HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 review

The HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One delivers on all fronts. It offers a blend of portability and great printing, with loads of extra features.

HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 review
(Image: © HP)

Top Ten Reviews Verdict

The HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 is the king of the castle when it comes to compact printers, offering an unbeatable combination of excellent print quality and portability.

Pros

  • +

    Excellent print quality

  • +

    Looks great

  • +

    Portable

Cons

  • -

    Expensive

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If you’re looking for a premium quality printer but don’t have space for a bulkier model, then the HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 will be perfect for you thanks to its compact size, portability, and great quality printing. The HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 has it all and that’s why it takes the top spot in our best compact printers showdown.

The HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 fits the compact printer description perfectly. Measuring 14.96 x 7.8 x 3.6 inches and weighing 6.51 pounds (without the battery, still under 7lbs with), it’s small and light enough to fit comfortably into a backpack if you need to carry it around with you, though if you’re looking for something truly lightweight you should check out the Brother PocketJet PJ763mfi.

Unlike other compact printers though, the HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 comes complete with a scanner so you can copy documents, a color touchscreen for easy operation, and a built-in power meter so you can tell how much life is left in the battery. The battery itself will last for around 500 pages worth of printing, which means you should be able to get a few days use out of it if you take it along on a business trip. Plus you can just recharge it using the power cable in the evenings.

HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 review: Print Quality

Its small size isn’t the only thing to love about the HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250, though. This compact inkjet has very good print quality, whether you’re printing off simple text or full-color PowerPoint slides. In our testing, the OfficeJet 250’s print quality was on par with larger desktop inkjet printers, producing documents with few to no errors – there was minimal spotting and no noticeable streaking or alignment problems, and it handled large swathes of color with only mild banding. This HP model printed some of the highest-quality documents out of all the printers that we’ve tested. It’s also one of the fastest compact printers, printing black-and-white documents at eight pages per minute.

HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 compact printer

(Image credit: HP)

The HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 is built to print crisp text and sharp images on letter- and legal-size paper up to 8.5 x 14 inches. Thanks to its high print resolution of 4800 x 1200, it can comfortably print photos as well, provided you have some photo paper and the ink to spare. We were also super impressed with how quiet the HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 was when printing.

HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 review: Features

As an inkjet printer, the HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 uses a two-cartridge system, with one cartridge for black ink and the second for cyan, magenta and yellow ink. We don’t recommend tri-color ink cartridges on normal printers, but in a compact printer, it’s par for the course. In any event, HP offers a pretty good page yield for each cartridge, with a standard black cartridge producing some 200 pages and the tri-color cartridge lasting 165 pages, which is pretty good value for money when you consider that a cartridge usually costs around $18-$24. If you want to make printing even more affordable, HP also sells high-capacity, XL versions of its ink cartridges, bumping up the page yields to 600 and 415 pages, respectively.

The HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250’s paper input feeder holds up to 50 pages of standard paper, which is the largest capacity offered on a mobile printer. It also has an automatic document feeder, so you can run multipage documents through its scanner. The scanner only reads one side of the page, but it can both scan and copy. You can scan to a variety of file formats, including PDF, JPEG and TIFF.

HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 compact printer

(Image credit: HP)

In our testing, the copy quality was quite good. When we copied regular text documents, the results were clean and readable, thanks to the HP’s scanning resolution, which was the best we saw in our review. It also copies images pretty well, with minimal banding or color issues and fairly good detail clarity, even in dark and shadowed images. It did wash out light colors a little bit in one of the images we copied, but even that was minimal.

Its connectivity options are also the best of the bunch – you can plug into a home computer with USB; print over WiFi from your laptop, smartphone, or tablet; and even print via Bluetooth from other mobile devices. The printer doesn’t have native support for print standards like Apple AirPrint or Google Cloud Print, but HP does have its own HP ePrint app available on both platforms, and you can print from all major mobile devices through the app. It also supports Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 Review: Price and Warranty

The HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 has an MSRP of $379, which is on the pricier end of the scale for compact printers. With that said, you get a lot of bang for your buck here with excellent print quality, extra features like a scanner, and portability all packed into one device. If you want something a little cheaper, check out the HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250’s smaller sibling, the HP OfficeJet Mobile 200.

HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 compact printer

(Image credit: HP)

HP covers the OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One with a one-year warranty, with additional service plans available for a small fee at time of purchase. HP’s support services and tools are some of the best in the business; you can contact support personnel via phone, email and popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The company also provides online manuals and troubleshooting guides so you can track down information and fix problems on your own, and you can browse frequently asked questions and post to a customer support forum for further assistance.

Should you buy the HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250?

The HP OfficeJet All-in-One 250 is easily the best compact printer that we’ve tested. It delivers on all fronts, with print quality that even some full-sized printers would struggle to match combined with portability that lets you take it just about anywhere. It’s a little pricier than some other models out there, but you get what you pay for here.

Jessica Richards

Jessica Richards is a former writer for Top Ten Reviews. She graduated with a master’s degree in English from Weber State University, where she now teaches. You'll find her bylines across a number of articles concerning software, especially when it comes to typing software. She has also written about grammar checker software packages too.