HP Officejet 6000

HP Officejet 6000 Wireless Printer

The HP Officejet 6000 Wireless color inkjet printer may dwell in the shadow of its faster cousin, the Officejet Pro 8000 Wireless, but it has nothing to be ashamed of. For a significantly lower price ($120 as of March 29, 2010), it offers good performance and plentiful features, plus cheap inks. Setup was easy, despite a veritable avalanche of dialog boxes for setting up the wireless functionality. On a Mac, you must visit the Preferences/Printers dialog box to add the printer manually--a small task, but one that other vendors' products have managed to automate. The Officejet 6000 Wireless placed in the middle of the pack on most of our speed and quality tests. (The Epson WorkForce 40 is a lot faster, but it has other drawbacks.) On the PC platform, text pages on plain paper averaged 7.4 pages per minute. A variety of plain-paper grayscale and color pages exited at rates of 3.3 ppm to 3.7 ppm. When we switched to photos using HP's own paper, prints emerged at 1.9 ppm, the fastest we've seen in a while. On the Mac platform, plain-text speed was 7.45 ppm, versus 1.47 ppm for a mixed text and graphics PDF file and 0.77 ppm for a full-page color photo. On both platforms, text quality was just a hair shy of crisp.