The HP OfficeJet 8012e packs in a lot of features for the price but HP did have to make some compromises.
The latest additions to HP’s range of affordable office all-in-one printers come with a free trial of HP+ which adds functionality and discounted consumables sent in the mail when you sign up. It’s a useful service that gives this budget model an edge in the competitive home office or small business category. We’ll call it the HP OfficeJet 8012e in this review, but our American friends will know it as the HP OfficeJet 8010e. At around £113 (US$155, AU$210) the HP OfficeJet 8012e comes with a generous set of features including a 35-sheet ADF (automatic document feeder), self-healing Wi-Fi, a tilting touchscreen interface and the ability to print on any kind of paper up to A4 in size. It’s not especially fast at printing and it lacks a multipurpose paper tray, but HP recommends it for use in a shared workgroup of up to five people and suggests a hefty maximum monthly duty cycle of 20,000 pages. It’s worth pointing out though that you only get enough ink in the stingy starter cartridges for 225 mono pages or 270 in colour. HP has a bewildering array of multifunction OfficeJet printers that all look much like this and the differences in design and functionality are subtle. The seemingly identical HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e/9010e is slightly larger, has several more ports and you access the ink cartridges through the front flap. Here you have to open the front flap and then lever open the printer to insert the cartridges. It’s quite a smart and functional design, though it’s not especially compact and the plastic panels feel quite wobbly and insubstantial. Apparently 15% of the plastic is recycled so it can forgiven the wobbliness, but 15% doesn’t sound like very much. We noted that this printer’s packaging was made of polystyrene rather than recyclable cardboard and included a lot of unnecessary plastic. At least HP is recycling the ink cartridges, so long as you sign up for an instant ink subscription and send them back. The main paper tray ejects awkwardly and it only holds 225 sheets of A4. There’s no multifunction paper tray or a front USB Host port and it feels as though the build quality here is being squeezed in order to meet that aggressive price point. We were impressed to see a 35-page ADF included though, and it performed perfectly well during the test. The HP OfficeJet 8012e is a 3-in1, which is to say it can print, scan and copy. There’s no phone line input for faxing although it can send a fax via your smartphone. It has a 35-sheet ADF for scheduled single side copying. It cannot dual scan, but it can of course duplex print automatically.
