HP OfficeJet Pro 8025e [8022e, 8028e, 8035e]  Printer Review

This printer feels well-built. It has a sturdy plastic body with no obvious gaps in the construction. The design gives you easy access to paper jams and ink cartridges for maintenance. It also has a good cartridge bay lid dampener to guide the lid down gently. The power cord is detachable, making it easy to replace if damaged.

This printer requires a fair amount of maintenance. Like most inkjet printers, there's a risk of the printheads clogging if you don't print for a long time. If you experience clogging or other print quality issues, there are a few maintenance functions built in that can help resolve them, including printhead cleaning, printhead alignment, and smear cleaning. You can watch how-to videos directly on the printer's display if you aren't sure how to perform maintenance tasks.

As for ink maintenance, you'll need to replace the cartridges frequently if you print a lot since they don't last very long. Replacing the ink cartridges is easy; you only need to turn on the printer and open the cartridge bay's lid. For paper jams, you can access the sheet rollers by opening the front panel and lifting the top of the printer. The input tray holds 225 sheets of paper, which is a pretty good size, so you likely won't need to refill it often.

See the user manual here.

The display is great. There are three touch-sensitive buttons at the bottom of the display for Back, Home, and Help. Touch input feels very responsive, and the user interface is easy to navigate.

This printer has a very low black page yield, meaning you'll often have to replace the black ink cartridge. Its color page yield is better, but not significantly. You can increase the yield slightly with XL high-yield cartridges (HP 910 XL), which will help reduce maintenance frequency. If you want a near-identical printer that uses higher-yield cartridges, check out the HP OfficeJet Pro 8135e/8139e; or if you want a printer that uses a super tank reservoir system, consider the HP Smart Tank 7602.

The OCR (optical character recognition) is software-based, meaning you can only initiate the OCR scan from the computer. It works well but sometimes makes mistakes with special characters. If you need a printer with duplex scanning, check out the HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e.

The scan quality is good. The image processing is a little too aggressive, removing some finer details, like the lines in the graph and the watermark.

• User manual
• Power cord
• HP 910 starter ink cartridges:
• 1x cyan
• 1x yellow
• 1x magenta
• 1x black

This is a corded printer without a battery.

This printer prints black-and-white documents exceptionally well. Text looks sharp, and all the smaller, fine elements are present and easy to see.

The print quality of color documents is outstanding. The finer elements are visible, albeit faint. The only other minor complaint is that the colors are washed out.

The cost-per-print is good. Although the ink cartridges need frequent replacement, they're relatively cheap, so your overall maintenance cost won't rise too quickly.

This printer comes with six months of free ink through HP+, HP's ink subscription service. However, subscribing to the service will block you from using any third-party ink cartridges in the future, even if you terminate your enrollment. Also, the printer must have a continuous internet connection to function, as HP continually updates the firmware to block the use of third-party cartridges.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 8035e variant includes 12 months of free ink instead of six. If you want a similar printer with a lower cost-per-print, check out the HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e.

The output tray holds 60 sheets of paper.

This printer has a mediocre color gamut. Its narrow color range causes significant loss of fine details, which you can easily see when comparing the sample (parrots) picture to the same photo printed on the professional-grade Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 and the original photo. Also, color transitions look grainy.

The color accuracy is decent. Photos look relatively natural; there's just an overly warm tone.

This printer reproduces small details well. Fine and distant elements are easily identifiable. However, the contrast could be better, and the halftones are very prominent, softening the edges of objects.

The printer supports Bluetooth, but it's only for setup purposes, not for printing.

The HP Smart app is feature-rich. It lets you print, scan (with your phone's camera or the printer), copy, and fax directly from your mobile device. You can also check the printer's ink levels and manage your ink subscription.

You don't need to install the drivers manually on Windows devices. You can install the HP Smart app, which automatically updates the drivers, making the installation process more straightforward and user-friendly. On Chrome OS, you may need to add the printer directly using its IP address in the system settings, as the operating system can't automatically detect it, and even then, you can only print, not scan. Like Windows, installing the HP Smart (Android version from Google Play Store) app makes the process easier. There's no need to install drivers or applications on Macs.