HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 review: A fast office inkjet with all the features you could want

The HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 is an inkjet printer, but instead of being aimed at photo printing and the occasional document, it’s targeted at busy small office environments.

In the past, you’d almost always go for a laser printer in these circumstances, but inkjets have come a long way in recent years and HP is so confident in its OfficeJet Pro 8022 that it rates it at being able to cope with printing up to 20,000 pages per month.

That’s a phenomenal number and a good indication that this printer will cope with even the most intense of small office environments.

With its white and grey colour scheme, the OfficeJet Pro 8022 is plain and business-like, but it doesn’t skimp on the features. It can print and scan at resolutions of up to 1,200 x 1,200dpi, has a generous 225-sheet paper tray and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder for making copies of multi-page documents.

Our favourite feature is the printer’s large, 2.6in colour touchscreen, which makes settings easy to access and status simple to check. The only physical button on the device is the one you press to switch it on.

It has plenty of connection options, too, with an Ethernet port alongside the more standard USB and Wi-Fi, giving more choices for sharing if you’re thinking of installing it in a small office.

And it’s generally easy to run and administrate. For initial setup and day-to-day use it employs HP’s standard printer software, which works well. Peculiarly, it doesn’t allow you to scan images at resolutions up to 600dpi, despite the hardware being capable of 1,200dpi, but that’s the only major complaint I have.

There’s a handy mobile app, available for Android and iOS devices, that will let you print straight from the device. It also lets you “scan” and then print anything you point your phone camera at.

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Print quality isn’t as good as inkjet printers aimed at consumers can produce, but it’s not bad for an office printer. Photo prints look reasonable, with the printer producing a good balance between dark and light, and representing colours reasonably accurately.

Unsurprisingly for a printer aimed at office use, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 is better at printing mixed text and colour documents, although its prints are slightly desaturated compared with the best home colour printers. You might not notice this looking at a printed page in isolation, however.

It’s less of a problem on a mono page that solely consists of black text on white paper. Here, text appears crisply printed and nice and dark.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 uses four individual colour cartridges (black, cyan, magenta and yellow), so there’s no unnecessary waste if individual colours run out. And the cost of printing is as good as cartridge-based systems get, with prices working out to 2.6p per page for a mono print and 5.5p for a colour print.

This means that enrolling in HP’s subscription service only really becomes worthwhile if you’re likely to use a fair bit of colour ink or just want the convenience of getting replacement ink sent to your address automatically.

However, it’s worth pointing out that significant savings can still be made by opting for an ink-tank printer, which can print something like 13 pages for the price of a single page on this printer.

If speed is more crucial than print quality, this model is well worth considering, though. At 17.4 pages per minute in standard mono mode, it really rolls them out, even outpacing some laser printers. It’s quick to get started, too, with a first-page-to-print time of 12 seconds.

When you need a readable document fast, there aren’t many inkjets that match it. It wasn’t quite as pacey when it came to colour printing, however, with print rates slowing to 4ppm, and I saw similar performance in the duplex and photo-printing tests.

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The one area where the OfficeJet Pro 8022 lets itself down is in single-page copying via the flatbed scanner, which took a remarkably long time, whether in mono or colour at around two minutes to complete.

The printer fared much better when using the automatic sheet feeder, however, producing a ten-page mono copy in 1min 26secs and a colour copy in 2mins 46secs.

While I’m talking about the scanner, it’s worth noting that, despite its claim to scan at 1,200 x 1,200dpi, we found it disappointing at such high resolutions.

HP’s own software doesn’t let you scan at this detail level, so I switched over to Windows’ own scanning tools and forced it to make the most of its maximum hardware resolution. It’s not worth bothering, though, as our scan of a 6 x 4in photo came out banded and jagged.

If most of your office work is printing lots of mono pages, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 is up to the task. It’s fast at that and copies at a decent rate if you stick with the automatic sheet feeder.

Added to this, it’s good value to buy and isn’t too expensive to run. While photo output doesn’t bear comparison with colour inkjets aimed at consumers, for office tasks it’s a reliable, easy-to-live-with workhorse.