The HP OfficeJet Pro 8035e All-in-One ($219.99) is a multifunction printer with something extra. The e after the model number indicates it supports HP Plus, an option you must select during setup or within a week afterward. Doing so limits the printer to genuine HP ink cartridges instead of third-party ink. In exchange, you get a year's unlimited supply of free ink, two years of warranty coverage instead of one, and gain some useful features including private printing (the ability to send a print job but delay actual printing until you're near the printer). Depending on how much you print, the combination can make the 8035e a considerably better value than comparable AIOs that cost the same or even less but don't give you free ink.

Print From Almost Any Device Anywhere

Another standout feature is a notably easy way to print from almost any device with an internet connection. All you need is the HP Smart app, which is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. Once set up, you can use it to print from virtually anywhere. Of course, if you're within reach of the OfficeJet Pro, you can also print via Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi Direct.

The 8035e delivers a solid if not ideal foundation of AIO basics. There's only one input tray, so you must unload and load paper every time you switch from one kind to another. But it holds 225 letter- or legal-size sheets and offers duplex printing, making it suitable for fairly heavy duty as a home office or micro office printer or a personal device in a larger office. HP rates the unit's maximum duty cycle at 20,000 pages per month, with a suggested ceiling of 800 pages.

By comparison, the Canon Pixma TR8620 offers similar paper capacity but with two trays of 100 sheets each for greater convenience if you use different kinds of media. The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4820 has a single, slightly higher-capacity 250-sheet tray, while the WorkForce Pro WF-4830 doubles that to two trays holding 250 sheets each. The Editors' Choice award-winning Epson Expression Premium XP-7100 Small-in-One offers only a 100 sheet tray for standard paper, but adds a 20-sheet photo paper tray and earns an Editors' Choice for top-quality output and other features including an auto-duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) for copying or scanning.

The HP 8035e's paper handling for scanning is more limited than for printing. The letter-size flatbed is paired with a 35-sheet ADF that can scan up to legal-size paper, but its only duplexing option is copying from one-sided originals to two-sided copies. If you want to scan, copy, or fax double-sided originals, you must scan each sheet one side at a time to get pages in the right order.

Very much on the plus side, front-panel touch-screen controls let you use the HP for standalone copying and faxing, printing photos from a USB memory key, and scanning directly to a thumb drive or a computer on your network.

Finishing Setup Doesn't Mean You're Done

Initial setup for the 8035e can be confusing unless you're already familiar with the choices HP gives you for its Instant Ink and HP Plus programs, but once you understand them it's reasonably straightforward. With Instant Ink, printing can cost as little as 4 to 7 cents per page according to the company depending on which program tier you choose. But if you also opt for HP Plus, your cost per page will be lower thanks to your first year of printing with free ink.

The all-in-one weighs 18 pounds and measures 9.2 by 18.1 by 13.4 inches (HWD) with its output tray closed. Extending the tray adds another 7 inches to the depth. Besides finding a spot for the printer and snapping in the four ink cartridges, you need to connect it to an internet-connected network (I used an Ethernet cable, though the setup routine is designed to establish a Wi-Fi connection for you). You can also print over a USB cable. However, installation requires an internet connection, as does the ability to print via the cloud. In my tests, plug-and-play automatically set up a driver instance for the USB port when I connected a cable after finishing the setup on my network. As already mentioned, you can also connect via Wi-Fi Direct.

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Setup on a PC requires downloading the drivers and HP Smart app, after which you can print. However, that doesn't mean the job's done: The first time I tried to scan using the front-panel touch screen, I got a message that I needed to download more software. It was only after installing the additional software that the printer could find my PC to scan to. And keep in mind that you have to set up the HP Smart app on any other devices from which you want to print.

The 8035e also interrupted one of my print runs at a later date to update, uh, something. It didn't say what. Aside from being surprised that the printer didn't fetch the latest updates during setup, I'd argue it's bad form for a printer to stop in the middle of a print job and start updating without giving so much as a warning. I'd be more than a little upset if it happened when I was late to a meeting and hurrying to print something I needed to bring with me.

Tolerable Speed, Excellent Output

In our benchmark tests, the OfficeJet Pro 8035e proved one of the slower printers in its class, but its output quality is worth the wait. I timed it using an Ethernet connection and our standard Windows 10 Pro testbed. Printing our 12-page Microsoft Word file, it managed only 12.9 pages per minute (ppm), which is well below its rated 20ppm for black text. In our business applications suite, it managed only 5.6ppm, well short of its rated 10ppm for color.

Among competitors that I've mentioned here, only the Canon TR8620 was slower with monochrome text at 11.8ppm. The Epson XP-7100 was essentially tied at 13.1ppm, while the Epson WF-4820 and WF-4830 were closely matched at roughly 19ppm. The same pattern held true for our business applications suite: The Pixma was a bit slower at 4.7ppm, the Epson XP-7100 a bit faster at 6.3ppm, and the two Epson WorkForce printers considerably quicker at 11.6ppm and 12ppm respectively.

Output was easily good enough for most personal and business use. Characters in most fonts in our test suite were nicely formed even as small as 4 or 5 points, though two heavily stylized fonts tended to fill in loops and gaps even at 12 points (lowercase e's looked more like 8's). Graphics offered vibrant color and crisp, fine lines. Some banding was subtle in light-colored fills, but more obvious in darker colors. For better quality, you can switch to a higher-quality mode if you're patient. Photos on HP's recommended paper were at the high end of drugstore quality, with nicely saturated color, good contrast, and a good sense of three-dimensionality.

In our smudging tests—putting a few drops of water on a page printed 24 hours earlier and rubbing it lightly—black text smudged only slightly. Color graphics and photos showed no smudging at all.

A Little Slow, But Lots to Offer

The HP OfficeJet Pro 8035e won't win any speed contests, and its lack of support for scanning duplex originals, even with manually flipping a stack of pages, is a severe limitation if you need to scan duplex pages even occasionally. All the other AIOs mentioned here provide at least duplexing with manually turning over the stack, while the Epson WF-4830 and XP-7100 offer auto-duplexing. The WF-4830 is also the best choice for heavy-duty printing, thanks to its fast print speeds and high dual-drawer paper capacity.

If you don't mind manually turning over a stack to scan in duplex and don't need the WF-4830's high paper capacity, the Epson WF-4820 offers the same fast print speed, while light-duty users who care most about print quality should consider the Editors' Choice award-winning Epson XP-7100 Small-in-One. That said, if you don't need duplex scanning, the OfficeJet Pro 8035e is a capable AIO with attractive output, low and potentially very low ink costs, and the convenience of being able to print from anywhere.