HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e Review
A multi-talented printer for the home office
Verdict
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e shows that cartridge-based inkjets can still be relevant. While it’s not as cheap to run as a refillable device, it still combines reasonable running costs with decent speed and quality across the board. It’s also very well specified, combining four functions with flexible features and paper handling. If you want a do-everything multifunction for home admin or a micro office, this is a great choice.
Pros
- A great set of features
- Reasonable running costs
- Quite fast, with good results
Cons
- Not brilliant at photo prints
Key Features
- A four-in-one wireless MFPHP’s OfficeJet Pro 9012e combines print, scan, fax and copy functions into a neat multifunction device.
- Strong paper handlingThis multifunction can make double-sided prints, scans, copies or faxes without you lifting a finger.
Introduction
With refillable ink tank printers getting ever cheaper to run, it seems the days of cartridge-based devices are numbered. Fortunately, there’s still time to enjoy multifunction peripherals (MFPs) like the HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e – an almost perfectly specified, do-everything printer for home and small offices.
Without doubt, the main attraction of this MFP is that it does simply everything that a busy home or small office could want. It has a printer and scanner, naturally, which work together to make copies. You can also send or receive faxes – if you can find anyone else who still wants to.
So far, so so-so, but both the printer and scanner can cover both sides of a sheet of paper. This duplex functionality means you can make double-sided prints, or even a double-sided copy of a multi-page, double-sided document, all without having to turn over any pages. If you want just one device to do everything, that makes the HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e a strong contender.
Design and features
- Businessy, but quite compact and attractive
- Excellent feature set
- Reasonable running costs for a cartridge inkjet
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e is aimed at home offices and micro businesses. Accordingly it looks quite sensible, but its white and grey plastics are still attractive enough that you can put it almost anywhere. Its looks are helped by a slick colour touchscreen that controls all the direct functions, leaving the panels uncluttered.
When it comes to features, it’s easiest to start with this MFP’s one real disappointment: it has only one paper tray. While this holds a decent 250 sheets of plain paper, there are no photo trays or bypass feeds, so you’ll need to load in any headed notepaper or photo media you want to use.
It’s genuinely hard to find any other shortcomings. The scanner’s automatic document feeder holds up to 35 sheets, which ought to be enough for all but the longest scans, copies or faxes. The fact that both it and the printer support duplex helps save paper and hassle, and lets you produce more professional looking reports or other handouts.
Tucked away on the left panel you’ll find a USB slot, so you can print from or scan to an inserted thumb drive. You can also connect to online services like Google Drive or Dropbox, again allowing you to print or scan to the cloud.
As you’d expect, you can join the 9012e to a network using either wired or wireless networking. It worked flawlessly when connected by Ethernet cable, but it refused to join my dedicated test wireless network, variously failing to find the network or failing to finish connecting to it. I’ve never previously experienced a similar problem with this strictly run-of-the-mill TP-Link router, but I couldn’t resolve the issue.
In the end, I gave up and connected the 9012e to my primary wireless network. This is based two floors away and has a weak signal in my office, but it didn’t seem to overly affect this MFP’s performance.
It’s increasingly hard for a cartridge-based inkjet to make financial sense, but the HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e largely manages it. It’s a lot cheaper to buy than a refillable ink tank, and although it doesn’t come with especially generous cartridges, you can buy replacements that last for 3000 black or 1600 colour pages. Shop around and these will help you get running costs down as low as 6.3p per colour page, admittedly some way short of the 1p or below you could expect from a refillable printer.
Sign up to HP’s Instant Ink service and you could pay less. In fact, all but the cheapest tier of the service have the potential to cost less per page, with the most expensive price plan dropping running costs as low as 3.2p. It’s worth noting that you’ll only achieve this by printing all of the included pages every month, though.
Clearly a refillable printer remains cheaper to run, but the 9012e is excellent by the standards of a cartridge printer. It also costs considerably less to buy than an equivalent ink tank device. In the ideal scenario you’d need to print more than 6000 pages for a similar refillable inkjet to become better value, although in practice the real figure might be only half that. Even then, many buyers will find this printer’s lower up-front price more palatable, particularly as it comes with a two-year warranty once you register it with HP.
