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HP Officejet 6000 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £62
inc VAT

Cheap to buy and run, with outstanding document quality even on low-grade paper, this is a great printer for a small or home office.

Specifications

thermal inkjet, 7ppm print speed, USB, 10/100 Ethernet, 164x458x389mm

http://www.oyyy.co.uk

Business inkjets are gaining popularity with home office users, as they’re smaller, less complicated and cheaper to run than their laser counterparts.

HP’s Officejet 6000 is one of the latest and, at £77, it’s one of the cheapest, too. It’s a basic single-function printer with the addition of a 10/100 Ethernet port. Its 250-sheet paper tray and 50-sheet output tray rival the capacities of many compact laser printers and it has a maximum duty cycle of 7,000 pages in a month.

If you read our specifications summary below, you’ll notice that the quoted manfacturer’s print speeds are significantly lower than those of, for example, Epson’s Stylus SX415. In fact, the Officejet 6000 is faster than the SX415 – read our FAQ for an explanation. If you print mono text documents at its default Normal quality, the Officejet 6000 should easily exceed its quoted speed. It achieved 8.2ppm in our tests, and the resulting text is sharp enough to rival that of a laser printer. Better yet, draft documents looked almost as good and printed at 10.7ppm.

As always, image-rich colour documents were much slower, although speeds of 3.3ppm aren’t bad. Colour document quality is outstanding, with no hint of graininess or marks from the print head on our presentation-quality PDF prints. Even on 80gsm photocopier paper – we usually recommend at least 100gsm for business-quality inkjet prints – there was no smudging or blurred edges. Tiny 8pt text was pin-sharp and blocks of solid colour and delicate shading were flawless.

As a business inkjet, the Officejet 6000 isn’t intended for printing photos. It has only three dye-based colour cartridges for printing on photographic media, so you’re stuck with composite black for dark tones. This is noticeable, as dark areas in our test pictures had a faded, blueish quality. However, our photos were detailed, with vivid colours and realistic flesh tones, making the 6000 good enough for printing the odd photo.

As well as three individual dye-based inks, the printer uses a massive black ink tank. The 6000 comes with lower-capacity introductory cartridges, but even these will print 420 mono and 250 colour pages. When these run out, we recommend buying HP’s 920XL high yield cartridges – you’ll get 1,200 black pages from a £16 cartridge and 700 pages from each of the £7 colour cartridges. This produces a low mixed-colour print cost of 4.5p per page, while a mono page will cost just 1.4p. It’s not as cheap as printing with a heavy-duty business inkjet, such as Epson’s B-500DN, but the Officejet 6000 costs a fraction of the price to buy. These low print and purchase costs clinch the Officejet’s Business Buy award.

Basic Specifications

Rating*****
Maximum native print resolution4,800×1,200dpi

Quoted Speeds

Quoted speed, mono A47ppm
Quoted speed, colour A47ppm

Tested Speeds

Time for two 10x8in photos 1.05m 35s
Time for six 6x4in photos 1.07m 12s

Print Quality

Number of ink colours4
Number of ink cartridges4
Maximum number of ink colours4
Maximum number of cartridges4

Physical and Environmental

Standard printer interfacesUSB, 10/100 Ethernet
Optional printer interfacesnone
Size164x458x389mm
Weight4.8kg
Noise (in normal use)64dB(A)
Duty cycle7,000 pages
Power consumption standby3W
Power consumption idle3W
Power consumption active30W

Paper Handling

Maximum paper sizeA4/legal
Maximum paper weight250gsm
Standard paper inputs1
Standard paper input capacity250
Maximum paper inputs1
Maximum paper input capacity250
Duplex (code, cost if option)No

Photo Features

PictBridge supportNo
Borderless printingup to A4
Direct (PC-less) printingNo
Supported memory cardsnone
CD printingNo

General

Printer technologythermal inkjet
Supported operating systemsMicrosoft Windows 2000/XP/XP-64/Vista/Vista-64, Mac OS X 10.4/10.5
Other inkjet featuresautomatic print head alignment, replaceable print head
Other inkjet optionswarranty extension to three-year collect and return (UG069E), £55

Buying Information

Price£62
Consumable parts and prices1,200 page 920XL black (CD975AE), £16.39, 700 page 920XL cyan (CD972AE), £7.15, 700 pages 920XL magenta (CD973AE), £7.20, 700 page 920XL yellow (CD974AE), £7.31
Quoted life of supplied black cartridge420 (ISO/IEC 24711)
Quoted life of supplied colour cartridge(s)250 (ISO/IEC 24711)
Quoted life of supplied photo cartridge(s)N/A
Price per colour A4 page3.1p
Price per mono A4 page1.4p
Warrantyone year RTB
Supplierhttp://www.oyyy.co.uk
Detailswww.hp.co.uk

Tested Print Speeds

Time for two 10x8in photos 1.05m 35s
Time for six 6x4in photos 1.07m 12s