HP Officejet 6000 Wireless Printer Review

Here's something we almost never, ever get to say in printer reviews: The USB cable you'll need is in the box. Here's something ironic: After the first half hour or so, you won't need it.

That's because the HP Officejet 6000 Wireless, as its name implies, supports 802.11b/g Wi-Fi as well as USB 2.0 and Ethernet connectivity -- if your home office or small office has a wireless network and router, you use the cable only temporarily during initial setup. It would be nice if a cable came with the plain Officejet 6000 base model of the inkjet printer, which uses USB and Ethernet only, but of course one doesn't.

The 6000 Wireless also differs from its sibling by including an automatic duplexer that pulls pages back and forth, pausing between sides to let the ink dry, for double-sided output. It naturally slows printing -- our 10-page Microsoft Word document took 1 minute and 11 seconds in normal mode on 10 sheets versus 3 minutes and 34 seconds on five sheets -- but works perfectly as a paper-saving convenience.

If you don't need wireless and duplex printing, the Officejet 6000 costs $90, compared to $120 for the deluxe model tested here. If you're reading this during August 2009, you can trim those prices to $70 and $100, respectively, thanks to an instant rebate in the small and medium business area of HP's Web site.

And even in an age where combo printer/scanner/copiers can be had for two figures, the 6000 Wireless is a lot of printer for $100: a workhorse with a rated duty cycle of 7,000 pages per month, a relatively large 250- instead of skimpy 100- or 150-sheet input tray, and high-quality output as well as duplex and wireless support.

Perhaps best of all is the HP's low cost per page: Like its multifunction Officejet 6500 Wireless cousin reviewed here in April, the 6000 Wireless takes the company's 920XL black, magenta, cyan, and yellow ink cartridges, priced at $32 for the black (rated for approximately 1,200 pages) and $15 apiece for the color trio (rated for approximately 700).

Once you use up the smaller starter cartridges in the box and start buying and using 920XLs, you'll be paying about 2.67 cents per black-and-white and 9.1 cents per color page -- the former's not bad even by laser printer standards, while the latter is a measurable saving over most desktop color lasers' 12- to 15-cent color pages. It's enough to let you spring for the print-quality boost of coated inkjet stock instead of plain paper and still come out ahead.

Cruising Speed

With paper trays extended, the Officejet takes about 18 by 23 inches of desk space and stands 7 inches tall. Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Mac OS X 10.4.11/10.5 users will find setup a matter of dropping a printhead or cartridge carriage into place, then fitting the ink cartridges into it and waiting some 10 minutes for the printer to prime itself and print a calibration page -- the printer is fairly quiet in operation, though it likes to whir and click and recalibrate itself for a few seconds after most jobs. Linux isn't officially supported, though the printer's PCL 3 language is well documented by most distros.

You load paper -- from 3 by 5 inches to legal-sized, though duplex printing is restricted to letter and A4 size and doesn't support borderless printing -- face down in the lower tray to see it exit face up in the upper; we experienced no paper jams during our testing. We never needed to use the three buttons on the front panel, either, which serve to feed paper, cancel a job in progress, and print a network status report and turn WiFi radio on and off.

To its credit, HP quotes the usual theoretical maximum print speeds (32 pages per minute for black, 31 ppm for color) but also provides more realistic laser-quality speed quotes of 7 ppm for both. The printer's Fast Draft mode produced our 10 pages of Word text in 46 seconds and five-page ISO 24712 document, a mix of text and images, in 42 seconds, but blacks were grayish and solid-color areas showed significant banding.

Switching to normal quality mode on plain paper, our one-page business letter with spot-color company logo printed in 18 seconds, the five-page ISO document in 81 seconds, and a 55-page Acrobat PDF file in 8 minutes and 38 seconds. Text was first-class in sizes as small as 5 points (and even 4 points was OK for sans-serif fonts) and colors were vivid.

Just a few solid areas showed just a trace, and some photo backgrounds more than a trace, of banding, unless we opted for either best-quality mode -- which is slow, at 36 seconds for the one-page letter and 3 minutes and 10 seconds for the five-page ISO document -- or inkjet paper or both. Photos looked their best -- quite good for four-color, though no match for six-ink or higher photo printers' output -- in best mode on photo paper; an 8 by 10 took just under three minutes and borderless 4 by 6-inch prints averaged 1 minute and 7 seconds each.

All in all, we like the Officejet 6000 Wireless very much, particularly with this month's discount from $120 to $100. It's a solid performer with sharp output, handy Wi-Fi and duplexing extras, and relatively low costs per page. And you can always find a use for a spare USB cable.

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