HP OfficeJet Pro 8620 review

HP’s OfficeJet Pro 8620 has many strengths. This A4 inkjet prints, scans, faxes and copies, and supports web and mobile printing. What’s more, it does it all more cheaply than a laser: HP’s XL ink cartridges deliver a mono page for 1p and a colour page for 4p.

The 8620 doesn’t beat a laser for speed, however: in Normal print mode it’s rated at only 21ppm for mono and 16.5ppm for colour. Our 25-page Word document printed at 22ppm, falling to 5.2ppm in Best mode. Similarly, our 24-page colour DTP document returned 14ppm in Normal mode but only 3ppm at the highest quality. In all cases, the time to first page was around 12 seconds.

The 8620 is similarly slow at copying. In our tests, a ten-page document sent through its 50-page ADF was copied at a rate of 9ppm. There’s a clip-on duplex unit at the rear, but switching to double-sided print nudged speeds down to 8ppm.

Print quality is variable. Text looked slightly fuzzy in Normal mode, but nicely crisp in Best mode. Mono photos printed at the Normal setting were covered with unsightly banding and poor levels of detail, and upping the print resolution did little to help.

Colour quality is good, however: the 8620 churns out punchy charts and graphs, and naturally it’s also possible to print out high-quality colour photos on glossy paper – something you can’t do with a laser.

A large 10.9cm colour touchscreen gives quick, easy access to all the main functions, and there’s support for wired and wireless printing via AirPrint, wireless-direct and NFC connections. Scans can be sent to an email address or a network share, and HP provides a tool for remote scanning from a PC. Meanwhile, HP’s Connected service makes it easy to email documents to the printer.

Although the OfficeJet Pro 8620 isn’t fast, it packs in a heap of features, with strong colour output and outstandingly low running costs.