HP OfficeJet Pro 8022
A fast office inkjet that doesn’t worry its rivals for print quality but it has all the features you could want
SCORE
PRICE £127 (£153 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk
With its subdued colours and boxy design, the OfficeJet Pro 8022 is a more businesslike printer than the voluptuous OfficeJet 6950. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a boring beige box; if anything it has more trimmings than its brother, including a slightly larger 2.6in colour touchscreen. The only physical button on the device is the one you press to switch it on.
There are numerous connection options too, with an Ethernet port alongside the more standard USB and Wi-Fi, giving more choices for sharing if you’re thinking of installing it in a small office. It uses the same setup and software as the OfficeJet 6950, so is reasonably smooth to get running and is well integrated into Windows 10. However, we aren’t fans of using HP’s software to control the device because it doesn’t provide full control over the hardware.
How you feel about its print quality may well be determined by what you’re migrating from. If it’s a printer like the OfficeJet 6950, you will be pleased with its far superior photos, as it makes a better job of dark areas and produces significantly bolder colours. Compare it to the Canon Pixma TS8350’s photo prints, though, and the dark areas and shadows look decidedly washed-out.
It’s better than its sibling at printing mixed text and colour documents… but again not as good as the Canon TS8350. Everything is printed slightly lighter than the Canon, so colours aren’t so rich and saturated, and black text has a slight greyness to it. However, we don’t want to be overly critical. You probably wouldn’t even notice this when looking at a page in isolation; it’s when you hold it next to the TS8350’s prints that the difference becomes apparent. Also, it’s less of a problem on a mono page that’s solely made of black text on white paper, where the text appears dark and crisply printed.
The cost of printing is as good as cartridge-based systems got in this test, with prices working out at 2.6p per page for a mono print and 5.5p for a colour print. This means that enrolling on HP’s subscription service only becomes worthwhile if you’re likely to use a lot of colour ink or want the convenience of getting ink sent to you automatically. But it’s worth pointing out that significant savings could still be made by opting for one of the tank printers instead, which can print 13 pages for the price of a single page on this printer. It uses four individual colour cartridges (black, cyan, magenta and yellow), so there’s no unnecessary waste if individual colours run out.
If speed is more crucial than print quality, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 is well worth considering. At 17.4 mono pages per minute, it outpaces three of the four laser printers and sits in second place overall. It’s quick to get started too, with its first-page-toprint time of 12 seconds only a couple of seconds behind the fastest printers. Drop the print quality down to draft mode and the printer flies at 18ppm, proving to be the fastest draft printer in the test. Quality is significantly compromised, of course, but when you need a readable document in
“At 17.4 mono pages per minute, the OfficeJet Pro 8022 outpaces three of the four laser printers and sits in second place overall”
short order, there isn’t an inkjet to match it.
It wasn’t quite as pacey when it came to colour printing. Its 4ppm speed sits around the middle of this group, where it stayed during the duplex and photo printing tests.
The one area where it let itself down in terms of speed was in the single-page copying tests, which took it a remarkably long time, whether in mono or colour. Here the flatbed scanner appears to be the problem, taking a long time to capture the page before printing out the copy. However, it fared much better when using the automatic sheet feeder – it was second fastest here, only falling behind the Lexmark laser printer – which suggests it’s just the main flatbed scanner that’s operating under par.
While we’re on the scanner, it’s worth noting that, despite its claim to scan at 1,200 x 1,200dpi, we found it disappointing at high resolutions. HP’s own software doesn’t allow you to scan at this detail level, so we switched over to Windows’ scanning tools and forced it to make the most of its maximum hardware resolution. It’s not worth bothering, as the scan of a 6 x 4in photo came out banded and jagged.
HP is the only manufacturer to give its inkjet printers a duty cycle
– a recommended maximum number of pages you can print each month without pushing the printer beyond its limits. The duty cycle on this printer is 20,000 pages
– a phenomenal amount. It’s a good indication that, if you’re looking for a shared, officefriendly inkjet printer with build quality to stand the test of time, HP is confident that the OfficeJet Pro 8022 isn’t going to wear out.