HP Officejet 6000 review

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.

Author: Kat Orphanides