HP OfficeJet Pro K850dn

Manufacturer: HP Part number: C8178A

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Compare with most popular

$459.00 - $588.91 at 2 online stores

CNET Editor rating:
3.5 stars Very good
Average user rating: 2.0 stars out of 3 reviews

More product information:: Editors' review; User reviews; Specifications; Product series; Manufacturer info

Bottom Line:: The HP Officejet Pro K850 fits a small and very specific niche: offices that need low volumes of high-quality prints--including wide-format prints. Otherwise, it's too expensive for a general-purpose single-function printer.

Where to buy

store customer rating inventory tax & shipping price

store	customer rating	inventory	tax & shipping	price
	Rate this store See store profile	In stock	Enter zip code to get total price: Price +Tax +Shipping =Total price	$459.00 Shop now as of 10/10/2008
Amazon.com	Rate this store See store profile	In stock	$588.91 Shop now as of 10/10/2008
The Right Technology. Right Away. Ricoh SP C811DN $3599 Network and duplex-ready workgroup color laser printer

Rate this store
See store profile

In stock

Enter zip code to get total price:

Price

+Tax

+Shipping

=Total price

$459.00

Shop now

as of 10/10/2008

Amazon.com

Rate this store
See store profile

In stock

$588.91

Shop now

as of 10/10/2008

The Right Technology. Right Away.

Ricoh SP C811DN
$3599
Product 1

Network and duplex-ready
workgroup color
laser printer

*Total price for the HP OfficeJet Pro K850dn are estimated and may vary slightly based on exact tax, shipping, manufacturer rebate or any sale/promotion on the merchant site.

show

CNET editors' review

HP OfficeJet Pro K850dn

price range: $459.00 - $588.91

Reviewed by: Felisa Yang
Edited by: Matthew Elliott
Reviewed on: 07/17/2007
Released on: 11/02/2005

The good: Great text quality; low print costs; can handle paper up to 13 inches wide; 24-7 tech support.

The bad: Slow prints; graphic and photo quality needs some improvement; expensive for a single-function printer.

The bottom line: The HP Officejet Pro K850 fits a small and very specific niche: offices that need low volumes of high-quality prints--including wide-format prints. Otherwise, it's too expensive for a general-purpose single-function printer.

Read full review

The HP Officejet Pro K850 is an expensive, single-function printer that fills a small niche in professional settings. This $400 color inkjet can handle medium-format media, but it uses basic, four-color printing instead of six-color for better range of color. Its print quality and speed are good enough for small-scale production of marketing collateral, but serious graphic designers who want slick brochures will be disappointed. If you need a network-ready printer with a duplexer, the K850dn offers both for an additional $100. Offices that require more standard office printing should look for a laser printer that can handle high volumes of prints quickly. Small offices that don't need medium-format media handling should check out the less expensive HP Officejet Pro K5400.

Design
The HP Officejet Pro K850 is an enormous inkjet printer because it can handle medium-format media, up to 13 inches wide versus 8.5 inches on a typical, consumer-level printer. The black-and-silver printer measures 24 inches wide, 17 inches deep, and 8 inches tall, and weighs 27.1 pounds. The duplexer on the K850dn adds an inch or two to the depth when attached to the rear of the printer. The K850's control panel is simple: power, cancel, and paper feed buttons and a set of icons that light up to indicate various problems, including a paper jam, an empty input tray, and low ink levels.

The printer's output tray sits atop the input cassette and tilts up so you can access the paper. The output tray features paper guides and two extension leaves that help corral longer prints. The input cassette also offers adjustable paper guides that let you neatly insert media ranging from 3x5 inches to 13x19 inches.

The four ink tanks reside separately from the print heads and are hidden behind a spring-release panel on the top of the printer. The K850 uses a pigment-based black (for better black text prints over dye-based black) and dye-based cyan, magenta, and yellow inks. Many photo-oriented printers--even consumer-level ones--offer six-ink printing (or more) for a better range of colors over four-color printing, which means the K850 isn't the ideal printer if you're working mainly with high-end graphics. It ships with the standard-yield cartridges, which cost $25 apiece, but you can replace those with high-yield cartridges: the black costs $34, while the color cartridges cost $38 each. Using the high-yield cartridges, HP estimates a black page can cost as low as 2.2 cents and a color page can cost as low as 8.4 cents--both numbers are low for an inkjet printer. Its monthly duty cycle is 6,250 pages, so if your office has high-volume printing needs, this isn't the printer for you.

