HP OfficeJet 8122e (Pro) review

HP’s OfficeJet printers are normally aimed at business users who work in busy offices and need to print lots of documents every month. However, the OfficeJet 8122e is a more affordable option designed for small businesses and people who work from home. Oddly, though, there are different versions of the printer available in the U.S. and other regions. You can’t buy it directly from HP in the U.S., so customers there will need to head to Walmart to buy the OfficeJet 8122e for a price of $179. But, in the U.K., it’s available on the HP website – although it’s called the OfficeJet Pro 8122e, and costs a very reasonable £110.

It’s a fairly conventional all-in-one printer, with a built-in scanner and copier functions. It provides 1,200×1,200dpi for mono printing, and uses interpolation to boost that to the equivalent of 1,200×4,800 for color printing.

Another slight oddity is that the U.S. version of the printer is quoted with a speed of 18 pages per minute for mono printing while the U.K. version is quoted at 20ppm, although both models agree on 10ppm for color printing. We’re guessing that the difference is based on A4 versus the smaller letter format paper in the U.S.. Our tests actually recorded speeds of 18ppm for mono and 7ppm for color, which should be perfectly adequate for smaller offices or working from home.

Connectivity is good too, including USB and WiFi, along with Ethernet and support for Apple’s AirPrint (which allowed my iPad Air to detect the printer automatically, with no need to install drivers or additional software). HP does offer the HP Smart App (which is available for Windows, Mac-OS, Android and iOS) for those times when you can’t use AirPrint.

Print quality is excellent, with laser-quality text and smoothly graduated colors on graphics files. It can handle the occasional photograph too, with bright colors and good contrast on our test files, and it only took 45 seconds to print photos on high-quality 4”x6” glossy paper.

The sting in the tail, as always, lies in the printer’s running costs. Buying the cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink cartridges individually is pretty expensive, but you can buy a multi-pack that contains all four cartridges for $78.99/£62.99, with the black ink providing 500 pages of text and the color inks lasting for 400 pages when printing mixed text and graphics.

That works out at around 4¢/3.1p for mono printing, which isn’t too bad. However, color printing is less competitive, at around 14.7¢/11.7p per page. The other option is to sign up for one of HP’s Instant Ink subscription plans. HP does try to tempt you in with an offer of free ink for the first three months, but after that you’ll have to pay the monthly subscription fees – which start at a laughable $1.49/£1.49 per month for just 10 pages a month. To be fair, the subscriptions are less expensive for users who need to print higher volumes of documents, but if you do need to print hundreds of pages every month then you’d probably be better off considering an ink tank printer that can use high-capacity bottles of ink rather than conventional small cartridges. So while the OfficeJet 8122e does provides a high-quality all-in-one printer at a competitive price, HP’s expensive inks and subscription plans mean that it’s best suited for people who only have fairly light printing requirements.

When it came to scanning and copying HPs software could be slow to perform, insisting on creating high-res scans, even if only a preview is required. Copying was done at average speeds of 17 seconds for a copy in grayscale and 23 seconds in color.

A single cassette for a maximum of 225 sheets of paper is included, via which you can feed special media such as envelopes. Thanks to the integrated duplex unit, the HP Officejet Pro 8122e automatically prints the front and back of a sheet.

For more recommendations about which printer to buy read our Best Mac printers roundup.

Buying advice

The OfficeJet 8122e (Pro) is a conventional all-in-one printer, with a built-in scanner and copier functions. It offers decent print speeds and admirable print quality and should suit those who work from home or in small offices.