In many ways, the HP Officejet 6700 Premium e-All-in-One ($169.99 direct) is the little brother of the Editors' Choice HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus e-All-in-One ($299.99 direct, 4.5 stars), which costs a lot more, and the HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One ($199.99 direct, 4.5 stars), which costs only a little more. Like those two 8600 models, it's very much office oriented. However, it's meant for lighter duty use, and is physically smaller. The combination makes it a better fit in a micro or home office where space is tight, and a better fit as a personal printer, which is enough to also make it an Editors' Choice.

The 6700 Premium delivers most of the same basic features as the 8600 models, including printing, scanning, faxing from a computer, and working as a standalone copier and fax machine. It can also print from or scan to a USB memory key, and let you use Apple AirPrint to print over WiFi as well as use HP's ePrint to print though cloud. As part of the installation routine, you can give the printer its own email address for ePrint, so you can print a document by sending it as an attachment to an email message.

One other key feature that shows up in nearly all of HP's e-All-in-One's is the option to use the 2.7-inch touch screen with HP's Web Apps.

Paper Handling and Size

The 6700 Premium's paper handling is just short of excellent, with a 250-sheet tray and a duplexer (for printing on both sides of a page). The tray offers ample capacity for most small offices. However, there's no bypass tray and no additional tray available as an option. That means you have to swap paper out of the one and only tray even to print just one page on a different paper stock—including envelopes for example. This won't be a problem if you don't switch paper very often, but could get annoying if you need to, say, switch between letters and envelopes several times a day.

For scanning, the 6700 Premium includes a 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF). As is typical for MFPs that offer both a letter-size flatbed and ADF, the ADF lets you scan legal-size pages as well as multipage documents.

The 6700 Premium is a lot smaller than either 8600 model, although it's hard to tell that from HP's official measurements, at 9.9 by 18.3 by 23 inches (HWD). Much of the 23-inch depth is taken up by the paper tray, and about 4.5 inches of that assumes the tray is open to its maximum amount. The actual printer body is only about 11.75 inches deep, making it a reasonable size to keep on your desk to use as a personal MFP.

Setup and Speed

Setup is standard fare except for the optional steps to get the printer an ePrint address and set it up to use HP's Web-based printer apps. Both added steps are easy, however, and they don't take much time.

One area where the 6700 Premium doesn't keep up with the 8600 models is speed. Both the 8600 and 8600 Plus are well into laser territory on that score. The 6700 Premium offers more typical inkjet speed. I timed it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at 3.4 effective pages per minute (ppm), significantly slower than either  8600 model, at 5.7 and 5.9 ppm.

To help put the speed in better perspective, note that the 6700 Premium is faster than, for example, the more expensive Canon Pixma MG6220 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-in-One ($199.99 direct, 4 stars), at 2.9 ppm. The photo speed for the 6700 Premium is also acceptably fast, averaging 1 minute 7 seconds for a 4 by 6 in our tests.

Output Quality

When it comes to output quality, the 6700 Premium scored at the low end of par for an inkjet printer across the board. That translates to output that's perfectly acceptable, but not impressive. Text, for example, is good enough for most business needs, as long as you don't have an unusual need for small fonts.

Graphic output offers vibrant color and is easily good enough for most internal business needs. However many of the full page images in our tests showed subtle banding at the default quality setting. Whether you consider them good enough for, say, PowerPoint handouts or material going to an important client or customer will depend on how much of a perfectionist you are. Photos are at the low end of what I expect to see from drugstore prints.

Other issues  

One last issue worth mention is running cost. HP claims a cost per page for the 6700 Premium of 3.2 cents per monochrome page and 9.0 cents for a color page. This is actually lower than the running cost for many similarly priced inkjets, and would count as a plus if the 8600 didn't exist. However, the 8600 does exist, and it offers a running cost that's 1.6 cents lower for each mono page and 1.8 cents lower for each color page.

Even if you print nothing but black and white pages, that means you can buy the much faster 8600 and make up the $30 difference in initial price by printing just 1875 pages over the life of the printer, or 625 pages per year for three years.

What that translates to is that if you'd really rather have the 8600 but were considering the 6700 Premium because it saves a few dollars, you need to rethink your decision. You're much better off in the long run paying a little extra for the 8600, and enjoying the faster speed while you're saving money.

That said, the HP Officejet 6700 Premium e-All-in-One  is also an attractive choice. Except for speed, it offers almost all the same features as the 8600, including support for ePrint and Web apps, and it's enough smaller to fit in a tighter space, including sitting on your desk as a personal MFP. It also delivers good paper handling and a lower running cost than many inkjets in its price range.

If you don't print enough for the difference in running cost to matter, don't have a lot of free flat space to spare, or both, the HP Officejet 6700 Premium e-All-in-One is the better fit and the right printer for your needs, especially if you want a printer that will fit comfortably on your desktop. More than that, as a personal printer, and for offices that don't have room for the 8600 models, it offers enough to make it Editors' Choice.

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