HP Officejet 6500A review

HP's Officejet 6500A is a fully-fledged business inkjet MFP, designed to provide a budget alternative to a compact laser printer. It has an integrated fax with a 35-page ADF, a 250-sheet paper tray, wired Ethernet connection and support for HP's ePrint technology. This allows you to send documents to it via Google Docs and mobile apps. It also has a maximum monthly duty cycle of 7,000 pages. All this for under £100 is remarkable.

We were impressed by the Officejet's print quality and speed, particularly when it comes to document printing. Mono text is clear, and sharp enough to rival any laser printer. Standard quality text emerged at a quick 9.6ppm but draft is even faster at 16.7ppm. Draft mode is easily good enough for day-to-day use, with only the faintest hint of jaggedness on 12pt lettering.

Colour document prints aren't quite as impressive, with slight banding in areas of solid colour. However, colours were accurate and intense even in challenging areas of gradated shading, while lettering was sharp and easy to read. Our colour prints emerged at 3.8ppm, which again is unusually quick compared to most inkjets.

Print costs are excellent if you buy HP's high-yield 920XL cartridges, which hold enough ink for 1,200 black pages and 700 pages of each colour. A mono pages costs just 1.3p, a colour-and-black one costs 4.7p and a photo on HP's Advanced Glossy paper costs 15p. The only MFP we've seen that costs less to run is Epson's WorkForce Pro WP-4525 DWF, which is significantly more expensive, although it also does a lot more.

Although the 6500A is a business printer, it's pretty good at printing photos. You can even enable borderless printing in the advanced settings menu. Dark areas of photos tend to look washed out and greenish, although this improves somewhat as they dry. Colours are generally accurate, including pale tones, so the Officejet is perfectly good if you just want to print a couple of snaps.

The scanner includes a 600dpi ADF and a flatbed which can scan at resolutions of up to 4,800dpi. The interface is better than previous versions but has just a handful of preset scan resolutions and basic brightness and contrast settings. We liked the ability to create multipage document scans and save scan profiles, though. Iris OCR software is supplied, so you can quickly and easily scan text documents into an editable and searchable form. Colour scans were surprisingly good, but we were disappointed to find that 1,200dpi scans were marred by blocky artefacts. It's best to stick to a maximum of 600dpi. Copy quality is also very good, particularly when it comes to colour; mono copies have slight banding due to the high speed of the print head.

Although the Officejet 6500A doesn't have an automatic duplexer, duplex scanning or Wi-Fi, it's a fast and capable MFP that covers the basics. If you want and MFP mainly for fast, cheap document printing, it's great, but the 6500A doesn't always produce the best scan or colour print quality. If you can afford it, the Epson WorkForce Pro WP-4535 DWF is a far more capable device, but this is still a great budget option.