All-in-ones (AIOs) have largely taken over the ink jet market, but if you don't need a printer that scans, copies, or faxes, you can get a lot more bang for the buck from one that doesn't do anything but print. Consider the HP Officejet 6000 Wireless Printer ($119.99 direct). It offers fast speed, reasonably good output quality, paper handling suitable for a small or home office, and a relatively low cost per page, all for far less than it would cost for an AIO with comparable features.

Despite offering reasonably high-quality photo output, the Officejet 6000 is clearly designed as an office printer, with none of the photocentric features such as direct printing from cameras or memory cards that you'd expect in a printer meant for the home. Instead, it focuses on features important for an office, whether as a shared printer in a small office or a personal printer in any size office.

Paper handling, for example, is a strong point, with an ample 250-sheet input capacity and an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a page. And if you take advantage of the printer's high capacity cartridges, you'll not only get more pages per cartridge than with most ink jets, but a lower cost per page. The claimed yield of 1,200 pages for monochrome and 700 pages for each color cartridge (based on the ISO/IEC 24711 yield standard), works out to a relatively low 2.7 cents per monochrome page and 9.1 cents per color page.

Not so incidentally, the Officejet 6000 Wireless is nearly identical to the HP Officejet 6000 Printer ($89.99 direct), so most of the comments in this review apply to both printers. The only difference between the two models, according to HP, is that the 6000 Wireless adds the duplexer unit and WiFi support. (The less expensive model offers manual duplexing.) If you don't need WiFi or automatic duplexing, you can save a few dollars by buying the less expensive model, but I'd argue that for most offices, duplexing by itself is worth the extra cost.

Setting up the 6000 is standard fare for a printer with a separate print head. First, find a spot for the 6.5- by 18- by 18.7-inch (HWD) printer and remove the packing materials. Then turn it on, snap in the print head and four ink cartridges (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black), and run the automated installation program from disc. I installed the printer on a wired network from a system running Vista. According to HP, it also comes with drivers for Windows 2000 SP4, XP and XP x64, Vista x64, and Mac OS X 10.4 and above. In addition, you can download drivers for Linux from HP's Web site.

I timed the 6000 on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing, www.qualitylogic.com) at a total of 11 minutes 34 seconds, which makes it the fastest single-function ink jet in its price range that I've seen to date. In comparison, the directly competitive Canon Pixma iP4600 took 16:11. Even the somewhat more expensive HP Photosmart D7560 Printer was slightly slower, at 12:23. Photo speed was also reasonably fast, averaging 1:05 for each 4-by-6 and 2:28 for each 8-by-10.

Text, Graphics, and Photo Quality
The 6000's output quality is a touch below par for an ink jet for text, above par for graphics, and at the low end of the typical range for photos.

Fewer than half of the fonts in our text tests qualified as well formed even at 8 points, primarily because of a character-spacing issue. More than half passed the easily readable threshold at 6 points, however, including most of the fonts you might reasonably use in a business context. Two fonts couldn't pass either threshold at any size we test, but both were heavily stylized fonts that you aren't likely to use for business documents. I wouldn't use the 6000 for anything that needs to look fully professional, like a resume, but unless you have an unusual need for small font sizes, the text is suitable for most business use.

Graphics quality was easily good enough for output going to an important client who you need to impress with a sense of your professionalism. Colors were vibrant, with smooth fills, and the printer even handled thin lines that most printers have problems with. The only flaw worth mention that I saw was banding, but that was in default mode only and with only some full-page images in our tests. I didn't see any banding in high quality mode. You might want to invest in a heavy weight paper for graphic output, however. Full-page graphics tend to add a slight curl to the plain paper we use in our tests.

Photos in my tests all qualified as true photo quality, but were very much at the low end of the scale. The most important issue I saw was that dark areas in both color and monochrome photos looked dark gray instead of black, giving the sense of looking at the scene through a haze. Monochrome photos also showed a slight tint at some shades of gray, and round objects in color photos—like an apple in a fruit bowl—had a flattened look that indicates a loss of the subtle shading that the eye interprets as three-dimensional. Depending on your tastes, you may or may not consider the quality acceptable for photos you want to keep in, say, an album.—Next: More Strengths >