HP Officejet 6600 e-All-in-One

The HP Officejet 6600 e-All-in-One is a low-cost multifunction colour printer with a touchscreen and Wi-Fi designed for small businesses with monthly outputs of 12,000 pages. HP is advertising professional quality prints and low cost-per-page. The touchscreen commands everything, from opening and running apps to setting the scan/copy/fax options, and ePrint allows multiple devices to print wirelessly over a network.

Design and Build

At 46 x 44 x 24 cm and 8 kg, the Officejet 6600 is compact enough to fit easily on any average desk. The responsive 2.65" touchscreen is where you enter all user commands and select options, which not only makes for a minimalist design, but also makes the 6600 enjoyable to use. HP's apps for printing without a computer are a simple tap away. The 6600 prints, copies, scans and faxes, but only single-sided sheets, which is a bit of a shame for a business-oriented printer; it also has no card reader. Like the rest of HP's Officejet range, the 6600 supports PCL 3.

Speed

The Officejet 6600 prints more slowly than the HP Officejet 6700 Premium (but it also has a lower launch price). That said, it's faster than the Canon Pixma MG5450, which prints 11 pages per minute (ppm) in colour and 6 ppm in B&W. In fact, the 6600 is closer in speed to the Epson Expression Premium XP-700, which prints 11 ppm in colour and 15 ppm in B&W. To really get faster print speeds—which could come in handy in B&W—you'll have to up your budget and go for something like the Epson WorkForce Pro WP-4525DNF, which prints 21 ppm.

Print quality

This is a great printer for all-text documents. And despite the visible ink droplets in solid colours, our test graph below came out clean, precise and with acceptable shading. It also did very well on our "thin line" test, reproducing clearly traced lines, even in complex images. The only downside is the colours, which look dull and washed-out.

Scanner & Copier

The fax function was well thought-out. You can have it automatically block specific incoming calls to avoid spam and save digital copies of faxes on any computer in your network, allowing you to choose which pages to print out. The copier function is full of options. But as usual HP makes it just as easy to use the standard options and simply choose "colour copy" or "B&W copy".

In the settings you can select the clarity, copy quality, paper size and paper type, resize and crop images, see previews and enhance the overall quality by choosing text only, text and images or images only. These are all handy features, but unfortunately they don't do much to truly improve the quality of copies. For example, options that are good for text may lower the quality of images and graphs, or vice-versa.

Power Use

The HP Officejet 6600 doesn't save paper by printing double-sided by default, but it does have an eco-friendly mode where you can have the printer go to sleep after 5 to 15 minutes without use. You can also adjust the screen brightness to (very marginally) consume less power and block or save faxes to avoid wasting paper. Great idea!

It consumes a reasonable amount of power: 20 W during use and 2 W on standby, which makes for an annual consumption of 1.6 kW for 1,000 pages. That's average for inkjet printers. It's also quiet, at 49 dB(A) during use.

Cost Per Page

For this model HP has released new pigmented inks (932 and 933) designed to resist discoloration, water and highlighting, and the cartridges last about 100 pages longer than the older models. When one of the colours runs out, you can still print in black only.

At 6.5 pence, the total cost per page is cheaper than the entry-level HP Officejet 4620 (9.5 pence), which was already one of the best prices on the market.