HP Officejet printers impress experts, but watch out for ink costs
The best general-purpose inkjet printers can produce letters, directions, maps and grocery lists in a reasonable amount of time and without consuming massive amounts of ink, yet are also able to create great looking birthday party invitations, scrapbooking graphics and personal photos. One of the best such printers for home use is actually a budget-priced printer, the Canon Pixma iP4820 (*Est. $80), discussed in our section on cheap printers.
HP also makes some of the few well-reviewed single-purpose inkjet printers geared toward business use. The HP Officejet 6000 Wireless (*Est. $80) packs several business-friendly features into a low-priced package. It accepts Wi-Fi print commands, so all of the computers and compatible smartphones on your wireless network can use the printer without bothering with cables. The Officejet 6000 Wireless can hold 250 sheets of paper and includes an auto duplexer, so you can print on both sides of the paper (although reviews say this slows printing down considerably). And this EnergyStar compliant printer complies with several other environmental standards -- even print canceling is instantaneous, saving ink and paper, notes PCMag.com's M. David Stone.
Stone bestows an Editors' Choice award upon the Officejet 6000 Wireless printer, saying it "offers an attractive balance of speed, output quality, paper handling, price and cost per page." It's noted as a best printer at PC World and Macworld, too. Testers say its text and graphics look professional, and it cranks out between seven and eight pages per minute in tests -- a middling to good speed, according to various experts.
The downside? The HP printer is better for document printing than for family photos. Photos print more slowly (more than one minute for a 4-by-6-inch photo and two to three minutes for an 8-by-10), and the Officejet 8000 Wireless printer can't print directly from your camera or from a memory card. Experts say photos look OK, but not terrific. "Photos in my tests all qualified as true photo quality, but were very much at the low end of the scale," PCMag.com's Stone says. Blacks look dark gray in his test, "giving the sense of looking at the scene through a haze," and round objects look flat and two-dimensional. "Depending on your tastes, you may or may not consider the quality acceptable for photos you want to keep in, say, an album."
HP also offers a step-up version of this printer -- the HP Officejet Pro 8000 Wireless (*Est. $110); this printer is meant for heavier-duty use, with a thicker plastic casing and the ability to print more than twice as many pages per month than the Officejet 6000 Wireless (15,000 versus 7,000 pages). HP also offers a nonwireless version, the HP Officejet 8000 (*Est. $95). The 8000 series is marketed as an alternative to color laser printers for office use. TrustedReviews.com's Simon Williams says it mostly lives up to that ambition, boasting near-laser-quality graphics and text, and better-than-laser photos. Operating costs also compete well with lasers.
Expert after expert recommends the HP Officejet 6000 and 8000 series for their less expensive replacement ink. These printers ship with four small ink cartridges -- black, magenta, cyan and yellow -- that cost $50 total to replace, although experts recommend replacing them with HP's extra-large ink tanks, which last longer (and cost more).
But many real-life users at Amazon.com say they feel like they're constantly replacing the ink cartridges in these HP printers -- and Hewlett-Packard settled a class-action lawsuit over this issue in late 2010. HP said it will pay up to $5 million to settle complaints that its printers say they're low on ink when they're not, use color inks when printing black-and-white pages or have ink cartridges that shut down and quit working before the ink runs out. The lawsuit names many HP models, including the Officejet 6000 and 8000 series. Even after the settlement, though, owners continue to complain about the short-lived ink, so be aware that you may wind up spending more for ink with these printers than the expert reviews predict.
Office-ready inkjet printers from Epson and Canon
Pricier office inkjets can do some things that the inexpensive HP Officejet printers can't. The Canon Pixma iX7000 (*Est. $335) can print on oversized paper (up to 13 inches by 19 inches), while the Epson B-510DN (*Est. $580) can print color and black-and-white documents very cheaply and quickly. But like the HP printers, both have their strengths and weaknesses.
If you need to print on large paper (for example, for menus, brochures or church bulletins), the Canon Pixma iX7000 is your best affordable bet, according to PCMag.com and PC Pro. Text and graphics look great in tests, and photos look pretty good -- although skin tones appear "warmer and less natural" than prints from the top-rated photo printer, the Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II (*Est. $445), in PC Pro's test. But the Canon iX7000 printer is really designed to print business documents, and experts say it does that very well, and at about half the price of a comparable laser printer. We did find some user complaints -- some owners say they have to fuss with the paper feed on the Canon printer, while others have problems connecting the printer to their network. But since only a handful of owners have reviewed this model, it's hard to find patterns in the complaints.
If your home or small office needs fast, affordable color printing for every day, experts say you should check out the Epson B-510DN. It costs as much as some color laser printers, but it prints better photos than a laser printer -- and it's even faster than some lasers. "Pages virtually flew out of the B-510DN," says PC World; various test sources report 14 to 20 pages per minute in black-and-white or color at the default print setting. Epson says you can get 37 pages per minute at the draft setting, which reviewers say is quite readable and good enough for in-house uses like proofreading.
Cheap ink costs are another plus, based on Epson's claims (none of our sources actually tests the per-page cost of this printer). Expect 1 cent per black page and 3.5 cents per color page on the default print settings, using the high-capacity ink tanks. But your prints will slow down -- and cost more -- if you choose the highest quality. And this isn't a photo printer: Testers say photos don't look as good as those from cheaper inkjet printers, and the B-510DN doesn't have a menu setting for glossy photo paper.
