HP Officejet 7500a e-All-In-One A3+ Printer Review

The New HP Officejet 7500a offers A3+ printing, A4 copying and scanning, wireless and fax facility for well under £200.

The control panel on this attractive machine houses a 2.4 inch LCD screen and numerical keypad with touch sensitive keys. On the front left facia are the memory card ports for SD, XD, and Memory Stick, but sadly there is no USB support.

There is an autosheet document feeder that holds up to 35 sheets of A4 paper. The scanner itself captures detail and colours very well but only in standard A4, so you will not be able to scan A3 documents with this machine.

There is a 150 sheet paper tray at the bottom which holds A4 paper and extends outwards for up to A3+ paper, increasing the total footprint of the printer. There is also a useful manual feed for printing envelopes and thicker media.

Paper size error messages have been reported but this could be to do with the internal sliding guide inside the paper tray being set incorrectly.

The HP Officejet 7500a is very easy to set up and connect, either via USB, Wi-Fi, or ethernet, so you can use the printer with more than one computer. Data loss Issues have been reported when printing using a wireless connection.

Print speeds range from around 4 pages per minute for text and graphics to up to four minutes for a full A3 photo print. Print quality is good for black text and graphics and when using good quality photographic paper colour prints are excellent. No duplex printing through!

This A3+ machine uses four separate cartridges, HP920 Black, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. XL versions of the cartridges are also available which print a reported 700 pages, but obviously print yields vary depending on the amount of page coverage.

Compatible cartridges are also available for the 7500a, particularly the XL large capacity version, however the ink level monitor will always read as empty. If you can tolerate this inconvenience then using copy cartridges will cut your printing costs dramatically.

Whilst colour printing results are not as good as dedicated profesional A3 printers, the 7500a produces pleasing results. Overall print quality is good and speeds ok but the printer can be slow to start up sometimes. Initial purchase price of the printer is low for an A3 printer with such features, and Ink costs can be low if using compatible cartridges. The HP Officejet 7500a may not be as easy to use as other models on the market causing the odd problem for technophobes and may be best suited to business users looking to print A3 posters.