i just talked to a rep at officemax about the HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One and i'm leaning toward buying one, anyone have good any experience with them? I'll be using it almost exclusively for papercraft. I just want to know it can stand up to 110 weight cardstock for 15-30 prints a week. its rated to over 100,000 pages a month for standard paper, not sure how that relates to cardstock though.
It also has 4 individual cartridges for color, i'm guessing thats good for refilling ink myself. but i've honestly never even owned a printer so i'm not too sure if buying what i need or if it will help in getting my cost per page down.
Any feedback would be helpful, Ive been doing papercraft since the beginning of last year. Mostly i've just been building what a friend print for me to build but i'm ready to start printing my own.

First, welcome to the boards. Enjoy your stay and I can't wait to see some pictures of what you build/while you build.

I have direct experience with that printer. I do know that HP tends to have printers that don't print square, which can be troublesome for this hobby. My last two printers were HP and both were out of square. Make sure and check this before making the purchase.

My last printer was an HP, and I suffered with my printouts being 1/16" off in one direction. It really, really, really sucked. I have a couple TLX sets I built that clearly prefer a certain orientation since they aren't square...

Last year, I picked up a Canon all-in-one printer (mine sees a lot of office use as well as cardstock printing) and I made sure I talked to the store manager about the printers. They were totally unaware that not all printers print square, and were totally willing for me to bring the printer home, try it out, and return it if I didn't think it printed well. We tried printing some things in-store, but we ran into problem after problem trying to print things out via a USB drive. Despite a miserable experience with Canon support, I couldn't resist the price and features of the MX870, and the printouts (in my opinion) look great. It's also a printer I could get a continuous ink system for, which was a plus.

I forgot to mention, I recently picked up an Epson Artisan 835 with a similar story to the previous.

How would i go about seein if its square? Take a usb with a sample of some terrain data and see if they will let me print it?

Any image will do. I wasn't able to pull it off in-store though. After talking to the manager about the idea, I tried bringing the TLX template PDF on in on a USB stick, but the printer wasn't happy with it - claimed the file was too big. Then I made a new PDF with just the template file for the 6" tile in it. Printer complained about the file format. Kind of made me upset at the support for printing off the USB port... It was after going through this and being unable to print something out, I had him assure me that they'd take the printer back if it didn't print square, since we couldn't tell before buying...

I probably could have created a png image or something with a 6" square on it, and that might have worked better in-store, but I just didn't bother.

If it's printing wrong, it'll probably only be off by 1/16", so bring a ruler to verify the printout. Eyeballing it isn't always going to work.

I have an HP 8600A. Not sure if this is a valid test to see if it is square but I just printed one of the templates for the 6x6 tile and it measured out to be 6x6 exactly. There is a setting that I have turned off which is "Remove Margins" in the printer dialog for the Nuance PDF application. Not sure if that makes a crap bit of difference but it is off. Heck I'm not even sure what it does exactly.

Yeah I have printed other things in the past and have not noticed any issues. I have played with that margins setting in the past and it does seem to mess things up.

I love the 8600A. It has individual color cartridges, can print on both sides, has two paper trays and seems to handle 110lb card stock with no problems.

alright so another question would be, since it has the four individual cartridges that means i can buy the ink bottles to refill correct? Because anything to lower cost would be great, not only do i use this terrain for gaming I also blow them up so my son has little houses and such for his playmobil toys.