Features
As a single-purpose office inkjet, the features are not surprisingly spartan. The Officejet Pro K850 can be connected via USB 2.0 or parallel port, but HP also sells an optional print server if you want to network the printer. (If you want both a duplexer and a network connection option, the K850dn offers both.) It ships with a 256MHz processor and 32MB of memory, standard for an inkjet printer. The print driver lets you make N-up prints, poster prints, and assists with manual duplexing if you have not purchased the duplex model.

Performance
It's difficult for us to make performance comparisons to the Officejet Pro K850 because we haven't reviewed similarly priced single-function inkjets. Most inkjets that fall into this price range are either multifunctions or professional graphics-oriented inkjets. The Pro K850, with its four-color printing and lack of any photo-oriented features such as a PictBridge port, is squarely an office inkjet printer.

It printed text at a rate of 6.31pages per minute and color graphics at a rate of 2.92ppm. It produced 4x6 photos at a rate of 0.33ppm. For a $400 printer, those numbers are slow. The $150 HP Officejet Pro K5400 made faster work of all prints, as did the $400 Canon Pixma MP960 multifunction.

CNET Labs' color inkjet speed tests (pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

4x6 photo

Color graphics

Black text

HP Officejet Pro K5400

1.84

6.21

10.16

Canon Pixma MP960 (inkjet AIO)

1.98

2.1

9.42

HP Officejet Pro K850

0.33

2.92

6.31

The Pro K850's print quality impressed us more than its speed. The text prints--both black and color--impressed us. The black text showed a rich black color and crisp letters. The color text was beautifully blended. Close inspection showed some minor wicking, even on HP's high-quality inkjet paper, so we'll call this "near laser" quality. The color graphics showed smooth gradients, sharp detail, and pleasing saturation, but the color looked a bit faded. The 4x6 color photo fared the worst, though it still wasn't bad at all. Details were sharp, but we noticed graininess in color blocks and the colors had a somber cast. We would've liked to see more brightness. Overall, the print quality and speed were good enough for offices that want to print small quantities of their own marketing materials (a small real estate or insurance office, for example), but offices that have high volume print needs should stick with lasers, while those that need high-end graphics should look at pro-level graphics printers.

CNET Labs' color inkjet printer quality
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Photo

Color graphics

Black text

Canon Pixma MP960

Excellent

HP Officejet Pro K850

Good

Excellent

HP Officejet Pro K5400

Fair

Good

Excellent

Service and support
HP backs the K850 with a standard one-year warranty, though you can upgrade that to two or three years. Toll-free phone support is available 24-7, or you can chat live online with tech support, also 24-7. HP's site has drivers, software downloads, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides, as well.

See pricing

show

User reviews

Write Review

Average user rating: 2.0 stars out of 3 reviews
My rating: 0 stars

Showing opinion 1 to 3 out of 3

Sort by:
2 stars

THIS IS A LEMON

by jjgerl1 on June 29, 2007

Pros: Good print quality

Cons: Does not perform for a home office.

Summary: I paid $500 for a printer that WILL NOT print envelopes of any size or texture. I repeatedly went back to HP, they replaced the printer, but it didn't ...

Read more

Summary: I paid $500 for a printer that WILL NOT print envelopes of any size or texture. I repeatedly went back to HP, they replaced the printer, but it didn't improve envelope performance.

One tech said it would take envelopes better if I remove the auto duplex cartridge and put the other cartridge on. Helloooo -- I am not going to disassemble my office and the equipment to print about four envelopes a month.

Any time I have to print an envelope my eyes well up with pending tears. I am going to unload this thing for $300 and buy something that will work for me. I believe for this amount of money I get to use ALL the listed features. I have got a box of crumpled envelopes I have pulled out of equipment.

Sorry HP, I have been a dedicated and loyal customer for close to 15 years. On the K850dn I have had way too many emails and phone calls with tech support people that are too accented to understand -- you are going to lose my business. I am no further along after having the printer for about six month.

Show less

1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
3 stars

Good print quality, extremely poor long-term reliability

by make_or_break on May 27, 2007

Pros: Tabloid printing, duplex capability actually works seemlessly, exceptional print quality, relatively easy network setup

Cons: Consumed cartridge budget like there's no tomorrow. Print queue issues. Single paper jam permanently ends this one's life.

Summary: My firm bought the K850dn less than a year ago to replace an old 13 x 19 tabloid format Epson Stylus (who's model number now escapes me) that we ...

Read more

Summary: My firm bought the K850dn less than a year ago to replace an old 13 x 19 tabloid format Epson Stylus (who's model number now escapes me) that we had been using for ages but finally was showing its age and wear over the seven or eight years of often heavy service that it had given us. The K850dn was roughly half the original price that the Epson had cost us, and in the past HP inkjets had performed well in use within our company. Seemed like a no-brainer at the time, so out came the company credit card.

