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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
