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HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter - Printers
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

Whether you need a shared inkjet printer for a micro office, a personal printer for any size office, or a dual home and home and home-office printer, the HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter can be a good fit.
Best Deal£752.51

Buy It Now

£752.51

Pros & Cons

    • Duplexer for two-sided printing.
    • Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wireless Direct.
    • Prints through the cloud.
    • Only one paper tray, with no optional trays available.

HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter Specs

Color or Monochrome 1-pass color
Connection Type Ethernet
Connection Type USB
Connection Type Wireless
Cost Per Page (Color) 9.9 cents
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) 15,000 pages per month
Number of Ink Colors 4
Print Duplexing
Type Printer Only
All Specs

If you need an inexpensive inkjet printer to share in a micro-office or use as a personal printer or at home, make sure to put the HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter ($99.99) on your must-see list. It offers both Ethernet and Wi-Fi, making it easy to share, adds Wireless Direct (HP's equivalent of Wi-Fi Direct) for easy printing from mobile devices even if you don't connect it to a network, and delivers both ample paper capacity and a low cost per page. The combination is enough to make it our Editors' Choice inkjet printer that's equally good for home use and light-duty personal or micro-office use.

According to HP, the 6230 ($129.99 at HP) is the replacement for the HP Officejet 6100 ePrinter , which is our previous top pick in this category, and is still widely available at this writing. Key differences between the two include a slightly lower paper capacity for the 6230, at 225 sheets instead of 250, and the addition of a duplexer for two-sided printing. The new model also adds Wireless Direct, giving you more flexibility for mobile printing.

With either model, if you connect to a network by Wi-Fi or Ethernet, you can both print through the cloud and from a mobile device by connecting through a Wi-Fi access point on your network. With the 6230's Wireless Direct support, you can also connect directly to the printer for mobile printing, even if the printer is connected to a single PC via USB cable. The 6230 supports mobile printing from iOS, Android, Windows, Google Chrome, Kindle, and Blackberry smartphones and tablets.

Setup

At 11 pounds 3 ounces and 5.7 by 18.3 by 15.2 inches (HWD), the 6230 is light enough for one person to move easily and small enough to share a desk with. For my tests, I connected it to a network by Ethernet and ran the tests on a Windows Vista PC.

As with other HP inkjet printers I've recently reviewed, the setup instructions send you to the HP website to download the software, even though you can also simply install it from the distribution disk. Having you manually download the software is an unwelcome extra step. Worse, there's no way to tell if the version online is actually newer than one on disc, which means you have to take the time to download the files whether you need them or not. This is a minor issue at most. However, it's worth mention, because a number of other installation programs ask if they should check for a newer version online, and then download the newer version only if they find one. Automating that step can make installation notably easier.

Speed and Output Quality

HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinterPrint speed counts as one of the 6230's strong points. I timed the printer on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at 3.4 pages per minute (ppm). That makes it a touch slower than the HP 6100, at 3.6ppm, but faster than the Canon Pixma iP4920 Premium Inkjet Photo Printer , which came in at 3ppm, and the Canon Pixma iP7220 Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer ($349.99 at Amazon) , which managed only 2.5ppm. Photo speed is on the slow side for an inkjet, averaging 1 minute 13 seconds for a 4 by 6.

The printer's output quality is best described as easily good enough for most business purposes, but not impressive. Text quality is just above midrange for an inkjet, making it suitable for day-to-day business use, but not a good choice for printing anything that needs to look fully professional, like a resumé.

Related Story See How We Test Printers

Graphics quality is one step below the level where most inkjets fall. It's more than good enough for most home use and for any internal business need, but whether you'd consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts or the like will depend on how critical an eye you have. Photos are a little better overall than the low end of what you'd expect from drugstore prints.

If you need a printer with an emphasis on output quality, be sure to take a look at the Canon iP7220. For most applications, however, the HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter will be the better fit. Its speed and output quality are good enough for most purposes, and it delivers a long list of features, including Ethernet, Wi-Fi, support for mobile printing, and a low running cost—at a claimed 3 cents for a monochrome page and 9.9 cents for a color page. The combination makes it highly attractive, and an easy pick as Editors' Choice for a personal inkjet, a light-duty shared printer in a micro office, or for the dual role of home and home-office printer.

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Further Reading

Final Thoughts

HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter - Printers

HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter Review

4.0 Excellent

Whether you need a shared inkjet printer for a micro office, a personal printer for any size office, or a dual home and home and home-office printer, the HP Officejet Pro 6230 ePrinter can be a good fit.

Get It Now
Best Deal£752.51

Buy It Now

£752.51

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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