HP OfficeJet Pro 9025 All-in-One Printer Review

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9025 ($329.99) is a color inkjet all-in-one printer designed for use in small to medium-size offices or work groups.

It prints well, comes with two large 250-sheet paper drawers, and has a single-pass automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning, copying, and faxing multiple two-sided pages.

It doesn't quite nudge out the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C5790, which matches most of its features and costs $30 less.

But the OfficeJet Pro 9025's excellent feature set, admirable print quality, and competitive running costs render it one of the best SoHo-centric AIOs available.

High-Performance Compact Cube

Among the top printer makers, HP's ever-evolving designs make for the most interesting-looking line of AIOs, and the OfficeJet Pro 9025 is no exception.

With its two-tone white-on-gun-metal-gray chassis, it's almost a perfectly proportioned 90-degree-angled cube; you won't find any rounded corners or sloping surfaces here.

Even the ADF output bed is completely flat, sans the more traditional sloping basin-like output trays found on most AIOs.

Measuring 12.5 by 12.2 by 15.6 inches (HWD) and weighing 26.4 pounds, the OfficeJet Pro 9025 is significantly smaller and about half as hefty as its color laser AIO counterparts, including Brother's MFC-L3770CDW ($596.01 at Amazon) and Canon's imageClass MF634Cdw (both Editors' Choice recipients).

It's also smaller than its two most closely priced inkjet laser alternative AIOs, the Epson WF-C5790 mentioned earlier and Brother's wide-format MFC-J6945DW.

The OfficeJet Pro 9025 sports a 35-page single-pass ADF for copying, scanning, and faxing two-sided multipage documents.

All the AIOs mentioned previously also come with single-pass ADFs, though they all hold up to 50 pages.

You can set up and initiate walk-up tasks involving the ADF and scanner from the 9025's 2.7-inch touch screen, which comprises the entire control panel.

Also available through the control panel, as well as your smartphone and other mobile devices, are scanner workflow profiles that allow you to designate several aspects of your scan jobs, such as resolution, file type, and destination.

HP touts these as all-new Smart Tasks, and though they are given different names by the various scanner and AIO manufacturers, workflow profiles are available on most machines capable of scanning.

Paper handling on the OfficeJet Pro 9025 consists of two 250-sheet trays and a 100-sheet output tray, which is robust for an AIO at this level.

The Brother and Canon color laser AIOs, for example, hold only 280 and 151 sheets, respectively, while the midrange Epson and Brother inkjet laser alternatives support 330 and 600 sheets, respectively.

The former is expandable to 830 sheets and the latter's 600 sheets are split between three separate sources.

Where the OfficeJet Pro 9025 really holds its own is its 30,000-page maximum monthly duty cycle (and 2,000 pages recommended monthly volume).

That's the same volume rating as the other machines discussed here, except for the Epson WF-C5790's formidable 45,000-page duty cycle.

Copious Connectivity and Security

The OfficeJet Pro 9025's standard interfaces include Ethernet, Wi-Fi, connecting to a single PC via USB, and printing from and scanning to USB thumb drives.

That port is in the lower-right corner of the front of the chassis, as shown below.

You can also connect the printer to various cloud and social media sites through web apps from the control panel, or from the printer's built-in HTTP server, shown below.

The onboard web site can be used to set up security and numerous other features.

Mobile connectivity on the OfficeJet Pro 9025 is a little more versatile than you'll find on some competing office-centric AIOs in that you get, for example, Bluetooth 5 LE (low-energy), which allows multiple simultaneous connections, as well as Wi-Fi Direct, Apple AirPrint, Mopria, and printing directly to the printer locally or over the internet via HP Smart App.

The OfficeJet Pro 9025's security is somewhat different from what you'd find on some other office-centric AIOs.

Instead of setting up user- and department-based access rules, PINs, and other more conventional configurations, it has its own firewall, from which you can control access, including to various features, by IP address, or you can create a universal password for denying any access to the device.

Granted, these may not be what you're used to, but this approach is more than sufficient for an AIO designed for small work group access.

State-of-the-Art Performance

HP rates the OfficeJet Pro 9025 at 24 pages per minute (ppm), which is about average for inkjet laser alternatives in this price range.

