Hands-on review: HP OfficeJet 8620 Printer

The HP 8620 is a reasonably standard modern-day printer. It uses standard ink tanks/cartridges and has a touchscreen and power button. The printer is ideal for home users and small businesses, because of its low costs per page.

Setup

I setup the printer as a network printer so I could print wirelessly. Setting up the HP 8620 was very simple. All I had to do was attach the ink tank to the back, plug in a couple of cables and turn it on.

The setup manual was quick and easy to follow as well. After setting up the printer, I simply inserted the setup disk into the PC and followed the on-screen instructions to install the required software. After that, I could start printing right away; I didn't seem to need to enter any particular paper settings, and it didn't throw up any errors.

Usability

The touchscreen was easy to use and very responsive. I could swipe left and right for more functions and simply select what I wanted to do; print, copy, scan, settings, etc.

The specifications for the HP OfficeJet 8620 on the HP website state that the print speeds for black-and-white draft is up to 35 pages per minute (ppm) and colour draft up to 34 ppm. The print speeds for black-and-white ISO are up to 15 ppm, and colour up to 11 ppm. These are all reasonable speeds in my opinion.

When I tested the speeds myself, both an A4 page with plain black text and coloured text took up to about five seconds each. Printing an A4 page with colour pictures copied from the internet took a little longer, but no more than about 10 seconds.

The photocopying was of great quality, producing a copy of an A4 piece of paper with colour pictures quickly. Another feature is that you can plug in an external USB and print photos directly from it; however, this seems more tailored to walk-up printing using a flash drive as it does not support the common PictBridge format.

Finally, the feature I liked the most was the ability to install web apps that allowed you to setup scheduled printing so, for example, you could set it up to print daily news articles.

Look and feel

The HP OfficeJet 8620 is quite compact, although it has a rather blocky look to it. For all the modern features it had, the slightly squarer look just didn't seem to fit. Other than that, it has a nice black colour and the touchscreen and button are spaced out well and uncluttered.

Verdict

Overall, the HP OfficeJet 8620 seems like it would be suited for small office and home use, and retails at NZ$499. The low cost per page printing is ideal for small and medium sized businesses.

It has reasonable speeds and quality, is easy to setup and has plenty of features. Its wireless printing capability would be great where it needs to be used by multiple PCs across a small network.