by integrating it with the scanner. When placed in the top feeder, the X585z can scan two sides of a document without having to turn it over. This printer is designed to save time where ever needed.
You can view the full system specifications of the X585z here.
Figure 5 – The X585z’s touchpad.
My final thoughts
Honestly, I don’t believe HP could have done any better than the X585z. Both stylish and fully functional, the X585z comes in three different models; the X585z is the top of the range model. Its Pagewide inkjet technology is excellent and the shear speed of printing is time saving. It does lack Wi-Fi capabilities for encryption reasons, but that doesn’t hold it back from being a dominant printer. Keep in mind that HP does offer additional paper trays that can be used on the X585z for more functionality.
All in all, I was very pleased with the X585z and would recommend it to any business looking for an upgrade to their printer. It is designed, performs, and belongs in the enterprise world, and with a price tag of $2,799 you will surely be happy with your purchase.
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1 Comment
HP printer is better i also used this printer and performance is good