HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer

All-in-one printers need not be cumbersome devices yoked to a desktop or consigned to a table of their own. The HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer ($349.99) can print, copy, and scan, yet is compact and light enough to fit into a travel bag and be lugged around with a minimum of strain. Like its single-function counterpart, the Editors' Choice HP OfficeJet 200 Mobile Printer , the OfficeJet 250 has better output quality than most inkjets, and it earns an Editors' Choice in its own right, our first for a mobile all-in-one printer.

Design and Features
With its cover closed, the OfficeJet 250 measures 3.6 by 15 by 7.8 inches (HWD), and it expands to 10.6 by 15 by 15.8 inches when the rear paper feeder and the front-facing automatic document feeder (ADF) are extended. It is a smidge larger than its predecessor, the HP OfficeJet 150 Mobile All-in-One , which measures 3.6 by 13.9 by 6.9 inches when closed. The OfficeJet 250 weighs 6.5 pounds (6.7 pounds with its included battery in place), nearly 2 pounds heavier than the OfficeJet 200 (4.6 pounds, 4.9 pounds with battery in place), which measures 2.7 by 14.3 by 7 inches. The addition of the copier and scanner clearly increases the OfficeJet 250's size and weight over a single-function mobile inkjet, but not outrageously so. Still, it's heavier than most laptops, which is much of the reason we have seen very few mobile all-in-one printers.

For paper handling, the OfficeJet 250 has a rear paper feeder that can hold up to 50 letter-width sheets. The feeder does not print automatically on both sides of a page, but does support manual duplexing, which is controlled through the printer's software interface. The recommended duty cycle is up to 300 pages per month. This all matches the capacity of the OfficeJet 150, as well as that of the OfficeJet 200.

But while the HP OfficeJet 150 has a scanner, it only supports the manual feeding of one sheet at a time. The OfficeJet 250 adds a 10-sheet ADF, but like the OfficeJet 150 is limited to simplex (one-sided) scanning. It can scan and save to PDF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, and RTF formats. It scanned a 10-page document from the ADF to PDF format at a speed of 4 pages per minute (ppm), a typical speed for a basic portable scanner.

To the left of the ADF lies a 2.7-inch touch screen that can be tilted forward for easy viewing. From it, you can initiate scans (to email, computer, or USB thumb drive inserted into a port on the printer's side) and copy documents, as well as launch HP Web apps.

Connectivity choices include USB and Wi-Fi, as well as peer-to-peer with a computer or mobile device via Wi-Fi Direct. The OfficeJet 150 offered only Bluetooth. Being both AirPrint and Mopria Alliance compatible, the OfficeJet 250 can print from iOS and Android phones and tablets. For the bulk of my testing, I connected it to a PC running Windows 10 via USB.

Printing Speed
I timed the OfficeJet 250 at 9.4ppm in printing the text-only (Word) portion of our new business applications suite, which is very close to its 10ppm rating for printing in black. First-page-out time averaged 10 seconds. The printer slowed down only slightly to 9ppm when I switched from AC to battery power.

On our full business suite, which includes PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files in addition to the aforementioned Word document, the OfficeJet 250 averaged 4.3ppm. I timed the HP OfficeJet 220, which tied the OfficeJet 200's speeds in printing the text-only document, at 4.5ppm for the entire suite.

I can't directly compare these results with those from printers I tested on the business part of our old test suite, which included a higher percentage of complex, graphics-heavy documents. Photo printing is a different matter, and the OfficeJet 250 proved much faster than machines I'd previously tested, printing out 4-by-6 photos in an average of 27 seconds, the exact same time as the OfficeJet 250 and far faster than the OfficeJet 150's 3:08.

Output Quality
The OfficeJet 250's print quality is slightly above par for an inkjet, with average text and slightly above-par graphics and photos. Text should be good enough for any use short of those requiring very small fonts. Be sure not to let the output fall into a basket when printing, as the ink is more smudge-prone than usual when wet.

In our graphics testing, the OfficeJet 250 did well in printing thin lines, and reasonably well at handling gradients and zones of similar color. Colors were well saturated and background fills were largely smooth, although a few backgrounds showed mild banding. Graphics quality should be adequate for, say, PowerPoint handouts. Most photo prints were at least the quality you'd expect from drugstore prints, and in a few cases were better.

Running Costs
Mobile printing is not cheap, and the OfficeJet 250's running costs are typical of portable inkjets: 6 cents per black page and 15.6 cents per color page. These match the running costs of the OfficeJet 200. The printer uses two cartridges: one for black ink and one tricolor (yellow/cyan/magenta). The high-yield black cartridge is rated at up to 600 pages, while the high-yield color cartridge is rated at up to 415 pages, considerably in excess of the highest-capacity cartridges offered by Canon and Epson. You shouldn't have to change cartridges all that frequently, which is a real strength in a mobile printer.

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Conclusion
Not everyone needs to both print and scan while on the road, but if you do, you needn't lug separate devices. The HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer can handle both these tasks, and it can copy, too. Output quality is better than you'll get from many desktop inkjets, and should be fine for formal reports and even PowerPoint handouts. As the all-in-one counterpart to the HP OfficeJet 200, our Editors' Choice mobile inkjet printer, the OfficeJet 250 adds scanning and copying to the mix for only a modest increase in size, weight, and price. It earns our first Editors' Choice as a mobile all-in-one printer.