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This evaluate first appeared in subject 353 of PC Pro.
HP’s OfficeJet Professional 9012e is sort of indistinguishable from the 9010e we topped inkjet Labs winner this time final 12 months. It’s a chunky-looking, businessy MFP aimed squarely at house and small offices. Whereas it’s clearly not an enterprise-class gadget, it’s constructed to take reasonably excessive use, with a one-time most month-to-month responsibility cycle of as much as 25,000 pages.
In actuality this MFP is unlikely to print anyplace close to that quantity, however it’s nicely arrange for its advisable 1,500 pages a month. In its base you’ll discover a 250-sheet paper cassette, whereas on prime there’s a 35-sheet ADF. It could possibly print, scan, copy and fax, with direct management coming by way of a 6.9cm shade touchscreen working a user-friendly menu. It’s hidden barely on the left aspect, however you additionally get a USB host port for direct prints and scans.
The “e” on some HP printers denotes that you will need to signal as much as HP+ to activate the gadget, and thereafter go away it related to the web for it to operate. Fortunately, that’s not the case right here, with customers allowed to decide on whether or not to activate HP+, the Instantaneous Ink subscription service, or neither. We requested HP to make clear whether or not it had modified its “twin SKU technique” which obliged customers to decide on HP+ or not on the time of buy, however didn’t hear again earlier than we went to press.
Regardless, the 9012e provides the perfect of all worlds. Select to enroll to HP+ and also you’ll get an extra 12 months’s guarantee and 6 months of Instantaneous Ink without cost. Decide out and you may nonetheless get two years’ cowl with on-line registration, and select to enroll to Instantaneous Ink if you’d like. We focus on the economics of this in View from the Labs, however with out it – at 1p per web page in black or 4.2p in shade – the 9012e is reasonable to run for a cartridge-based inkjet.
HP claims the 9012e has self-healing Wi-Fi, however we had points connecting it to our common Labs router – an unremarkable dual-band TP-Hyperlink. It couldn’t detect the two.4GHz community till we rebooted it, after which the printer failed to attach and overlooked it once more. We tried the 5GHz community with comparable outcomes, ultimately giving up and utilizing our predominant router. Though this labored with none issues, it’s additional away from the take a look at space, which can have slowed the 9012e down.
If it did, we will’t say we particularly observed. The OfficeJet Professional 9012e took fairly some time to spool and begin printing multi-page jobs, however as soon as began it was the quickest inkjet on this group. It hit 21.1 pages per minute (ppm) on our 25-page textual content take a look at, and reached an equally spectacular 6.9ppm over 24 pages of shade graphics. Inspired by these outcomes we tried our 50-page Alice in Wonderland take a look at, however with a really lengthy spool time this proved slower at simply 11.6ppm. The 9012e was additionally underwhelming when duplexing, reaching solely 3.4ipm when printing ten sides of shade graphics.
For an inkjet, this can be a quick copier, managing single black pages in 9 seconds, and needing solely ten seconds in shade. It rattled off ten mono copies in 71 seconds, and once more wanted little longer in shade, taking 79 seconds. A ten-page, 20-side duplex shade photocopy took almost 5 minutes, nonetheless.
When it got here to scanning, this was once more the quickest inkjet right here, dispatching low-resolution A4 scans in solely ten seconds. We have been much more impressed at larger resolutions, the 9012e needing solely 12 seconds to seize a ten x 15cm photograph at 600dpi.
The 9012e isn’t an incredible photo printer, with its pigment inks drying to a uninteresting, semi-matte end. We have been additionally upset in its barely darkish and dingy photocopies. In any other case, it’s exhausting to fault the standard of its prints and scans, notably on typical workplace jobs reminiscent of textual content and shade graphics. It’s definitely ok for printing formal correspondence, and it might be nice for archiving paperwork – if solely it got here with software program that might save scans as searchable PDFs.
Total, this stays an incredible MFP for a typical house workplace. It’s quick, strong, produces good outcomes, and is sort of as low-cost to run as cartridge-based inkjets get. Nevertheless, its buy value has crept up considerably in comparison with the 9010e, so it loses out on worth for cash.