How cost effective is your printer in terms of consumables like paper and ink or toner? Does it use a lot of electricity to run? Is it environmentally friendly in terms of manufacture, day-to-day operation and ultimate disposal?

These are probably not questions at the front of your mind each time you send an email or Word doc to the printer to get a hard copy.

They’re not usually the prime things I think about when printing – although cost is increasingly a thought especially whenever I have to replace expensive ink cartridges – but I’m going to find out if a new printer, an HP OfficeJet 8500 Wireless, will provide convincing answers to questions like these.

Along with answers to more fundamental questions like how good is the print quality, how fast does it print, what about scanning, etc.

I set up and installed the printer in my home office yesterday; here’s an Animoto video story of that experience.

All the photos you see in the video are also on Flickr. I also posted a couple of ipadio audio comments here and here as well as an Audioboo of the sound of the printer calibrating itself (close your eyes, listen, and imagine). This printer is quite a machine. Setup took about 90 minutes in total, from unpacking the box, putting everything together, setting it up on my network and getting it to work with my desktop PC running Windows Vista. Very easy and straightforward, a question really of following some simple instructions and running some wizards on the PC as well as on the printer. I have the HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 Wireless (that’s quite a mouthful) until the end of June as part of a trial HP’s PR agency Edelman is conducting with a number of bloggers in the UK:

HP’s big focus at the moment is on designing printers that cost less to run and are kinder to the environment.  [..l.] Please use the printer as you normally would and keep a track of daily paper usage with the tracker provided. We are aiming to calculate how much money can be saved when printing with the HP OfficeJet printer compared to other laser printers of a similar pricing.

Meanwhile, my Epson Stylus DX6000 printer is consigned to a cupboard, there to sit for the duration of this trial. I’m under no obligation to Edelman or HP to write or say anything about the printer, by the way, or post pics to Flickr, do videos, etc. But what’s the point of having it to trial if I don’t do such things? Where’s the fun? So reviews to come on my tech blog.