Hands on: I tested the HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e – read why this is a cracking home printer
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This comment first appeared in issue 353 PC Pro.
HPOfficejet Pro 9012e almost with 9010e Last year, we were crowned the Inkjet Labs champion. This is a small-looking, business MFP targeted at home, Small office. While it is obviously not an enterprise-grade device, it is built to take up medium-high usage, with a one-time maximum monthly duty cycle up to 25,000 pages.
In fact, this MFP is unlikely to print anywhere near the volume, but has a nice setup for its suggested 1,500 pages. On its basis, you will find a 250 carton with a 35-page ADF on top. It can print, scan, copy and fax, directly control running user-friendly menus through a 6.9 cm color touch screen. It’s somewhat hidden on the left, but you’ll also get one USB A host port that prints and scans directly.
“E” on some HP printers means you have to register with HP+ to activate the device and then connect it to the Internet to get it running. Happily, this is not the case here, allowing users to choose whether to activate HP+, Instant Ink Subscription Service, or none of them. We asked HP to clarify whether it changed its “dual SKU strategy” that forces users to choose HP+ or not when purchasing, but there is no response until we push it away.
Anyway, 9012E offers the best of all the worlds. Choose to sign up for HP+ and you will get a free one-year warranty and six months of instant ink. Opt out and you can still get a two-year cover by registering online, and if you want, choose to sign up for Instant Ink. From the lab, we discussed the economics of this, but without it – 1p in black or 4.2p color – the 9012E can run for cartridge-based inkjet.
HP claims 9012E has self-healing Wifibut we had a problem connecting it to a regular lab router – this is an irrelevant dual-band TP-Link. It couldn’t detect the 2.4GHz network until we restarted it, and after that the printer failed to connect again and lost it. We tried 5GHz networks and the results were similar, and we ended up giving up and using our main router. Although this is not any problem, it is farther from the test area, which may slow down the 9012E.
If so, we can’t say we pay special attention. It took a long time for the OfficeJet Pro 9012e to start printing multi-page work, but once it started, it was the fastest inkjet in the group. In our 25-page text test, it hit 21.1 pages per minute (PPM) and an equally impressive 6.9ppm on a 24-page color graph. These results inspired us to try 50 pages Alice in Wonderland Tested, but over a long spool time, it proved that only 11.6ppm was slower. The 9012E is also incredible when duplexing, only reaching 3.4 ipm when printing ten sides of the color graphic.
For inkjet, this is a quick copy machine that manages a single black page in 9 seconds, taking only ten seconds of color. It spreads ten mono channels in 71 seconds and the color takes longer, which takes 79 seconds. However, a double-chain color copy on the 10-page and 20-side takes nearly five minutes.
When it comes to scanning, this is the fastest ink jet Here, a low-resolution A4 scan is dispatched in just ten seconds. We were impressed at higher resolutions, and the 9012E takes only 12 seconds to take 10 x 15 cm photos on 600DPI.
9012E is not great Photo printerits pigment ink is dry to a blunt, semi-matte finish. We were also disappointed with its slightly dark and dirty photocopy. Otherwise, it’s hard to miss its print and scan quality, especially on typical office work such as text and color graphics. Of course, it’s enough to print formal letters and is perfect for archived documents – as long as it comes with software that can save scans as searchable PDFs.
Overall, this is still a great MFP for a typical home office. It is fast, powerful, produces good results, and runs almost as cheap as the price of cartridge-based inkjet. However, its purchase price has increased slightly compared to the 9010E, so value for money has lost its value.
