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HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer

 & Tony Hoffman Senior Writer, Hardware

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 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer - Printers
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

The HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer is an inkjet that's light enough to travel with, but can copy and scan as well as print.
Best Deal£205

Buy It Now

£205

Pros & Cons

    • Portable.
    • Scans and copies.
    • Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and USB connectivity.
    • Rechargeable battery.
    • 50-sheet input tray.
    • 10-sheet ADF.
    • Output quality worthy of a desktop inkjet.
    • High claimed page yields for print cartridges.
    • Lighter than its predecessor.
    • Fast photo printing.
    • Lacks a USB cable.
    • Heavier than most laptops.

HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-In-One Printer Specs

Automatic Document Feeder
Color or Monochrome 1-pass color
Connection Type USB
Connection Type Wireless
Cost Per Page (Color) 15.6 cents
Cost Per Page (Monochrome) NA
Maximum Optical Resolution 600 ppi
Maximum Scan Area 8.5" x 14"
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Mechanical Resolution 600
Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) 500 pages per month
Monthly Duty Cycle (Recommended) 300 pages per month
Number of Ink Cartridges/Tanks 2
Number of Ink Colors 4
Printer Input Capacity 50
Printing Technology Inkjet
Rated Speed at Default Settings (Color) 7 ppm
Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono) 10 ppm
Scanner Optical Resolution 600 pixels per inch
Scanner Type Sheetfed
Standalone Copier and Fax N/A
Type All-in-one

All-in-one printers need not be cumbersome devices yoked to a desktop or consigned to a table of their own. The HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer ($349.99) can print, copy, and scan, yet is compact and light enough to fit into a travel bag and be lugged around with a minimum of strain. Like its single-function counterpart, the Editors' Choice HP OfficeJet 200 Mobile Printer , the OfficeJet 250 has better output quality than most inkjets, and it earns an Editors' Choice in its own right, our first for a mobile all-in-one printer.

Design and Features
With its cover closed, the OfficeJet 250 measures 3.6 by 15 by 7.8 inches (HWD), and it expands to 10.6 by 15 by 15.8 inches when the rear paper feeder and the front-facing automatic document feeder (ADF) are extended. It is a smidge larger than its predecessor, the HP OfficeJet 150 Mobile All-in-One , which measures 3.6 by 13.9 by 6.9 inches when closed. The OfficeJet 250 weighs 6.5 pounds (6.7 pounds with its included battery in place), nearly 2 pounds heavier than the OfficeJet 200 (4.6 pounds, 4.9 pounds with battery in place), which measures 2.7 by 14.3 by 7 inches. The addition of the copier and scanner clearly increases the OfficeJet 250's size and weight over a single-function mobile inkjet, but not outrageously so. Still, it's heavier than most laptops, which is much of the reason we have seen very few mobile all-in-one printers.

For paper handling, the OfficeJet 250 has a rear paper feeder that can hold up to 50 letter-width sheets. The feeder does not print automatically on both sides of a page, but does support manual duplexing, which is controlled through the printer's software interface. The recommended duty cycle is up to 300 pages per month. This all matches the capacity of the OfficeJet 150, as well as that of the OfficeJet 200.

But while the HP OfficeJet 150 has a scanner, it only supports the manual feeding of one sheet at a time. The OfficeJet 250 adds a 10-sheet ADF, but like the OfficeJet 150 is limited to simplex (one-sided) scanning. It can scan and save to PDF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, and RTF formats. It scanned a 10-page document from the ADF to PDF format at a speed of 4 pages per minute (ppm), a typical speed for a basic portable scanner.

HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-In-One Printer

To the left of the ADF lies a 2.7-inch touch screen that can be tilted forward for easy viewing. From it, you can initiate scans (to email, computer, or USB thumb drive inserted into a port on the printer's side) and copy documents, as well as launch HP Web apps.

Connectivity choices include USB and Wi-Fi, as well as peer-to-peer with a computer or mobile device via Wi-Fi Direct. The OfficeJet 150 offered only Bluetooth. Being both AirPrint and Mopria Alliance compatible, the OfficeJet 250 can print from iOS and Android phones and tablets. For the bulk of my testing, I connected it to a PC running Windows 10 via USB.

Printing Speed
I timed the OfficeJet 250 at 9.4ppm in printing the text-only (Word) portion of our new business applications suite, which is very close to its 10ppm rating for printing in black. First-page-out time averaged 10 seconds. The printer slowed down only slightly to 9ppm when I switched from AC to battery power.

On our full business suite, which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files in addition to the aforementioned Word document, the OfficeJet 250 averaged 4.3ppm. I timed the HP OfficeJet 220, which tied the OfficeJet 200's speeds in printing the text-only document, at 4.5ppm for the entire suite.

HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-In-One Printer

I can't directly compare these results with those from printers I tested on the business part of our old test suite, which included a higher percentage of complex, graphics-heavy documents. Photo printing is a different matter, and the OfficeJet 250 proved much faster than machines I'd previously tested, printing out 4-by-6 photos in an average of 27 seconds, the exact same time as the OfficeJet 250 and far faster than the OfficeJet 150's 3:08.

Output Quality
The OfficeJet 250's print quality is slightly above par for an inkjet, with average text and slightly above-par graphics and photos. Text should be good enough for any use short of those requiring very small fonts. Be sure not to let the output fall into a basket when printing, as the ink is more smudge-prone than usual when wet.

In our graphics testing, the OfficeJet 250 did well in printing thin lines, and reasonably well at handling gradients and zones of similar color. Colors were well saturated and background fills were largely smooth, although a few backgrounds showed mild banding. Graphics quality should be adequate for, say, PowerPoint handouts. Most photo prints were at least the quality you'd expect from drugstore prints, and in a few cases were better.

Running Costs
Mobile printing is not cheap, and the OfficeJet 250's running costs are typical of portable inkjets: 6 cents per black page and 15.6 cents per color page. These match the running costs of the OfficeJet 200. The printer uses two cartridges: one for black ink and one tricolor (yellow/cyan/magenta). The high-yield black cartridge is rated at up to 600 pages, while the high-yield color cartridge is rated at up to 415 pages, considerably in excess of the highest-capacity cartridges offered by Canon and Epson. You shouldn't have to change cartridges all that frequently, which is a real strength in a mobile printer.

Related Story See How We Test Printers

Conclusion
Not everyone needs to both print and scan while on the road, but if you do, you needn't lug separate devices. The HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer can handle both these tasks, and it can copy, too. Output quality is better than you'll get from many desktop inkjets, and should be fine for formal reports and even PowerPoint handouts. As the all-in-one counterpart to the HP OfficeJet 200, our Editors' Choice mobile inkjet printer, the OfficeJet 250 adds scanning and copying to the mix for only a modest increase in size, weight, and price. It earns our first Editors' Choice as a mobile all-in-one printer.

Final Thoughts

HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer - Printers

HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer

4.0 Excellent

The HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer is an inkjet that's light enough to travel with, but can copy and scan as well as print.

Get It Now
Best Deal£205

Buy It Now

£205

About Our Expert

Tony Hoffman

Tony Hoffman

Senior Writer, Hardware

Since 2004, I have worked on PCMag’s hardware team, covering at various times printers, scanners, projectors, storage, and monitors. I currently focus my efforts on 3D printers, pro and productivity displays, and drives and SSDs of all sorts.

Over the years, I have reviewed smart telescopes, iPad and iPhone science apps, plus the occasional camera, laptop, keyboard, and mouse. I've also written a host of articles about astronomy, space science, travel photography, and astrophotography for PCMag and its past and present sibling publications (among them, Mashable and ExtremeTech), as well as for the former PCMag Digital Edition.

The Technology I Use

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 laptop that's my work daily driver, an HP Pavilion Aero 13 as my primary personal laptop, and an Asus ProArt P16 for detailed photo work. (I also have an older Dell XPS 13, which now stays at home full-time.) For storage testing, I rely on our three custom-built Windows testbeds in PC Labs, as well as a 2024 MacBook Pro.

My primary home monitor is a BenQ EX2780Q, a gaming monitor with a great sound system and excellent image quality. I use that panel for writing, watching videos, and working with photos. I also have an HP 27 Curved Display—one of the first general-purpose curved monitors—which I have paired with an Acer Aspire desktop computer. My multifunction printer is an Epson Expression Premium XP-7100 Small-in-One. I also own an Epson Perfection V39 flatbed scanner, which I use for photos and short documents, and a Canon Selphy CP1300 small-format photo printer for turning out snapshots.

My first cell phone, in 2006, was a Motorola Razr; since then, it’s been all iPhones—I currently have an iPhone 15 Pro. I use my iPhone a lot for casual photography, though I also use a Sony DSC-RX100 VII and a Canon G5 X Mark II for everyday shooting. For much of my travel photography and astrophotography, I use either a Sony A7r II or A7 III, paired with a variety of lenses ranging from a Sony 14mm f/1.8 prime to a Sony FE 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G OSS zoom lens. I also pair the A7r with a RedCat 51 for deep-sky star shooting. For astrophotography, I also use the Seestar S30 and S50 and the Unistellar Odyssey smart telescopes, which are essentially astronomical cameras controlled through one’s mobile device.

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