I tested it over Ethernet from our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.

The OfficeJet Pro 9025 printed our standard 12-page Microsoft Word test document at the rate of 24.9ppm, or just above its 24ppm rating.

That's 11.1ppm faster than Canon's MF634Cdw, about 2ppm slower than Brother's MFC-3770CDW, 0.5ppm behind Epson's WF-C5790, and 5.6ppm faster than Brother's MFC-J6945DW ($594.99 at Amazon) .

See How We Test Printers

Next, I printed our colorful and complex Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing charts, graphs, and other business graphics, and then combined these results with those from printing the 12-page text document in the previous test, to come up with a score for churning out our entire suite of test business documents.

Here, the OfficeJet Pro 9025 managed a score of 11.3ppm.

That's 1ppm faster than the MFC-L3770CDW, 0.7ppm ahead of the MF634Cdw, 6.4ppm behind the WF-C5790, and 0.9ppm slower than the MFC-J6945DW.

As you can see, speed-wise, the OfficeJet Pro holds up well against both entry-level and midrange competition.

Almost-Perfect Output

As a business-centric AIO and a laser alternative, the OfficeJet Pro 9025 is expected to churn out near-typesetter quality text, as it did during my tests.

Characters were well-shaped and highly legible down to about 6 points, which is more than adequate for most business applications—except, of course, for those that require tiny fonts.

The OfficeJet Pro 9025 also printed our Excel and PowerPoint charts and other business graphics well, except that, in large, dark backgrounds, I did notice dark artifacts that looked like a 0.5-point vertical rules that ran the length of the background.

These were spaced approximately 2 inches apart and look like they occurred each time the printhead returned to start a new row of content.

These lines were in no way unattractive, nor did they detract from the message conveyed by the graphics.

The OfficeJet Pro 9025 is not a photo printer.

However, like most HP printers, this one prints excellent-looking images.

And it has an advantage over the other printers mentioned here (except for Brother's MFC-J6945DW), in that it is capable of printing borderless photos and documents up to letter-size (8.5 by 11 inches).

Competitive Running Costs

If you use HP's highest-yield ink cartridges for the OfficeJet Pro 9025, your running cost will be about 1.8 cents for monochrome pages and 8.3 cents for color pages.

Compared with its entry-level color laser counterparts, these numbers are highly competitive.

The Brother MFC-L3770CDW, for example, delivers ongoing operational costs of 2.6 cents for black pages and 15.5 cents for color and the Canon MF634Cdw's costs per page are about 3.2 cents for monochrome pages and 16.4 cents for color prints.

Epson's higher-volume WF-C5790, on the other hand, operates at about 1.7 cents per monochrome prints and 7.7 cents per color page.

Brother's MFC-J6945DW, one of that company's INKvestment Tank discount ink products, prints at about 1 cent per black page and just less than 5 cents for color pages.

The OfficeJet Pro 9025 is also an Instant Ink-eligible product, which means that you can sign up for HP's subscription ink service.

HP has added a 700-page subscription that sells for $19.95.

At that rate, each page—no matter what the size or percentage of ink coverage—will cost you 2.9 cents.

After 700 pages, each additional page will cost you 5 cents.

If you print predominantly black pages, this is not a very good deal.

If, on the other hand, you print a lot of color pages, especially pages with a high percentage of coverage, such as, say, PowerPoint handouts or photos, Instant Ink could be a good value.

In addition, HP is, at the time of this writing, offering the first two months of your Instant Ink subscription for free.

The company also offers a product that it calls the OfficeJet Pro Premier, a somewhat slower, one-paper-tray version of the OfficeJet Pro 9025 that comes with "two years of ink" and a two-year warranty with a next-business-day exchange.

Standing Out From the Pack

Without question, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9025 is an excellent printer that we have no large complaints about.

The problem is that it's up against some very closely priced stiff competition, including the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C5790.

That model costs $30 less, and mirrors or bests the OfficeJet Pro 9025 in terms of its performance and many of its features.

That said, the OfficeJet Pro 9025 is a fine machine for small offices and work groups with midrange volume requirements.