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- Fast monochrome printing
- Easy-to-use colour touchscreen
- Cheap print costs
- Colour print speeds are slower
- Flatbed scanning is ponderous
The HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 is an inkjet printer, but instead of being aimed at photo printing and the occasional document, its targeted at busy small office environments.
In the past, youd almost always go for a laser printer in these circumstances, but inkjets have come a long way in recent years and HP is so confident in its OfficeJet Pro 8022 that it rates it at being able to cope with printing up to 20,000 pages per month.
Thats a phenomenal number and a good indication that this printer will cope with even the most intense of small office environments.
HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 review: What do you get for the money?
With its white and grey colour scheme, the OfficeJet Pro 8022 is plain and business-like, but it doesnt skimp on the features. It can print and scan at resolutions of up to 1,200 x 1,200dpi, has a generous 225-sheet paper tray and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder for making copies of multi-page documents.
Our favourite feature is the printers large, 2.6in colour touchscreen, which makes settings easy to access and status simple to check. The only physical button on the device is the one you press to switch it on.
It has plenty of connection options, too, with an Ethernet port alongside the more standard USB and Wi-Fi, giving more choices for sharing if youre thinking of installing it in a small office.
And its generally easy to run and administrate. For initial setup and day-to-day use it employs HPs standard printer software, which works well. Peculiarly, it doesnt allow you to scan images at resolutions up to 600dpi, despite the hardware being capable of 1,200dpi, but thats the only major complaint I have.
Theres a handy mobile app, available for Android and iOS devices, that will let you print straight from the device. It also lets you scan and then print anything you point your phone camera at.
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HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 review: Whats the print quality like?
Print quality isnt as good as inkjet printers aimed at consumers can produce, but its not bad for an office printer. Photo prints look reasonable, with the printer producing a good balance between dark and light, and representing colours reasonably accurately.
Unsurprisingly for a printer aimed at office use, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 is better at printing mixed text and colour documents, although its prints are slightly desaturated compared with the best home colour printers. You might not notice this looking at a printed page in isolation, however.
Its less of a problem on a mono page that solely consists of black text on white paper. Here, text appears crisply printed and nice and dark.
HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 review: How fast is it and how much does it cost to run?
The HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 uses four individual colour cartridges (black, cyan, magenta and yellow), so theres no unnecessary waste if individual colours run out. And the cost of printing is as good as cartridge-based systems get, with prices working out to 2.6p per page for a mono print and 5.5p for a colour print.
This means that enrolling in HPs subscription service only really becomes worthwhile if youre likely to use a fair bit of colour ink or just want the convenience of getting replacement ink sent to your address automatically.
However, its worth pointing out that significant savings can still be made by opting for an ink-tank printer, which can print something like 13 pages for the price of a single page on this printer.
If speed is more crucial than print quality, this model is well worth considering, though. At 17.4 pages per minute in standard mono mode, it really rolls them out, even outpacing some laser printers. Its quick to get started, too, with a first-page-to-print time of 12 seconds.
When you need a readable document fast, there arent many inkjets that match it. It wasnt quite as pacey when it came to colour printing, however, with print rates slowing to 4ppm, and I saw similar performance in the duplex and photo-printing tests.
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The one area where the OfficeJet Pro 8022 lets itself down is in single-page copying via the flatbed scanner, which took a remarkably long time, whether in mono or colour at around two minutes to complete.
The printer fared much better when using the automatic sheet feeder, however, producing a ten-page mono copy in 1min 26secs and a colour copy in 2mins 46secs.
While Im talking about the scanner, its worth noting that, despite its claim to scan at 1,200 x 1,200dpi, we found it disappointing at such high resolutions.
HPs own software doesnt let you scan at this detail level, so I switched over to Windows own scanning tools and forced it to make the most of its maximum hardware resolution. Its not worth bothering, though, as our scan of a 6 x 4in photo came out banded and jagged.
HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 review: Should you buy it?
If most of your office work is printing lots of mono pages, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 is up to the task. Its fast at that and copies at a decent rate if you stick with the automatic sheet feeder.
Added to this, its good value to buy and isnt too expensive to run. While photo output doesnt bear comparison with colour inkjets aimed at consumers, for office tasks its a reliable, easy-to-live-with workhorse.
