For a long time color laser printers were the best for office use because they offered high capacity, crisp text printing and had a good price per print. Nowadays inkjets are starting to be more competitive, and offer lower printing costs. The speed of inkjet has also improved and the technology is extremely good when it comes to printing imagery and photographs. The same can’t be said about lasers.

The quality of the K8600dn is very competitive. It manages to produce crisp text that’s very similar to the one produced by a laser printer while the photos printed by it look natural and good quality. This HP printers uses four-color printing and is equipped with tanks that load behind the door you’ll find on the front of the printer.

There are two print heads, one for black and yellow and the other for magenta and cyan. The tanks are high capacity and will last somewhere in between 830 and 1070 prints (for standard capacity) or 1510 to 2500 pages (high-yield). Speeds are satisfying for a small office and the HP K8600dn can produce up to 35 pages per minute in draft (both color and mono) or 13 pages per minute in quality that can be compared to the one of laser printers.

Office printers need to also offer good paper capacity. In the case of the K8600dn you’ll be getting a 250 input tray. The lid of the input tray serves as an output tray and has a capacity of 150 sheets. Also featured is an automatic duplexer that allows cost and time saving by printing on both sides of paper. The K8600dn can handle a wide variety of media types and sizes. The list includes envelopes, transparencies, photo paper, cards and others. Connecting this printer can be done through high speed USB 2.0. Standard connectivity also includes HP Jetdirect Fast Ethernet embedded Print server and you can optionally make use of HP Jetdirect external print servers.

Finally, the HP Officejet Pro K8600dn wide format color inkjet printer is not the most affordable of the bunch and most offices will find some of its features a bit too much, as they only need the more basic printing capabilities. The quality is pretty good but unfortunately not as good as a high-end color laser (that you’d most likely be able to get for around the same price). On top of that some users may be inconvenienced by the way you need to load paper with this printer. Raising the tray and struggling with it every time you need to refresh paper is somewhat annoying.