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HP Officejet Pro 8610 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £139.46
inc VAT

Fast, flexible and very affordable, this is a strong small office inkjet, with irritating drivers

If you’re setting up a small office, a budget of £150 gives you a surprisingly good choice of inkjet multifunction peripherals (MFP). The latest example from HP is the Officejet Pro 8610, which can print, scan, copy and fax, and which connects to Wi-Fi and wired networks. It’s well specified, with a 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for multi-page copies or faxes, and automatic duplex (double-sided) printing.

HP Officejet Pro 8610

The Officejet Pro 8610 has a smart and uncluttered design. There are no buttons, but the colour touchscreen is responsive and intuitive. There’s a front USB slot for easy printing and scanning, plus support for direct printing from mobile devices through AirPrint and HP’s ePrint app. Build quality feels excellent, with neat design touches that include a detent in the 250-sheet paper tray to help you unload it. Unfortunately there wasn’t quite enough room for A4 paper unless we unlocked the paper tray’s telescoping front portion: markings in the tray suggest this shouldn’t be necessary unless you’re using legal-size paper (59mm longer than A4), but the movable paper guide wouldn’t lie completely flush with the tray’s front edge.

HP Officejet Pro 8610

This is an impressively quick printer, spitting out almost 20 pages of black text a minute (ppm) at its fastest, and beating 16ppm at the Normal quality setting. It’s unusually quick when printing colour, too, producing our mixed graphics test at 7.2ppm. For the latter pace, at least, HP seems to have sacrificed a small amount of print quality. Although the results were artefact-free and generally very good, colours weren’t quite as strong as we usually see in HP’s plain paper prints.

HP Officejet Pro 8610

Photocopies were unusually good, with near-perfect exposure and reasonably accurate colours, but the lethargic ADF made multi-page copies slow, and sounded like a panel show contestant slumped dead on their buzzer. Although HP quotes a maximum optical resolution of 1,200dpi for this scanner, we couldn’t select anything higher than 300dpi in the PC interface.

HP Advanced Scan

We think these advanced settings are actually simple

Although we’ve previously criticised this software for being over-simplified, we’ve never had functional issues before. The print driver is over-simplified, too; you need to enter its advanced settings to change the paper size.

HP Print Defaults

The print driver offers quick shortcuts for everyday jobs

Fortunately, this MFP has another important strong point: low running costs. Sticking to the XL versions of HP’s cartridges, the black component of a full-colour page costs 1p, while the colour part should cost around 3.4p. Buy the three-colour multipack and you could lower the cost of a full-colour page to about 3.8p, which is cheap.

It’s a shame to see another superb HP product saddled with frustrating software, but even so the HP Officejet Pro 8610 is a cheaper alternative to a high-end printer such as the Epson Workforce WF-3540DTWF, and a good choice if you want a smart and economical business MFP.

Basic Specifications

Rating****
Maximum native print resolution4,800×1,200dpi
Max optical resolution1,200×1,200dpi
Output bit depth24-bit

Quoted Speeds

Quoted speed, mono A419ppm
Quoted speed, colour A415ppm

Tested Print Speeds

Time for two 10x8in photos 1.05m 55s
Time for six 6x4in photos 1.08m 58s

Physical and Environmental

Standard printer interfacesUSB, 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n wireless
Optional printer interfacesnone
Size501x470x300mm
Weight11.9kg
Noise (in normal use)64dB(A)
Duty cycle30,000 pages (maximum), 250-1,500 pages (recommended)

Paper Handling

Maximum paper sizeA4/legal
Maximum paper weight200gsm
Standard paper inputs1
Standard paper input capacity250
Maximum paper inputs2
Maximum paper input capacity500
Duplex (code, cost if option)Yes

General

Printer technologythermal inkjet
Supported operating systemsWindows XP or later, Mac OS X 10.6 or later, Linux
Other inkjet features6.8cm colour touchscreen
Other inkjet optionsVarious extended warranty packages – see www.hp.co.uk

Buying Information

Price£139
Consumable parts and prices£17 each
Price per colour A4 page3.4p
Quoted life of supplied black cartridge1,000 pages (ISO/IEC 24712)
Quoted life of supplied colour cartridge(s)Cyan, magenta, yellow cartridges 700 pages each (ISO/IEC 24712)
Quoted life of supplied photo cartridge(s)N/A
Warrantyone year RTB
Supplierhttp://www.morecomputers.com
Detailswww.hp.co.uk

Print Quality

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

Tested Scan Speeds

Full scan area preview13s
A4 document at 150dpiFail
A4 document at 300dpi15s
6x4in photo at 600dpiFail
6x4in photo at 1200dpiFail

Tested Copy Speeds

Time for single A4 mono copy 1.013s
Time for single A4 colour copy 1.017s
Time for 10 A4 copies using feeder 2.02m 40s

Photo Features

PictBridge supportNo
Borderless printingA4
Direct (PC-less) printingYes
Supported memory cardsnone
CD printingNo

Copy Features

Maximum number of copies99
Max mono copy resolution600x600dpi
Max colour copy resolution600x600dpi

Fax Features

Max mono fax resolution200x200dpi
Fax memory (maximum mono pages)100