Top pick
Easy-to-use software, affordable ink, a long warranty, and thoughtful touches make this inkjet all-in-one less annoying than the competition. Results look sharp, too. But consider carefully before opting in to HP+ or Instant Ink.
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e is remarkably easy to set up and use, hitting the sweet spot of print quality, speed, and reliability in a way that other printers can’t match. Its sleek design also helps it stand out from stodgy-looking competitors, which is almost enough to make us forgive its tiny touchscreen and flimsy output tray.
With the 9125e, you can opt in to HP’s Instant Ink subscription service and a “free” HP+ membership, which extends your warranty and can reduce your printing costs. But it also limits how you can use your printer, so we recommend weighing your options carefully before deciding to join. More on that below.
It offers a seamless setup process. An on-screen keyboard makes it trivially easy to connect the 9125e to Wi-Fi to complete the install process. During testing, we were up and running in less than 10 minutes, including the ink-cartridge install. The process is smooth and modern enough that it makes other printer makers’ comparably clunky installers feel decidedly last-generation.
From your smartphone, you can download the HP Smart app (Android, iOS) and add the printer in just a couple of steps.
One downside to the app-guided installation is that it barrages you with “exclusive” offers to join HP+ and Instant Ink. Refuse, and it’ll offer again—with increasing intensity. If you know going in that you want to sign up (or don’t), it’s easy to tap the right button. But if you’re not prepared, you can quickly get sucked into a decision that turns out to be irreversible.
Instant Ink can make financial sense. The tiered program is based on how much you expect to print each month, from 10 to 700 pages. (A three-month trial is included with your printer purchase, provided that you sign up for HP+.)
With Instant Ink, the cost per page is 14.9¢ at worst and 4¢ at best—but one nice thing about the program is that printing color pages costs the same as printing in black. When your ink runs low, the service automatically ships new cartridges at no added cost. Unused pages roll over, up to three times your plan amount, and if you burn through your allotted pages (and your rollover) in a given month, extra “sets” of 10 to 15 pages cost $1 each.
Plus, enrolling in the Instant Ink program extends the machine’s warranty to two years.
But weigh your options before committing to Instant Ink or HP+. To get the three-month free trial of Instant Ink, you have to sign up for HP+, an optional service that adds a number of features to the 9125e. These include a more advanced HP Smart app, cloud-based connectivity and security, and the aforementioned extended two-year warranty.
However, HP+ also permanently locks your printer into using original HP ink cartridges. This means you cannot ever use third-party ink or remanufactured cartridges, which limits your choices and leaves you at the mercy of HP’s pricing.
HP+ also requires your printer to be connected to the internet at all times, or it may cease to function until it reconnects. For people with a less than perfectly stable internet connection, this restriction could be very frustrating. When the printer is not connected to the internet, it stops printing and displays an error message.
Finally, if you opt to use Instant Ink and later cancel your subscription, you will not be able to use any ink remaining in the current cartridges.
There’s no need to second-guess maintenance levels. The HP Smart software suite (available for both computers and mobile devices) allows you to check ink levels, order replacement ink, adjust settings remotely, and access the printer’s Embedded Web Server, a control panel designed for power users. In HP’s all-in-one approach, few functions are more than a click or two away.
It’s cost-effective, though not as cheap as its predecessor. The 9125e comes with enough ink in the box for roughly 800 black-and-white pages or 420 color pages. A full set of high-yield HP 936e EvoMore cartridges runs about $240 and lasts for approximately 2,500 monochrome pages or 1,650 color pages. That works out to a reasonable 3.2¢ per page for printing in black or 12.8¢ for color.
The OfficeJet Pro 9015e, the model we used to recommend, was a little less expensive on a per-page basis, but the 9125e is still a bargain in comparison with most other non-ink-tank all-in-ones, with the exception of our budget pick.
Its print prowess is on point. In our tests, text from the 9125e came out dark and was sharp and readable down to about 4 points in most fonts. Graphics were crisp and vibrant on default settings, and we saw minimal banding when printing full-page graphics on copy paper.
Glossies popped under the Best quality setting. This optional print setting helped our borderless 8.5-by-11-inch glossies look fantastic on the fridge despite having colors that skewed slightly bluer and had more contrast than the source photos.
It’s plenty fast. HP says that this model can print up to 22 monochrome pages per minute or 18 color pages per minute. In our testing with a grayscale IRS 1099-MISC instruction sheet and a color office doc (both PDFs), the 9125e printed at 12 ppm and 8.1 ppm, respectively. Duplex printing wasn’t much slower, at about 8 pages per minute in both grayscale and color.
But printing a text-only Google Docs file put the 9125e’s speed much closer to HP’s estimate, as we clocked it at a respectable 21.4 pages per minute.
Scanning was similarly brisk in our tests, averaging 9.2 pages per minute in grayscale and 6.5 pages per minute in color. Those numbers dropped to 4.5 ppm and 3.9 ppm, respectively, when we did two-sided scanning. If you have more demanding needs, consider a printer that can handle single-pass duplex scanning, such as our laser upgrade pick.
If you don’t regularly have big print jobs, the delay in duplex output may not matter. “I usually print double-sided, and I have never been bothered by the pause between sides,” says Wirecutter senior editor Marguerite Preston, who has owned the very similar, previous-generation 9015e for three years. “It’s plenty fast for me.”
It’s less likely to malfunction. In our testing, the 9125e’s paper handling was nearly flawless. It dealt with both full and nearly empty trays, it didn’t balk at scanning crumpled paper, and it never grabbed two pages when it was supposed to grab one. And our scans from the automatic document feeder came out almost completely straight, a rarity among printers we’ve tested (including some other HP models).
It’s an attractive addition to a workstation. We prefer the clean, sharp, and modern look of the OfficeJet Pro 9125e to the bulbous design of previous-generation OfficeJet machines. Aesthetics are less than a tertiary concern when it comes to office equipment, but if your printer is going to live in your home office for at least a couple of years, why not pick one that’s easier on the eyes?
Flaws but not dealbreakers
- The HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e’s biggest shortcoming is its single 250-sheet paper tray. Since the machine has only one tray, you need to manually swap out your plain letter paper whenever you need to print on something else—whether it’s legal, labels, glossy photo stock, or résumé paper.
- The touchscreen is on the small side at just 2.7 inches. The touchscreen works fine, but the limited real estate makes it hard to hit the smallest on-screen buttons, such as the gear icon that takes you to the Settings menu. Be prepared for a few frustrating mis-taps.
- The 9125e’s colors aren’t perfectly accurate. In our test prints, glossy photos skewed slightly blue and magenta and displayed overaggressive contrast. Photographers should opt for a dedicated photo printer instead.
- As mentioned above, if you enroll in HP+ for the discounted printing fees and extended warranty, you’re locked into using HP ink exclusively, and your printer must remain online at all times or it simply won’t print. HP ink is reasonably priced in general, but this kind of anti-consumer behavior is disappointing to see.
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