HP Officejet J6488

Full Review

This HP wasn’t the best performer. The OfficeJet J6488 has a strong feature set along with speed of operation and strikes an overall correct balance. It has an auto duplexer (ability to print on both sides of the paper without manual intervention). For a device targeted at businesses, (albeit SMBs and home offices) this is an extremely useful feature that enables booklet printing with ease and also saves on paper costs (as you can use both sides to print). The spool time was the least on this HP, with the time for first page out being just 17 seconds.

On the connectivity front, the Officejet J6488 has everything – wired LAN, Wi-Fi and of course, USB.

Color photos turned out with no colorcast and were fairly color neutral. We would not recommend this MFD for regular photo printing however – we could make out faint gaps in print where a solid color fill is expected and darker areas of the print lose detail. Note that our tests were conducted with the usual HP 860 and 861 cartridges that came bundled (HP also has special photo printing cartridges made specifically for the purpose). Also, bear in mind that MFDs that are targeted for offices are very unlikely to be used for photo printing. Hence, this aspect has a lesser bearing on the overall score.

On the connectivity front, the Officejet J6488 has everything – wired LAN, Wi-Fi and of course, USB. Network connectivity ensures that the device need not be connected to a PC that needs to be kept on at all times to ensure access. A memory card reader is also present for easy photo printing.

The printer driver offers four quality modes – normal and fast draft, photo and normal – which should suffice pretty much every quality, ink consumption and speed preference. The driver supports both, sRGB and Adobe RGB color profiles – something that advanced users would appreciate. The various driver settings are easy to find and the inclusion of ‘printing shortcuts’ makes it easy for new users to get their print settings right.

The copier has all standard functions – one touch copy for black and white and color, three quality options (the draft setting produces very dull looking output, compared to the same quality level in other MFDs) set magnification and number of copies. It even has a photo enhance mode.

Cost of running is about Rs.3.7 per page, which is fairly standard. HP’s cartridge choices include a more expensive ‘XL’ cartridge which gives you a much higher yield, effectively reducing the cost per print.

Bottom Line

All-in-all, the HP Officejet J4688 printer offers a good mix of performance and features inspite of a lower printing cost.