HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e printer review: quick and efficient

HP’s OfficeJet Pro 9015e is a compact all-in-one printer for your home office or small business that promises fast print speeds, top quality, and several advanced options that will get the job done reliably day after day.

I went hands-on with this workhorse to see whether it offers good value compared to lower-cost models. It’s not perfect, but with its fast and high-quality printing, I can see why it’s become such a popular option.

Design

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e is an attractive printer with a footprint of just 17.3 inches by 13.5 inches by 10.5 inches. That’s small, considering it’s a robust, all-in-one inkjet that carries the HP’s pro moniker. With accents in medium and dark gray on a white body, it looks good alongside modern décor or in a work environment.

The 2.7-inch color touchscreen makes it easy to access copying, scanning, and printing without needing another device. There’s even a USB port on the side to plug in a thumb drive to load and save documents and images. You can use all of the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e’s basic features with nothing more than a pocketable USB drive.

The generous paper tray can hold up to 250 sheets at a time, so you’ll make fewer trips to the printer to refill, but as it’s the only one, it makes one-off prints more complicated. If you switch media types and paper sizes infrequently, that might not matter.

HP estimates that the XL ink cartridges can print up to 2,000 pages in black-and-white and 1,600 pages in color before being changed. The standard cartridges last for up to 1,000 black-and-white and 700 color pages.

HP annotates paper guides with friendly icons that indicate the correct way to insert blank paper for printing. The flatbed scanner and document feed has similar markings to help you align photos or documents for scanning.

Printing performance

The print speed is immediately apparent from the very first use. Warm-up takes only a few seconds, and the first page rolls out in about 10 seconds. It can print up to 22 pages per minute (ppm) in black-and-white, slowing only slightly to 18 ppm in full color.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e’s color prints shoot out faster than some inkjets can print monochrome. That makes this inkjet competitive with low-cost laser printers when comparing print speed, particularly for small and medium-sized jobs.

Quality is outstanding for both monochrome and color printing. Borderless printing is possible even on letter-sized paper. Most impressive is knowing that performance and quality should continue even with a long and heavy workload. HP rates the OfficeJet Pro 9015e as having a duty cycle of up to 25,000 pages each month.

Such a massive amount of printing would empty a full paper tray 100 times over. Realistically, few people print that much, but it’s nice to know that HP says you can push its printer that hard without affecting performance.

Special features

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e includes a flatbed scanner and automatic document feeder that can process 35 sheets at a time. You can scan both sides of a page when using the feeder. The sharpness looks great, and the colors are accurate. Output can be saved as PDF, JPEG, and other formats.

Scans can be sent to a computer, a smartphone, or a thumb drive. There are even advanced options for scanning to email, a network folder, and the cloud via SharePoint.

The copy controls are easy to use directly from the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e’s touchscreen. Simply place photos or documents on the glass or in the feeder, then hit the copy button. You can reduce documents to as small as 25% of the original size or scale up to 400%.

Software and compatibility

HP printers work with any device. The OfficeJet Pro 9015e is instantly recognized by Windows, macOS, and even ChromeOS. If a driver is needed, the operating system handles that painlessly since HP is such a well-known brand. HP says it’s compatible with Linux, but I don’t have a computer with that operating system for testing.

Setting up the printer takes just a few minutes, and the quick start guide included in the box makes it simple. Power it up, plug in the four ink cartridges, matching each color to the corresponding slot inside the printer. The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e prints an alignment sheet, then asks you to place it in the scanner. It scans and automatically adjusts the print heads, if needed, to ensure optimal quality.

You can install the HP Smart app to use the full features of the OfficeJet Pro 9015e with an iPhone or Android phone. Using a smartphone is recommended since it makes Wi-Fi setup effortless. Wireless is so convenient that I can’t imagine having to route cables or keep the printer near my computer anymore. However, you can connect the OfficeJet Pro directly to a computer with USB or Ethernet cables if you’d like.

The mobile app has an optical character recognition (OCR) feature to convert to text, and an automatic cropping feature allows multiple photos to be scanned at once. Unfortunately, those extra scanning features don’t always produce the best results at this time. Borderless printing is easy to select from a computer, but I could only get it to work from a smartphone by selecting photo paper on the printer’s touchscreen after loading paper in the tray.

HP is aware of the mobile app issues and is working on an update to correct these problems.

Low-cost and economical printing

For a fast and rugged printer, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e has a friendly price. It retails for $290, but is often discounted to slightly more than $200. That’s hard to beat for such a durable and quick all-in-one printer.

It comes with six months of free ink if you sign up for HP+ with Instant Ink. HP will email you before the paid subscription begins, allowing you to cancel and manage supplies for yourself. The Instant Ink plan takes all of the work out of the process and offers discounted prices as well.

With any printer, supply costs can significantly impact the long-term value. In the case of the OfficeJet Pro, ink costs are quite low, even without an HP+ subscription. That means the total cost of ownership for an HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e might be less than cheaper printers that have a lower initial price, but more expensive ink.

Based on HP’s estimated number of pages per cartridge, the ink cost for black-and-white printing could be as low as two cents per page. If you buy standard-yield cartridges, an average color page might use 10 cents worth of ink to print. When using XL color ink cartridges, that would drop to seven cents. Paper cost is not included in this calculation.

That’s very affordable and makes the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e a great value choice if other aspects of this all-in-one printer work well with your intended use.

Is this the printer for you?

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e offers outstanding speed at a low price. Print and scan quality are excellent. From a technical point of view, HP nailed it. It might not be the right choice for everyone, however.

If you often switch between printing documents, envelopes, and photos, the paper tray must be emptied and refilled between every media change. Then you have to select the correct paper from the touchscreen menu. Many printers, including the slightly more expensive HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e, have a secondary input tray that takes the hassle out of printing envelopes and photos.

That might be enough to put you off of the otherwise excellent HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e. But if you want a home business printer that can do everything, including scanning, copying, and rapidly knocking out big print jobs without breaking a sweat, it’s hard to beat this solid all-in-one printer from HP.

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