Product Reviews

Inkjets have their advantages in the office. HP's Officejet Pro K8600 is an A3+ office printer with some of the lowest print costs we've seen from an inkjet or laser. HP hopes this will appeal to small and medium-sized businesses who want to match the speed and quality of a colour laser without the cost and inconvenience of consumables.

At £169, the K8600 is cheaper than most A4 colour lasers. The K8600dn, which has an Ethernet port and an automatic duplexer, costs around £40 more and is more suitable for workgroups. The K8600 is designed to handle all a small office's printing needs, from mono text documents to glossy brochures, projector transparencies or photos. It's better suited to photo printing than most business inkjets, as it has a high resolution and uses dye-based inks, which produce more accurate colours than pigment-based inks.

The standard-size cartridges have generous yields, but the real cost benefit comes from using HP's high-yield XL cartridges. We've used these for our cost

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calculations. The high-yield black cartridge can print around 2,450 pages and costs just £25 including VAT. This equates to a mono print cost of just 1p per A4 page. Low colour costs bring the total cost of a mixed black and colour page to just 4.2p. That's cheaper than any of the colour laser printers in our recent Labs test. Ink costs are kept down because the print heads aren't built into the cartridge. The heads are designed to last the printer's lifetime, but are replaceable.

A large, adjustable paper tray can take paper up to A3+, while heavy media such as card can be fed in by removing a cover at the back of the printer.

Print speeds rivalled most low-end colour lasers. Draft text printed at 17.6ppm and only slightly paler and blurrier than at normal quality, making it suitable for most day-to-day printing tasks. Standard-quality text printed at 13ppm and documents with colour graphics averaged 5.4ppm. A high-resolution A3 graphics print at best quality took just one minute, 14 seconds.

Unlike laser printers, print quality depended on the quality of our paper. Text looked slightly fuzzy on standard 80gsm paper. It was visibly sharper on 100gsm stock. Our A3 and A4 prints looked beautiful, with clear colours and sharp lettering, but again required higher-quality paper to look their best.

The K8600 produces great-looking colour prints and precisely rendered subtle shades. It's cheaper to buy and run than most colour laser printers, and can handle a wider range of media. However, for the best value and results, you'll have to buy decent paper and high-yield ink.