Hasta La Ideas

The following is a sponsored post from Staples about a product we support. We’ve been aggressively testing this product and the review is based on our first-hand experiences. We agreed to work with Staples because they sell so many different products in their stores, and our arrangement with them allows us to review products we use and have no hesitation recommending to our readers. Again, these infrequent sponsored posts help us continue to provide quality content to our audience.

This spring, HP released a series of new four-in-one color printers exclusive to Staples — the Pro X line. Not too long afterward, we received an HP Officejet Pro X576dw to review. We were interested in this new line of printers for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that it’s being marketed as the “world’s fastest color desktop printer.” It actually holds a Guinness World Record for speed, and we thought that was something we wanted to test for ourselves.

The HP Officejet Pro X576dw is $800 and is intended for active use by small- and medium-size businesses. It’s wireless, so everyone in the office can use the same machine. This means instead of buying each employee a scanner and printer, you can save your company a good amount of money with a shared device. Being wireless, it also means you can store it anywhere that is convenient for all of your employees.

And, it really is fast. When I hit print on my computer, it immediately starts printing, and the pages come out at a rate of up to 70 pages per minute (that’s for basic, single-sided printing). The printer we were using before this wasn’t even half that number and it wasn’t color. The HP Officejet Pro X576dw can print, scan, and copy both sides of the paper, so it saves us money by also not wasting paper. It uses what HP calls “PageWide technology.” According to HP, that means it “delivers four colors of Original HP pigment ink at one time onto a moving sheet of paper. As the paper moves, the printhead remains stationary, allowing the HP Officejet Pro X Series to print quickly and quietly.” In short, it moves the paper instead of the ink.

In addition to saving time, it saves money, too. It’s Energy Star qualified and the entire unit consumes less energy than a laser printer. It’s also half the initial cost of a laser four-in-one printer with relatively comparable features. It uses high-yield ink tanks (which you can also get at Staples) that result in fewer and less expensive ink tank replacements over the life of the machine in comparison to a laser printer. You save money at initial purchase and then over the lifetime of the machine.

The setup process is simple. While the machine runs its initial automatic internal configuration, you just use the touch screen on the front to type in the network password and make preferences. You don’t need an installation CD or any high-tech knowledge to make it work.

A few of our favorite functions:

• You can email the machine things you want printed and copied. If you’re out and about, you can send an email from your smartphone and print documents so they’re available when you and your clients arrive back at the office.
• I really like the Stamps app, which allows you to print postage through Stamps.com directly on the printer. With the help of a trusty scale, I weigh what I need to send, use the app to print a stamp for the exact postage amount, and then hand the package to the mail carrier. I’ve stopped going to the post office, saving myself a lot of time.
• For its size, it has a really big paper tray. It holds a full ream of paper (500 sheets), while our previous printer held less than half a ream (200 sheets). It’s genuinely nice not to have a partial ream of paper hanging open in our office supply closet all the time. It sounds silly, but unopened reams stack much more cleaner than open ones.

Exact product specifications and more technical information can be found on Staples’ website. But, on the whole, we are really impressed with this four-in-one printer. It greatly exceeded our expectations, especially with saving us time and money over the longterm.

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