The K850dn was easy to set up on our internal network (the Epson had to be tied in as a local printer to one of the computers on the network), and did pretty much everything we asked of it--most of the time. Print quality was very good; while color calibration and matching took a bit of time (it's bad enough doing it for a single computer and monitor, try doing it for a dozen different workstations), generally most of us were all quite pleased with the K850dn's end print results.

I did notice right away that the HP seemed to be considerably more expensive on the consumables budget than our old unlamented Epson was. At first we thought it was because the K850dn was the new kid on the block and that many in the firm were just using it more (given that towards the end, printing to the Epson was NOT an enjoyable user experience), but in truth as time passed we were actually having to buy replacement cartridges quite frequently with the HP. The HP uses four separate cartridges whereas the Epson used a combined color cartridge with a separate black ink cartridge. While the idea of having the flexibilty of replacing only the specific color that runs dry that the K850dn's design utilizes seems good, in practice our actual color usage habits more often than not seem to use up two or all three of the color ink wells fairly evenly. With the Epson, that cost us $50-60 each time that the color well needed replacing, whereas with the HP the typical bill runs $120-130 for replacing the entire color set (both printers seem to go through their respective, separate black ink cartridges at about the same rate). For every two complete color cartridge cycles that the HP went through, the Epson would probably have gone through two-and-a-half to three color cartridges. One additional change at worse, but roughly 25-40% cheaper on consumables, which is not insignificant.

Another issue that cropped up early with the HP was its ability to handle a large queue of print jobs. In short, it didn't, at least not as well as the Epson (and its software) did, or certainly nothing like our old large format HP DesignJet 1055cm did (before it recently died, but that's another tale for some other time). The OfficeJet Pro would balk if the queue got too deep (roughly 6 or 7 print jobs would do it); the printer would complete the job that it was handling, and perhaps go on to the next one in the queue, but then would forget the remaining jobs, and would refuse to accept any subsequent new print jobs until a power reset was done. HP never could provide us was a clear answer on why this was happening, or whether it was something to be expected from this printer. In the end we just accepted this quirk, even if we weren't happy about it.

The more telling and irritating problem that we were confronted with was the HP's fatal paper jam, which of course happened outside of the K850dn's warranty period. The K850dn is prone to paper jams as often (or infrequent, depending on your point of view and whether you have to be one having to clean it out) as most any other inkjet I've ever used, both at work and at home. One particular 8 1/2 x 11 job caused this life-ending situation. It's believed that the wayward sheet of paper worked its way into the inkjet transport mechanism, where either the initial jam or the cleaning out of the paper likely damaged the transport to the point that all the printer would subsequently do was issue error codes. Because of the relative cost of the printer, it was determined that it would be cheaper to buy a new one than have HP repair the thing (which they'd probably just ship us a new one anyways). Not a good thing result, certainly for a $500 printer that barely saw a year's worth of usage before going T.U.

While I realize that...ahem...'stuff' happens, as a business there are expectations that products bought for business--particularly those marketed to business--are supposed not end up costing said business more time and wasted money than they were originally worth. The natural tendency for trying to salvage something so relatively new and young is strong (I never like the idea of wasting something that should still have servicable life to it), but the reality is that we probably spent twice to three times the price of the printer trying to make the bloody thing work again. Even if we had been sharp enough to just stop right away and buy another, there's still the unexpected downtime, and the time needed to get the new printer up and running. Part of the price of doing business? Perhaps, but I would hope that such expense would've happened at a rate longer than once a year.

Show less

1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
8 stars

Excellent all around printer!

by sahalu on July 4, 2007

Pros: works flawlessly every time even after months of inactivity

Cons: ink monitor not very accurate

Summary: Have had this printer for almost a year and it works flawlessly for me everytime I use it. My only complaint is that occasionally one or more of the ink ...

Read more

Summary: Have had this printer for almost a year and it works flawlessly for me everytime I use it. My only complaint is that occasionally one or more of the ink cartridges give wrong reading (shows less than full reading)even right after replacing it.

The duplexer is just great. The best wide format printer I have ever owned or worked with in 14 years in IT support. I highly recommend this printer.

Sahalu

Show less

Showing opinion 1 to 3 out of 3

See pricing

show

Specifications

Manufacturer: HP
Part number: C8178A
Description: Information technology professionals rely on HP quality to ensure maximum productivity. As the power of applications, processors, memory adapters and storage devices increases, high-end computer users are seeking ways to optimize their system performance. HP provides leading solutions, adding new levels of performance, availability, flexibility, and management.

