Hp Officejet 5258 All in One Printer Review

HP's OfficeJet 5255 All-in-1 ($139.99) is an entry-level color inkjet designed to print and/or copy a few hundred pages per month in today's business concern-oriented dwelling offices and micro businesses. Similar the Brother MFC-J805DW INKvestment and the Editors' Choice Catechism Pixma G6020 MegaTank all-in-i printers reviewed here concluding summer, the OfficeJet 5255 prints well, if not a little slowly. Too like these and a few other competitors, the 5255 delivers reasonable running costs—when y'all accept advantage of HP'south Instant Ink subscription program, that is. Like so many of today's entry-level printers and all-in-ones, the 5255 is a skillful value with a robust feature set up, making it an excellent culling to the Pixma G6020 and most other depression-book colour all-in-ones we've looked at lately.

For Occasional Impress and Copy Tasks

Small-scale, depression-priced AIOs like the OfficeJet 5255 and its ilk are designed primarily to wake upwards, churn off the occasional impress, copy, or scan, go back to sleep, then wake upward a few days later and do information technology all once more—in other words, to print and re-create no more than a couple of hundred pages each month. Machines designed for such light duty shouldn't take upward much space in your abode or small-scale office, either.

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The OfficeJet 5255 measures seven.5 by 17.5 by 14.5 inches (HWD) with its trays closed and weighs a mere xiv.4 pounds. That's about identical in size to (yet a few pounds leaner than) the Brother MFC-J805DW and Canon Pixma G6020 mentioned in a higher place. Interestingly, though, at just an inch wider and a few pounds heavier, Canon's wide-format (tabloid-size, or 11 by 17 inches) Pixma TS9520 takes up about the same amount of desk infinite, and as you lot'll see coming up, provides a wider range of functionality.

A perk you should expect with even the most bones office AIO nowadays is an automatic certificate feeder (ADF) for sending multipage documents to the scanner. The OfficeJet 5255'south ADF holds upwards to 35 legal-size originals, though it doesn't support auto-duplexing for scanning two-sided pages without your having to flip the pages manually to scan the second sides.

Similar Products

Of the three competitors mentioned hither so far, the G6020 has no ADF at all, and the MFC-J805DW and TS9520 both come with xx-sheet ADFs (neither of them support auto-duplexing, either). For setting up and making copies, monitoring consumables, tweaking the configuration, and many other walk-up tasks, the OfficeJet 5255 provides a 2.5-inch monochrome touch display that, aside from Home and Back buttons and a Wi-Fi status LED, comprises the entire control console.

Most of today'due south part-oriented AIOs, regardless of how upkeep-minded they are, also come with built-in web sites that provide at least the aforementioned functionality as the control panel, and sometimes a little more than, or at least easier access. Generating usage reports and configuring security features, for example, is often much easier when working from a spider web browser (even a smartphone browser) than when poking at a control panel.

Paper handling consists of up to 100 patently sheets or 20 premium photo paper sheets in the main drawer that slides in and out from the front of the printer. The output tray holds up to 25 prints.

The OfficeJet 5255 holds 150 sheets less than the Pixma G6020, fifty sheets less than the Brother MFC-J805DW, and 100 sheets less than the Pixma TS9520. The OfficeJet's maximum monthly duty cycle is rated at 1,000 pages, with a recommended maximum of 400 prints. That's 4,000 pages fewer than the letter-size Canon and Brother AIOs. Catechism doesn't publish suggested volume ratings for the wide-format Pixma TS9520, simply my educated guess is that it could churn out effectually a m prints each calendar month without working likewise hard.

Basic Connectivity and Software

For a while now, virtually of HP'south consumer-course and business organization-oriented AIOs have shipped with HP Smart App, a cross-platform combination commuter/interface that non but connects the printer to your computing device but supports several value-added features. These include small conveniences such as, say, using your smartphone's camera to browse documents and photos to a local computer or the deject, or providing the aforementioned interface beyond the four platforms that Smart App supports: Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.

Smart App comes with Smart Tasks, a drove of customizable workflow presets that automate repetitive chores such as scanning to your favorite cloud site, scanning to e-mail or local folders on a networked PC or server, or press remotely. You tin edit existing Smart Tasks, or create new ones.

Smart App also performs the optical graphic symbol recognition (OCR) function of converting scanned pages to editable text, a feature that oftentimes requires a separate bundled program.

The OfficeJet 5255'due south standard connectivity interfaces are Wi-Fi, USB 2.0 (for connecting the printer to a single PC), and Wireless Straight, HP's equivalent to Wi-Fi Direct. The last is, of class, a peer-to-peer protocol for connecting mobile devices to the printer without either it or them being function of a local area network.

In addition to Smart App, you become HP Photo Creations, a lightweight photo editor like Catechism's Easy-PhotoPrint Editor or Epson's Creative Impress App, equally well as a drove of templates including photo-book layouts, calendars, and greeting cards.

