EXCLUSIVE: HP CM8060 Edgeline Printer review

Combine the operator panel with the options available in the bundled drivers and users have a lot of features to play with. From the printer you can access functions such as copying, scan to email, network folder or the internal hard disk and display a job status. The scan function supports a wide range of formats including PDF, JPEG and TIFF whilst OCR comes as standard. This is provided by ReadIris Pro which is installed on the embedded XP and can output to HTML, CSV and XML. From the driver you can select the professional colour mode but the general office mode aims to deliver draft copies that reduce costs by around 30 per cent and are good enough to used as final copies. We compared draft prints from the usual suspects with those from the CM8060 and they are, indeed, much better quality.

During performance testing we found HP's quoted speeds to be somewhat optimistic although speed really will depend on the type of document as pages may require more than one pass. A basic 100-page Word text document was delivered in 143 seconds for an average of 42ppm. Our 120-page DTP test document with its collection of colour graphics and photographs dropped into the output bin in 237 seconds in professional mode and 209 seconds in general mode for speeds of 30.5ppm and 34.5ppm respectively.

The CM8060 may not impress in the speed stakes but it really scores for print quality. Text is razor sharp even down to the smallest font sizes whilst mono photographs also show very good levels of detail. Charts and graphs in our test reports were cleanly produced and colour blocks laid down with no white edging showing placement to be very accurate. The printer isn't aimed at photographic use and we did find that colour pictures lacked a certain vibrancy. However, the characteristic banding often found with many high speed lasers is virtually non-existent for the professional mode. As with mono pictures we also found the printer was capable of resolving a lot of detail in darker areas of colour photographs. With our performance test we could see colour fades with almost no stepping at all and grey shades using different mixes of cyan, magenta and yellow were reproduced faithfully with no colour casts evident.

The CM8060 delivers an innovative colour inkjet technology that looks a very solid alternative to high volume lasers. We couldn't achieve the quoted speeds during testing but quality is undeniably good and the printer design and operator panel makes it extremely user friendly.