HP’s OfficeJet Pro 9012e is almost indistinguishable from the 9010e we crowned inkjet Labs winner this time last year. It’s a chunky-looking, businessy MFP aimed squarely at home and small offices. While it’s clearly not an enterprise-class device, it’s built to take moderately high use, with a one-time maximum monthly duty cycle of up to 25,000 pages.

In reality this MFP is unlikely to print anywhere near that volume, but it’s well set up for its recommended 1,500 pages a month. In its base you’ll find a 250-sheet paper cassette, while on top there’s a 35-sheet ADF. It can print, scan, copy and fax, with direct control coming via a 6.9cm color touchscreen running a user-friendly menu. It’s hidden slightly on the left side, but you also get a USB host port for direct prints and scans.

The “e” on some HP printers denotes that you must sign up to HP+ to activate the device, and thereafter leave it connected to the internet for it to function. Happily, that’s not the case here, with users allowed to choose whether to activate HP+, the Instant Ink subscription service, or neither. We asked HP to clarify whether it had changed its “dual SKU strategy” which obliged users to choose HP+ or not at the time of purchase, but didn’t hear back before we went to press.

Regardless, the 9012e offers the best of all worlds. Choose to sign up to HP+ and you’ll get an additional year’s warranty and six months of Instant Ink for free. Opt out and you can still get two years’ cover with online registration, and choose to sign up to Instant Ink if you want. We discuss the economics of this in View from the Labs, but without it – at 1p per page in black or 4.2p in color – the 9012e is cheap to run for a cartridge-based inkjet.

HP claims the 9012e has self-healing Wi-Fi, but we had issues connecting it to our regular Labs router – an unremarkable dual-band TP-Link. It couldn’t detect the 2.4GHz network until we rebooted it, after which the printer failed to connect and lost sight of it again. We tried the 5GHz network with similar results, eventually giving up and using our main router. Although this worked without any problems, it’s further away from the test area, which may have slowed the 9012e down.

If it did, we can’t say we especially noticed. The OfficeJet Pro 9012e took quite a while to spool and start printing multi-page jobs, but once started it was the fastest inkjet in this group. It hit 21.1 pages per minute (ppm) on our 25-page text test, and reached an equally impressive 6.9ppm over 24 pages of color graphics. Encouraged by these results we tried our 50-page Alice in Wonderland test, but with a very long spool time this proved slower at just 11.6ppm. The 9012e was also underwhelming when duplexing, reaching only 3.4ipm when printing ten sides of color graphics.

For an inkjet, this is a fast copier, managing single black pages in nine seconds, and needing only ten seconds in color. It rattled off ten mono copies in 71 seconds, and again needed little longer in color, taking 79 seconds. A 10-page, 20-side duplex color photocopy took nearly five minutes, however.

When it came to scanning, this was again the fastest inkjet here, dispatching low-resolution A4 scans in only ten seconds. We were even more impressed at higher resolutions, the 9012e needing only 12 seconds to capture a 10 x 15cm photo at 600dpi.

The 9012e isn’t a great photo printer, with its pigment inks drying to a dull, semi-matte finish. We were also disappointed in its slightly dark and dingy photocopies. Otherwise, it’s hard to fault the quality of its prints and scans, particularly on typical office jobs such as text and color graphics. It’s certainly good enough for printing formal correspondence, and it would be great for archiving documents – if only it came with software that could save scans as searchable PDFs.

Overall, this remains a great MFP for a typical home office. It’s fast, robust, produces good results, and is almost as cheap to run as cartridge-based inkjets get. However, its purchase price has crept up somewhat compared to the 9010e, so it loses out on value for money.

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HP’s LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw looks like the perfect color laser MFP for a small office. It’s a four-in-one with fax, topped off by a 50-sheet ADF. Both this and the printer are duplex-capable, so you can start a multi-page double-sided copy and go off to put the kettle on.

This MFP has virtually no packing to remove – you can just load up paper, join it to a network and install the drivers. Unfortunately, that didn’t go as smoothly as it should have. The touchscreen didn’t confirm whether the 4302fdw had joined our Labs network, and it didn’t respond when we repeatedly tried to print a network report. Shortly afterwards the printer sprang into life, delivering several unwanted copies.

We still don’t love HP’s TWAIN scan software, which in this case doesn’t offer 150dpi, but its MFPs’ lipless scan platens make it so much easier to retrieve your originals. This is quite a fast scanner, managing a 10 x 15cm photo at 600dpi in just 17 seconds, but it repeatedly dropped out midway through our 1,200dpi test.

If it’s been idle for a while, the 4302fdw needs only about three seconds extra to warm up before delivering a first black or color page. From standby it managed this in 17 seconds, and went on to deliver our 25-page test in exactly a minute. It was slower on our challenging color test, but its 14.4ppm still compares well at this price.

At 1.5p in black or 8p per color page this isn’t the cheapest laser to run, but you can sign it up to HP’s Instant Ink toner delivery, which brings the cost down as low as 1.3p. Unfortunately, you can’t do much about the 4302fdw’s indifferent print and scan quality. Black text was perfect, but graphics and photographs had a blue bias, apart from skin tones, which tended to look flushed. Office scans were perfectly good, but with photos we noticed a loss of detail from the darkest areas.

It’s a shame. The LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw should be the perfect small office device, but its results are just a little too weak.

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