HP Officejet 6000 (E609a) inkjet printer

HP's Officejet 6000 (E609a) is a barebones inkjet printer. Though only $149 at the register, you still get an Ethernet connection along with the standard USB port. Automatic duplex doesn't come as standard but the Officejet 6000's bundled drivers support manual duplex.

Resembling the Officejet Pro 8000 in design, the Officejet 6000 is short but quite wide. There are no direct print options, and the fascia itself is completely bare save for resume buttons and indicator lights for the ink cartridges.

The HP Officejet 6000 inkjet printer is cheap to run, at just 17.77c per A4 page when using high-yield cartridges. Though it won't compete with laser printers, it is significantly cheaper than similarly priced multifunctions like the Brother MFC-250C. It isn't all good news, however; the Officejet 6000 is bundled with starter cartridges, which didn't even provide enough ink to cover the PC World testing procedures.

In draft mode, the HP Officejet 6000 prints greyscale documents at a rate of 17.5 pages per minute and colour ones at 16.3ppm. It takes substantially longer to print pages using the normal quality setting; 42.5 seconds and 43.7 seconds to print for greyscale and colour pages, respectively.

Normal quality documents suffer from overuse of ink, making text less readable and colours overly saturated. Thankfully, printing at the highest quality setting largely removes these issues. While text doesn't have laser-like quality, it is accurate and readable. The printer also produces fantastic and vibrant colour in documents.

Like the Officejet Pro K5400dn, the HP Officejet 6000 inkjet printer produces a fair amount of background noise in photos, particularly when dealing with colour gradients. Colours and contrast are acceptable, but the printer won't produce the results that photo enthusiasts require.

For $149, this single-purpose printer is an inexpensive way to print professional documents and marketing materials.

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