HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 Printer Review
Make/Model: HP OfficeJet Pro 8000
Type: Office, colour inkjet printer
Web site: www.hp.com/uk
Typical online price: £117 (£112 ex VAT)
HP has designed the OfficeJet Pro 8000 as a rival to low-end colour lasers and many of the arguments the company makes hold up when you consider this machine. So much so, that HP may actually hurt sales of its own entry-level colour lasers.
This is a big, robust machine, with separate print heads and ink tanks. There are two print heads, each printing two colours, and these clip in under the hinged top cover of the printer. The ink tanks themselves slot in behind a cover at the left-hand end of the front panel. Just above this, and running most of the width of the printer, is a simple control panel. It comprises four LEDs for the cartridge ink status and four buttons for controlling paper feed and other housekeeping.
Paper feeds from a single A4 paper tray at the front of the machine and exits onto the tray’s cover, once you’ve extended a paper support at the front. You can load photo paper into the machine, but only by removing any plain paper first; this is primarily a small business printer, not one for the photo enthusiast.
USB and Ethernet connections are provided at the back, as is a plug-in duplexer and a separate, black-block power supply. Software is straightforward, including a driver and a web print utility.
Page speeds for normal print are quoted at 15ppm for black and 11ppm for colour and although we got close to the black print speed, clocking up 12.6ppm under test, we couldn’t get above 5.8ppm printing a five-page black text and colour graphics job.
Duplex print suffers from a 10 second pause between printing the front and back sides of each page. A 20-side duplex document took a snail-baiting 5:38, which is likely to mean most office documents will be printed single-sided to save time. HP uses pigmented inks in this machine, which take longer to dry than dyes, but give better water and fade resistance and a sharper print.
Print quality is good for an inkjet, with dense, clean black text and bright business graphics. If you need to print photo images, you’ll get much better reproduction than from any colour laser, with a much wider range of available colours.
The ink cartridges have high yields for an inkjet, with the black cartridge rated at 2,200 pages and each of the colour cartridges at 1,400 pages. Standard yield cartridges are also available, giving about half the pages, and these are what’s supplied with a new printer.
Verdict
HP has good reason to push the OfficeJet Pro 8000 as an alternative to a low-end colour laser. Speeds, if you exclude duplex print, are comparable and page costs, which worked out at 1.2p for black and 4.9p the colour, are considerably lower than those from many rival lasers.
Speed: 12.6ppm black, 5.8ppm colour, measured 8/10
Print quality
Text print: 8/10
Text/Graphics: 8/10
Photo 9/10
Features: 7/10
Overall: 9/10