General
Printer Type Workgroup printer - Ink-jet - Color
Width 24 in
Depth 17.1 in
Height 8.1 in
Weight 27.1 lbs
Printer
Ink Palette (Colors) 4-ink
Print Speed up to 4 pages/min - Black best - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 6 pages/min - Black normal - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 0.7 min/page - Color normal - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 0.9 min/page - Color best - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 0.2 min/page - Color draft - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 1.1 min/page - Photo - 3.95 in x 5.9 in, up to 0.3 min/page - Color draft - A3 (11.7 in x 16.5 in), up to 24 pages/min - Black draft - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 0.2 min/page - Mixed text/color graphics draft - A3 (11.7 in x 16.5 in), up to 5.5 pages/min - Color normal - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 1.8 min/page - Color best - A3 (11.7 in x 16.5 in), up to 21 pages/min - Color draft - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 3.6 pages/min - Mixed text/color graphics best - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 11.5 pages/min - Black draft - A3 (11.7 in x 16.5 in), up to 1.2 min/page - Color normal - A3 (11.7 in x 16.5 in), up to 3 pages/min - Black best - A3 (11.7 in x 16.5 in)
Connectivity Technology Wired
Interface Ethernet, USB, Parallel
Max Resolution ( B&W ) 1200 dpi x 600 dpi
Max Resolution ( Color ) 4800 dpi x 1200 dpi
Image Enhancement Technology HP PhotoREt III
Duplex Printout Duplex
Language Simulation PCL 3
Processor
Processor Motorola ColdFire 4e 256 MHz
RAM
RAM Installed ( Max ) 32 MB / 32 MB (max)
Printing
Color 4-ink
Media Handling
Media Type Plain paper, Greeting cards, Transparencies, Index cards, Labels, Photo paper, Envelopes
Media Sizes B6 (4.92 in x 6.93 in), B5 (6.93 in x 9.83 in), C4 (9 in x 12.75 in), 3 in x 5 in, A3 (11.7 in x 16.5 in), A5 (5.83 in x 8.25 in), C6 (4.5 in x 6.38 in), A3 plus (13 in x 16.65 in), B4 (9.83 in x 13.9 in), A6 (4.13 in x 5.83 in), A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), C5 (6.38 in x 9 in)
Max Printing Width 8.26 in
Max Printing Length 13.76 in
Media Weight 60 g/m2 - 286 g/m2
Total Media Capacity 150 sheets
Media Feeder(s) 1 x Autoload - 150 sheets weight: 60 g/m2 - 286 g/m2
Max Media Capacity 150 sheets
Duty Cycle
Monthly Duty Cycle 6250 pages
Telecom
Modem None
Networking
Networking Print server - Plug-in module
Connectivity Technology Wired
Data Link Protocol Ethernet

Power
Power Device Power adapter - External
Voltage Required AC 120/230 V
Power Consumption Operational 67 Watt
Miscellaneous
Compliant Standards GS, MIC, C-Tick, IEC950, UL, VCCI, CE, GOST, EN 60950, CCC, CSA, BSMI, FCC Part 15
Scanner
Type None
Copier
Copier Type None
Manufacturer Warranty
Service & Support 1 year warranty
Service & Support Details Limited warranty - Parts and labor - 1 year
Expansion / Connectivity
Expansion Slots Total (Free) EIO
Connections 1 x Network - Ethernet - RJ-45, 1 x Parallel - IEEE 1284 (EPP/ECP), 1 x USB
Environmental Parameters
Min Operating Temperature 41 ?F
Max Operating Temperature 104 ?F
Humidity Range Operating 15 - 80%
Sound Emission (Operating) 57 dBA
Battery
Type None
Software / System Requirements
Software Included Drivers & Utilities
OS Required SuSE Linux 8.1, Apple MacOS X 10.2.x, LindowsOS, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Debian Linux 3.0, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Red Hat Linux 9, Novell NetWare 6, Novell NetWare 3.2, Novell NetWare 4.2, Apple MacOS X 10.3.x, Novell NetWare 5.x, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Apple MacOS X 10.4.x

See pricing

show

Product series

show

Manufacturer info

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Reddit
- Facebook
Print

HP OfficeJet Pro K850dn

Where to buy

CNET editors' review

User reviews

Submit your review

Specifications

General

Printer

Processor

RAM

Printing

Media Handling

Duty Cycle

Telecom

Networking

Power

Miscellaneous

Scanner

Copier

Manufacturer Warranty

Expansion / Connectivity

Environmental Parameters

Battery

Software / System Requirements

Product series

Manufacturer info

Similar products