You can extend this to three years if you also sign up to HP+, but this imposes some conditions in return. Most significantly it requires that the MFP is always connected to the internet. If it’s not, you won’t be able to print, even if you’re connected directly via USB.
Print speed and quality
- Very fast printing – but not on every document
- Excellent quality on almost every job
- Not a great photo printer
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e became the latest printer to perform slowly on our standard series of document tests. We include the time taken by a PC to prepare and send the print job, which can lead to printers significantly underperforming their specified speed. Even so, the 9012e took 46 seconds to produce a first page of black text, and managed only 5.3 pages per minute (ppm) when printing text at normal quality. Things were a bit better on our simple colour test, which is usually far quicker to spool – here the 9012e reached 10.4ppm over 20 pages.
I switched to more simple text documents and recorded far better results, the 9012e delivering a first page in just 13 seconds, and managing an excellent 21.1ppm over 25 pages of text. Even a challenging, graphics-rich colour job completed at 6.9ppm – much faster than I’d expect on an inkjet at this price. While this MFP’s long preparation times could make it slow on some jobs, it’s likely my ageing test PC was in part responsible for the slower results.
I had no problems at all with scan speeds, which were some of the fastest I’ve recorded. The HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e scanned an A4 page in nine seconds at 150 dots per inch, and needed only an extra second at a more detailed 300dpi. More impressively, it scanned a 10x15cm photo in just 12 seconds at either 600dpi or the maximum 1,200dpi. That last is comfortably the fastest time I’ve recorded from an HP scanner.
I’m not a huge fan of HP’s over-simplified scan software, but I do love its ‘Easy slide-off glass’. This basically means there’s no plastic lip on two sides of the glass scanner platen, which makes it much easier to remove original documents without snagging or creasing them.
This MFP is a fast copier, needing only 10 seconds to make either a black or colour copy of a single A4 page. Using the ADF it took me 71 seconds to copy 10 pages in black, and 79 seconds in colour – that’s particularly impressive for an inkjet.
This multifunction’s most impressive trick is to make a double-sided copy of a double-sided original. It copied 20 sides of colour graphics on 10 pages in a little under five minutes – not especially fast, but a useful feature all the same.
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e produced great prints on plain paper. Text was crisp and dark, while graphics had fairly punchy colours, only spoiled slightly by traces of grain in some lighter regions. Photocopies weren’t bad, but their colours were a little dank and undersaturated, while black copies were just a touch too dark.
This isn’t a good photo printer, however. In fairness it’s an office-focused device, with office-focused pigment inks that don’t produce a great finish on glossy papers. My results suggest you’ll get excellent colour prints on matte photo papers, but our black and white test print came out too dark and with much too little contrast – it took just under three minutes to complete.
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Should you buy it?
Perfect for a home office
If you’re after a four-in-one device for a small office, or to handle all your home admin, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e is near-perfect. It’s quick on most jobs, produces great or good results, and isn’t unreasonably expensive to buy or run.
Not so great for creatives
This MFP isn’t ideal if you’re more of a creative user, expecting to often print photos. And if you anticipate printing in big volumes, you’d probably pay less overall to buy and run an alternative with refillable ink tanks.
Final Thoughts
If you’re buying for a home office, or you’ll mostly be printing, scanning or copying plain paper documents, the HP OfficeJet 9012e is ideal. It’s fast at most jobs, and produces great quality results when scanning or printing plain paper. Provided you’re not planning to print in huge volumes, and you don’t need glossy photos, it really is an excellent choice.
That said, it’s not perfect for everyone. Particularly, it’s not ideal for more creative users who want the best quality when printing or scanning photos. It’s also not ideal if you expect to print more than a few thousand pages a year, as its reasonable running costs will begin to mount up. Here you’re better off choosing an equivalent with refillable ink tanks, such as the Canon MAXIFY GX22050, which will prove much cheaper to own. Check out our Best Printer guide for even more options.
How we test
Every printer we review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key things including print quality, speed and cost.
We’ll also compare the features with other printers at the same price point to see if you’re getting good value for your money.
Measured the time it takes to print with various paper
Compared print quality with other printers
Tested printing with monochrome and coloured ink
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FAQs
Yes, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e does have a scanner.
No, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9012e uses ink cartridges instead.
Trusted Reviews test data
Full specs
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Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
