HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 review: Good, but not outstanding

The OfficeJet Pro 8022 looks every inch the small office printer. It’s made from muted grey and off-white plastics, and proudly wears its ADF like a hat. There’s little clutter. The 225-sheet paper tray juts out slightly from the front, but the eye is drawn by the tilted, touch-sensitive control panel above it.

This MFP has most of the features you’re likely to need in a micro or home office. There’s copy, scan and fax support, along with both wired and wireless network connections. The printer can automatically print on both sides of a page, but the 35-sheet ADF is simplex only, ruling out unattended double-sided scans, copies or faxes.

HP has mastered touchscreen controls, and the example here is a case in point. The menu responds predictably to drag-and-tap gestures, making it a pleasure to use. There’s support for cloud services including Google Drive and Dropbox, but no USB or memory card slot for direct prints or scans.

HP has ditched the humble setup disc for an online installer that can be frustrating, and which seems overly eager for you to install the HP Smart app. We sat through several minutes of entertainingly corporate messages including “finishing software solution discovery” before getting to download conventional driver software.

In use, we began to discover other frustrations. With no second paper tray, you have to dig out the contents of the main cassette if you want to print on headed or photo paper. HP’s driver also seemed very slow to spool our colour graphics job – we timed almost a minute between clicking Print and the printer becoming active.

Plain paper print quality was superb, with jet-black, sharp text, and exceedingly bright and bold colour graphics. The only letdown was slight banding in some presentation slides. Scans were also very good, although our 600dpi photo looked as though it had been sharpened in software. Speeds were decent all-round, with the printer reaching 3.9ppm on our graphics test even including the long initial spool time. The only exception was our 1,200dpi photo scan, which took almost two minutes.

Stick with the largest supplies and the OfficeJet Pro 8022 should print a colour page for about 8.1p. That’s okay for a light daily workload, making this a good – if not outstanding – small or home office MFP.

HP OfficeJet Pro 8022 specifications