HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format (E809a) A3+ inkjet printer

An A3+ inkjet printer with Ethernet connectivity and vibrant colour quality

PC World Australia (online)

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HP's Officejet 7000 Wide Format inkjet printer offers networked A3+ printing for the small office, allowing you to print in-house marketing materials quickly. Native A3 documents and materials look good, but the lack of a dedicated scaling option for A4 documents reduces the printer's overall functionality.

Pros

  • Ethernet connectivity, reasonable consumable costs, vibrant colour quality, accurate text in A4 documents, reasonable print speed

Cons

  • Bundled with introductory cartridges, haphazard A4 media handling, no dedicated scaling option, poor black levels in photo printing

Bottom Line

HP's Officejet 7000 Wide Format inkjet printer brings A3+ printing to the networked office. Dedicated to marketing materials more than anything else, it won't produce the best quality photos but this printer is cost effective and reasonably fast in our print tests.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 399.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

The HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format A3 inkjet printer may be short, but it is also quite deep — 640mm with its output tray fully extended — which creates a rather large footprint. Thankfully, it uses an open front input cassette instead of a rear paper tray, so your A3 media is always accessible.

Despite its glossy looks, the HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format A3 inkjet printer caters more towards the office than the design studio. It can connect over both USB and Ethernet connections and it has a reasonable consumable cost of 17c per A4 page using high yield black and high yield colour cartridges. Buyers should be aware that HP bundles introductory cartridges with the printer; these ran dry before we even finished our printing tests.

The HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format A3 inkjet printer doesn't come standard with an automatic duplexer but you can print double-sided documents by selecting the manual duplexing option in the print dialogue box.

HP's Officejet 7000 inkjet printer handles A3 paper well but we found it was a little rough with A4 media. During our draft printing tests, the printer often grabbed two or three pages at a time, disorganised pages, and even sent them flying off the printer altogether. Fully extending the paper output tray remedied this issue slightly, but unmonitored A4 printing is still potentially disastrous.

Nonetheless, the HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format A3 inkjet printer prints A4 documents at a reasonably fast speed. Monochrome A4 documents printed at an average rate of 18.75 pages per minute (ppm) in draft quality, and 10ppm in normal quality, with the first page printed in roughly 15 seconds. Colour A4 documents were slighty slower, at 17.3ppm for draft documents and 6ppm in normal quality. In our tests, a 4x6in photo took 28 seconds to print while A4 photos printed in 1min15secs each.

Naturally, the Officejet 7000 Wide Format printed A3 documents significantly slower, but still maintained reasonable speeds. Both monochrome and colour documents took 47.4 seconds to print in draft quality and 1min34secs in normal. An A3 photo took around two minutes to print in our tests. While these speeds are nowhere near those achieved by Brother's MFC-6890CDW A3 inkjet multifunction, the HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format A3 inkjet printer does an adequate job with nearly half the initial cost.

If you wanted to enlarge existing A4 documents to an A3 or A3+ size, you may be disappointed with the HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format A3 inkjet printer, as it has no dedicated scaling option. You can enlarge documents using the scale option in Microsoft Word or a similar application, but these applications do not interface directly with the printer. In our tests, scaled documents appeared faded and lacked a professional look.

Both A4 documents and native A3 material look great. Text reproduction is accurate and the colours produced are vibrant, with no misalignment or registration issues. Printed photos were also good quality, though black levels could be better when printing on glossy media stock. On one of our test photos we noticed some minimal banding issues, although this certainly won't affect images included in presentation documents.

The HP Officejet 7000 Wide Format A3 inkjet printer is a viable option for small offices looking to produce in-house marketing materials, although it isn't suitable for photographers or those looking to scale existing A4 material. Its print quality is vibrant and is largely a cost effective device to run. Results are only let down by inadequate black levels in our monochrome test photos and minimal banding issues.

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