The HP Officejet 6700 Premium.
All-in-one printers intended for the home and small office (SOHO) market tend to be quite expensive, due partly to the need for automatic document feed, fax facilities and duplex printing. HP, however, has managed to include all these facilities in the Officejet 6700 Premium, while pricing it at $279 in the HP online store this printer can be purchased for $170 if you shop around and this makes for great buying.
Design and Features
It certainly looks the part, with its large, textured black case and curves to its Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). The scanner lid lifts easily for placing single sheets but doesn’t have extending hinges, which help when scanning from books and magazines.
Controls are on a small, flip-up panel which has a 67mm touch screen at its centre with columns of dedicated touch buttons down either side. The panel is plastic-fronted, which means it gives a little more than the glass on a phone or tablet, but it’s quite sensitive and easy to navigate.
The main paper tray protrudes quite a way from the front of the printer and paper feeds to the top of the tray cover, which has an extension coming out still further – not a small footprint device.
Installation and Connections
Flip down the front cover and the print head carrier slides into view, so you can plug-in the four ink cartridges. They click into place in their holder extremely easily.
The black cartridge has a standard yeild HP 932 CN057AA (400 pages) and a high yield HP 932XL CN053AA that prints 1000 pages, each yield is at 5% coverage.
The colour cartridges are the high yield Cyan HP 933XL CN054AA, the Magenta HP 933XL CN055AA and Yellow HP 933XL CN056AA each yielding 825 pages at 5% coverage.
The Officejet 6700 Premium comes with USB and Ethernet support as standard and there’s a front panel USB socket which can be used with a USB drive to print documents and photos from, and to scan them to. Scans can be made straight to PDF file or to JPG image.
HP pioneered wireless printing with its various ePrint technologies and they include AirPrint support for Apple devices, and Wireless Direct print for PC and Android. Connecting to the online ePrint Center enables downloading of specialist printing apps, directly to the printer.
HP Officejet 6700 Premium – Print Speeds and quality
HP specs the Officejet 6700 Premium at 16ppm in black and 9ppm in colour, both of which are very healthy speeds for a sub $300 colour printer.Duplex print is at 3.9 sides per minute, and reduces the page size by around 10 percent, compared with single-sided pages.
Print quality is better than good across the board. Black text is solid with sharp, clean edges and colours on plain paper are bright and dense. There’s slight dappling on some solid fills in colour copies, but originals are better than most of the competition. Photo prints, from all sources, are well detailed and offer natural and vibrant colours, depending on subject matter. You’re only going to see better from a print engine with more than the four colours here.
Should I buy an HP Officejet 6700 Premium?
There aren’t many machines that can compare with this printer at the price it’s currently fetching. Brother and Epson each make SOHO inkjet all-in-ones, but for the same feature set and robust design, you’re looking at quite a bit more money and they both struggle to match HP’s plain paper print quality.
Verdict
The HP Officejet 6700 Premium is an excellent SOHO all-in-one. It includes most of what you’ll want in a small office, including duplex print, fast regular print, wireless connection for all kinds of mobile device, automatic document feed, USB drive support and straightforward control from its touch screen controls.
Need help deciding on a printer or wanting to save money on printer cartridges then call Ink Post on 1300 793 593 and we can show you how to save on your printing costs.