HP OfficeJet Pro 8740

HEY, BIG PRINTER!

THE 8740 IS almost comically oversized for an SMB-oriented printer, and we were surprised that it couldn’t accommodate A3-sized paper. However, if you can find the space to store it, you’ll have no complaints with its performance. The 8740 spits out black documents at 9.5 pages per minute and colour at 5.5 pages per minute, and the quality of text in particular rivals that of a laser. Running costs are also cheap at 9c per page for black documents.

It’s incredibly quick when it comes to scanning, at 20.5 pages per minute, while copying is reasonably fast at 8.5 pages per minute. It takes more than a minute to print a borderless 6 x 4 photo, but like most other MFC printers, this isn’t within its sweet spot, and colours are noticeably patchy.

As well as the standard MFC functions, the 8740 has an NFC printing feature, but it’s fiddly to set up and use. While it recognises a Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus when tapped against the reader, it’s not quite as ‘instant’ as it’s made out to be, as you’ll still need to install the HP plug-in before you can print. Also, since the NFC pairing connects the phone to the printer’s Wi-Fi network, you can’t actually download the plug-in until you manually disconnect and reconnect to your home/office’s Wi-Fi network or mobile network.

The 8740 also exhibited a few bugs during testing. Initially, it wouldn’t recognise the 6 x 4-inch photo paper we’d put in Tray 1, even though the paper holders were all aligned correctly. The error message came with a handy video icon, which crashed the printer when we tapped on it. Tapping on the icon to download more apps also gave us an internal processing error.