HP Officejet Enterprise Color X585dn review

HP’s latest A4 inkjet MFP offers a range of features at a price that similarly equipped lasers can’t even come close to. It combines the low running costs and high print speeds of HP’s 70ppm X555dn, and adds copy and scan functions, an internal 320GB encrypted hard disk and a big 8in colour touchscreen.

It comes with the same paper capacities and tray upgrade options as the X555dn. If you want direct wireless mobile printing, HP offers the optional JetDirect 2800w, which costs £37, fits in the hardware-integration pocket and supports NFC.

Not only does the printer cost around £1,000 less than a 50ppm colour laser MFP, the X585dn’s printing costs are also lower. The four chunky, high-capacity ink cartridges deliver a mono page for 0.7p and a colour page for 3.3p.

With HP’s huge PageWide print head and its 42,000 nozzles on the case, the X585dn ripped through our print tests. At the 300dpi General Office setting, it quietly dropped a 70-page text Word document into the output tray in 58 seconds and only slowed to 40ppm once we enabled the Professional 600dpi setting. Our 24-page colour DTP document returned 48ppm at 300dpi and 30ppm at 600dpi. The time to first page for all tests came in at less than 12 seconds.

The X585dn excels as a copier too, and our 30-page document copied in 54 seconds. Duplex copying takes longer, though, as the automatic document feeder and printer both have to reverse each page: a 30-page double-sided document copy took 3mins 28secs.

For print quality, the X585dn comes in for the same criticisms as the X555dn. Text is grainy at the standard 300dpi setting, and it isn’t until you use the top Presentation driver setting that prints emerge with laser-like clarity. Colour quality for reports and brochures is good, but you will need to use premium paper for the best results.

Installation is handled neatly by HP’s utility, which registers the printer with HP Connected so remote workers can email prints directly to it. To register with Google Cloud Print, simply enter the printer’s email address. We also had no problems printing from our iPad via AirPrint.

Along with standard copy functions, you can set up scanning to email, network folders and USB devices; once enabled from the web interface, these options appear in the intuitive touchscreen menu. The web interface is used to create address books for email and network folder locations. Access can also be controlled with local usernames or authentication via Active Directory or LDAP.

We could send jobs to the internal hard disk directly from the printer driver. Plenty of options are on offer: Personal jobs are removed after the user has walked up and collected them; Proof and Hold jobs allow you to check the first copy before releasing the rest; and Private jobs can be protected with a PIN or encrypted with your choice of password.

We thought the X555dn was a good choice as a low-cost office workhorse, but HP’s PageWide inkjet technology really comes into its own for MFP applications. The X585dn is vastly better value than a laser MFP, is cheaper to run and offers excellent features – so it’s worthy of a Recommended award.