HP OfficeJet 6950
A monolithic multifunction printer, but its wealth of features are marred by disappointing prints
SCORE
PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from cartridgepeople.com
This big dark grey box will dominate any table you place it on, but its size is somewhat tempered by its quirky, slanted styling. It gives the impression of a printer that’s been manufactured in italics, and is strangely pleasing to the eye. Its lines carry down through the printer to the paper tray at the bottom, which can hold 225 sheets of plain paper.
The top of the box is dominated by the 35-sheet automatic document feeder. Below that, there’s a simple control panel with a small, monochrome touchscreen. At 2.2in across the diagonal, it’s small enough to make some operations fiddly – you’ll find yourself scrolling to get
through menus of options – but it’s perfectly usable.
Cartridges are split into the usual four colours, meaning there’s no waste as they’re used up. The cost of printing is over the odds for an inkjet but can be smoothed to between 3p and
4p per print using
HP’s Instant Ink subscription service
( see opposite), presuming you print a predictable amount of pages per month.
Setting the device up is relatively straightforward using HP’s Smart app, which takes you through the physical setup, grabs the latest software and also runs the printer’s functions afterwards. While setup is smooth, HP prioritises ease of use over functionality; for instance, you can’t scan at the maximum resolution of 1,200dpi through HP Smart. But you can do this if you access it through other scanning tools, such as Microsoft’s own Scan app.
Looking closely at the result of scans to the PC, though, we can see another reason why HP may have disabled this mode: we wouldn’t recommend this printer at all if y you want to scan anything y g at high g resolution, as in our tests it produced imperfect banding and failed to capture detail.
Unfortunately, this follows through to the OfficeJet 6950’s print quality. Prints were washed out and pale, most notably the photos, which is at odds with this model’s consumer styling; we might have expected drab photos from the OfficeJet Pro 8022, but its brother actually produced better prints.