HP Officejet Pro 8500 all-in-one inkjet

Laser printers are traditionally seen as offering better value than inkjets when printing office documents.

HP’s Officejet Pro 8500 challenges this assumption, claiming to print at up to half the cost of a laser.

It’s certainly not quick to set up. Once you’ve installed the two print heads, four ink cartridges and HP software, you have to wait while the printer goes through a lengthy initialisation procedure.

A 3.5in touch-sensitive display makes short work of navigating through the menus, and the Officejet will hook up to your PC via USB, Wifi or Ethernet.

The usual array of memory card slots are found at the front, while a 50-page document feeder sits above a 4,800dpi scanner.

An automatic duplex unit is also present, but it slows down print jobs considerably as it waits seven seconds for the ink to dry before dragging the page back in to print on the other side.

A colour A4 photo at the highest quality setting took just over six minutes to appear, which is quite slow, but the result was vivid colours with plenty of fine detail.

Timed after the first page arrived, which took 15 seconds, a fairly sparse text document printed at a rate of 19ppm (pages per minute). This increased to 26ppm in draft mode, but documents with a large amount of text took around 15ppm.

Replacement ink costs £23 for black (2,000 pages) and £17 for each colour cartridge (1,400 pages each), resulting in running costs of 1.2p per mono and 4.8p per colour print ­ well below that of most lasers.

At just under £300, the low print costs are offset by a high initial outlay and the Officejet Pro 8500 won’t match the speed at which some lasers can print text-heavy documents. However, it’s loaded with features and capable of decent quality prints.