Slow Print Speeds

HP rates the OfficeJet 5255 at x pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome pages and 7ppm for color prints, which is most as slow as it gets for desktop printers. The Canon Pixma G6020, for example, is rated at xiii blackness pages per minute, while the Blood brother MFC-J805DW claims 12 monochrome pages per minute and 6ppm for color. I tested the OfficeJet 5255 over USB two.0 on our standard Intel Cadre i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Pro. (See how we test printers.)

In the outset leg of our test regimen, I clocked the OfficeJet 5255 every bit it churned out our 12-page Microsoft Give-and-take text document at 11ppm, or 1ppm faster than HP's rating. For the next stage of testing, I timed the OfficeJet 5255 as information technology printed our collection of colorful and circuitous Acrobat PDF files, Excel spreadsheets (with corresponding charts and graphs), and PowerPoint handouts containing business organisation graphics and multiple typefaces at varying sizes and colors. Then I combined these results with those from press the 12-page text document to come up with a score of 4.8ppm for printing our entire 26-page set of exam documents.

That may seem terribly slow, but it's not unusual for this class of printers. The Pixma G6020, for example, managed just 4.3ppm in this test. Brother's MFC-J805DW tied the HP, equally (substantially) did the Pixma TS9520 (four.7ppm).

To consummate my tests, I clocked the OfficeJet 5255 equally it printed two colorful and detailed iv-by-6-inch snapshots. Taking an average of 25 seconds, the OfficeJet beat all merely the Pixma TS9520, if by a negligible two seconds. Overall, the entry-level OfficeJet 5255 held its own against these competitors.

Improve-Than-Acceptable Output Quality

Nowadays, inkjet printer technology has evolved to the extent that I seldom see unacceptable output quality. Granted, some of our more than complex test documents weren't designed with lower-end family and home role printers in mind, but usually even the smallest and least capable machines churn out acceptable-looking documents.

The OfficeJet 5255'due south text came out well-shaped and highly legible down to most 10 points, making information technology better than acceptable for most business organization applications and even more so for the majority of home and family documents. I was also impressed with how well the 5255 handled the gradients and other fills in the full-page Excel graphics and PowerPoint handouts I printed. They displayed very minimal ink-distribution flaws such as banding and streaking.

The test photos I printed looked expert, too, with respectable above-drugstore-quality output. Details were impressive, especially given this AIO's cost, and I saw niggling to no graininess or any other bug owing to low resolution. Overall, given its target market and pricing, I've no complaints about the HP's print quality.

Instant Ink Saves the Day

If you print more than, say, 50 to 100 pages each calendar month, the only way that the OfficeJet 5255 makes sense is if you sign upwardly for HP's Instant Ink consumables subscription plan. Why? Well, without Instant Ink, even if yous buy the and so-called actress-large (Twoscore) cartridges for this machine, your running costs will come out to about 8.iii cents for monochrome pages, and a whopping 21 cents per colour folio.

With Instant Ink, on the other hand, when you opt for the $ix.99-per-calendar month subscription—which delivers upwardly to 300 monochrome or color pages for 3.five cents each—using this little AIO isn't nearly as daunting a proposition. Keep in mind that that 3.5-cent effigy besides includes photographs upwards to alphabetic character-size (8.5 by eleven inches) with 100 percent coverage. Without Instant Ink, such photos could hands cost y'all $1 or more each.

By comparison, Brother's MFC-J805DW and all other INKvestment Tank models print monochrome pages for just under a penny apiece and colour pages for but under five cents each. (Nosotros're talking document pages here, with about 5 to xx percent ink coverage, not photos.) Canon'due south Pixma G6020, at under 1 cent for both black and color pages, is by far the least expensive to use, but then it also has a much higher purchase price ($299.99 list). Nevertheless, if you impress several hundred pages each month, springing for the Pixma may brand more sense—if, that is, you can do without an ADF.

Canon's Pixma TS9520 comes with an ADF, but and then its running costs are like to that of the OfficeJet 5255's—sans Instant Ink, that is. If, however, you have relatively loftier-volume impress and copy requirements and need an automatic document feeder, there are disbelieve-ink AIOs bachelor, such equally Epson'southward EcoTank ET-4760. Granted, it costs three or four times as much as this OfficeJet, but if you print and copy a lot, information technology may be worth it.

A Rubber Entry-Level Choice

Equally an entry-level home and small-part AIO, the OfficeJet 5255 is aptly positioned and priced. It prints, copies, and scans well, and, if you choose Instant Ink, its running costs are both competitive and reasonable. But you can go fifty-fifty lower running costs by choosing Catechism'due south Pixma G6020 (or perhaps one of that company's other MegaTank AIOs) or i of Epson's many EcoTank machines, including the somewhat more robust ET-4760. Otherwise, for relatively low-book duty, the OfficeJet 5255 is a solid option.

HP OfficeJet 5255 All-in-One

Cons

The Bottom Line

The HP OfficeJet 5255 prints well and doesn't cost a lot to use when you subscribe to the company's Instant Ink programme, making it a good low-volume print and copy solution for home and small offices.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/hp-officejet-5255-all-in-one

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