Not that the HP Officejet Pro K8600dn is a slouch. It has wide-format capability so you can print on tabloid and B-size media. It's also pretty snappy. I printed out good-looking text pages at just under six pages per minute (ppm) for best (near-laser) quality and up to 35 ppm for draft quality. High-res color images ranged from 2.5 ppm to 4.5 ppm on standard size media (8 x 11) depending on the image. Overall, the print quality is very good; the printer can handle up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi (dots per inch) on premium photo paper. Photos are vibrant, warm and crisp, if just a slight bit grainy.

The Officejet Pro K8600dn can print on a variety of paper sizes, including letter, legal, statement, executive, tabloid, super B, 8.5 x 13 inches, envelopes and index cards. Supported media types include paper (inkjet, photo, plain), envelopes, labels, cards and transparencies. You can print on heavy media (up to 76 pounds) and oversized material such as card stock and envelopes through the manual feed and straight-through paper path. I printed on several types of media with no jams or snafus.

HP uses a standard suite of four-color documents to determine page yields. The printer utilizes four ink cartridges (black, cyan, magenta and yellow) with the black pigment-based and the colors dye-based. The standard-size tanks cost $15 to $20 each and last a long time, from 830 to 1070 pages depending on the color. The high-yield tanks ($25 to $35) last from 1,510 to 2,450 pages, so I'd go for these. The printheads are $60 each to replace.

With the HP printer, you can resize from 25 to 400 percent, enlarge one-page documents to 25 times their size with tiling, arrange 16 pages on a sheet to check layout. It has an automatic two-sided printer option, which is a little tricky to use as you have to change the default setting initially.

If you're cramped for space, then you may want to consider other options. The The Officejet Pro K8600dn weighs 31.5 pounds and measures 24 x 19.7 x 8.78 inches (24 x 27.76 x 8.78 with the straight-through paper path attached). The printer is also pretty loud and "wriggles" quite a bit when doing its thing, especially when churning out pages in draft mode.

The Officejet Pro K8600dn is compatible with Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher. It has USB 2.0 connectivity.

Macismum rating: 8 out of 10.

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