HP Officejet Pro 6978 Review

I know you are on a printer hunt looking for different models. In this article, i am reviewing HP officejet pro 6978.

You know there are lot of noise out there, don’t get lost into features! Let me share my personal experience with you and let’s discuss how these features mean to actual end-users. No dought, this model is a masterpiece on paper but is it really one you need? let’s find out.

HP Officejet Pro 6978 is an All-in-One Printer that offers plenty of features for a really good price and this makes this printer stand out from its competitor. Also, the support for HP’s Instant Ink subscription service gives a good running cost. 

Apart from all of the perks above, the output quality for the photos, graphics, and text makes it rank higher than its competitor. It is a perfect choice for moderate use in small home offices.

Thinking about printing speed? It prints 20,000 pages a month, however, with the recommended volume of 200 to 800 pages a month. 

This model comes with Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) for feeding documents to the scanner.

The ADF capacity is 35-sheet and the best part of this printer is the support for unassisted two-sided scanning, which is a perfect feature for small business or the home offices out there.

The scanner gives out multiple options to save the scanned documents, i.e, JPEG, PDF, RTF, TIF, TXT, etc. 

Control panel of the printer lies in the 2.7-inch colour touch screen surrounded by plenty of buttons including Home, Help, Cancel and Back.

Power consumption of this printer is low too, it consumes only about 27 watts at maximum. It consumes about 5.5 Watts when active and around just 1.21 watts when put on sleep.

Verdict

 Officejet Pro 6978 didn’t surprise us much but it is fully packed with amazing features such as automatic two-sided printing, faxing and copying while along with the competitive printing speeds. It also offers a low colour printing cost. 

This means it’s definitely a great buy for the low-to-moderate volume home office or small business.

The print quality is good enough and we kind of like the output compared to most of the printers in this price range and segment. 

We definitely recommend this printer to the small workgroup. The best thing about this printer is that it is comparatively small and can fit in on all desks with ease. 

However, nothing is perfect so there are some drawbacks for this printer too. The printer’s top document feed sometimes ignores the paper or doesn’t recognize paper when inserted. Overall, this printer is totally a good choice for the small workgroup or the home office.

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1. Functions

The Officejet Pro 6978 is a multifunctional printer with a paper capacity consisting of a 225-sheet tray with an extra 35-sheet capacity for Automatic Document Feeder. It can print, scan, copy and fax.

The printing output from this printer is quite impressive. The texts are crisp and are of good quality and also we didn’t found any smudging of ink on the printing paper we used.

Print resolution of the is pretty good. Let’s have a look at table below to know more.

Secondly, the scan feature on this printer just amazed us, to be honest. In this printer, you get Automatic Duplexing i.e, two-sided scanning from ADF (Automatic Document Feeder).

The resolution of the scanner is pretty high at 1200 dpi, which means it can scan with sharp details. The maximum scan size from the glass is 8.5 x 11.7 inches while from the ADF it is 8.5 x 14 inches for 1-sided and for 2-sided it is 8.3 x 11.7 inches.

This model from HP has the capability of copying as well. It can make up to 99 copies from the original and provides a digital zoom from 25% to a whopping 400%. Same as scanning, it also supports automatic duplexing i.e, two-sided copying.

This printer can scan at a resolution of 600 dpi. The copying speed is good enough, we have compiled a table for the same below.

Last but not least, the fax function comes handy especially for the small home offices or small business. This printer supports both black and white as well as the colour fax.

Speed of faxing is around 4 seconds per page. It supports manual fax send and receives and also the two-sided faxing. 

2. Printing Speed

“23 Pages Per Minute”

The HP Officejet Pro 6978 passed our tests fair enough and is considered above average in terms of the printing speed.

It is fast enough for the printer which is to be kept in the small home offices. To be more specific, check out this table and you will get a pretty good handle of speed of this model if you are concerned about it.

Printing method used in this model from HP is drop-on-demand thermal inkjet printing. It supports both the automatic and the manual duplexing and does the print job pretty fast. The print resolution for the black and white print is 600 dpi while for the color it is automatically selected. 

This printer can handle roughly 20,000 pages per month at its best. The print speed for the photo is, however, a bit slow at 23 PPM but much faster when compared to the other printers in the price segment and range.

To be fair, this is not a photo printer so you shouldn’t be too concerned about photo printing speed. it is just an extra feature that you can use. But you shouldn’t rely on his printer alone to print out photos day in day out. It is great for periodic use when it comes to photo printing.

This printer does perfectly fine with the charts and graphics. The blacks are not denser but look quite clean. Based on price of this printer, quality is pretty acceptable.

Apart from this, the memory of this printer is 1GB which makes it efficient and it can easily store a lot of data to be printed in the queue which is amazing for the offices or workgroup.

Even though the printer is quite small and compact, it comes with a 225 sheet input tray and a 35 sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). This printer can also hold about a maximum of 10 envelopes.

The printer supports various formats and sizes. The borderless printing size for this printer is up to 8.5 x 11 in, 216 x 279 mm. The most used formats supported by this printer are A4, A5, A6 and Card Envelope including many more. 

3. Connectivity

This is a wireless-ready printer. If you’re tech-savvy, then you must be able to set it up without any help from the documentation. If you’re not, no worries there are tons of youtube videos you can get help from.

Even if you aren’t

The printer is easy to set up and it has built-in wireless and comes with 1x USB Host, 1x USB 2.0, 1x LAN and 1x Modem. 

The Mobile Printing feature can be easily done with HP’s Smart App or you can use AirPrint Capability which is also available. The printer has built-in wireless and ethernet option for connectivity making it easier to connect it to the internet for fax or printing via portable devices.

4. Display

The Officejet Pro 6978 is fitted with a gorgeous and crisp 2.65” Colour and Graphic Display (CGD) where all the functions of the printers can be accessed. Although many of the customers of this printer can be old and have a slightly lower vision, then this printer display can be harder to look at.

It is pretty small compared to the HP Officejet Pro 8720 I previously reviewed but it is cheaper model so no complaints.

Apart from being smaller, the display is crisp and shows details and text very clearly. There are three modes in this multi-functional printer, i.e Print, Fax and Copy. These three functions can be easily operated through this little display.

For your ease, the display specifications are:

• Type: Colour Graphic Display (CGD) touchscreen
• Display size: 67.31 mm (2.65 inches) diagonal
• Colour or black and white: Colour

The display on this printer really didn’t hit our nerve, to be honest, it is small and not that sharp enough as you get on the other printer. However, it can be a good pick since 2.65” isn’t that bad after and gets the job done easily.

5. Ink Cost – Rough Estimation:

This printer comes with a total of four individual cartridges and consists 1 black while Cyan, Magenta and Yellow each.HP Officejet Pro 6978 uses HP 902 Cartridge and the HP 902XL Cartridge. The black cartridge if you need to print more documents from the home office then you can use the HP 906 XL which can print about 1500 pages.

However, the detailed table we made below shows you the total pages a cartridge can print at the maximum.

The cost for the printing of the paper in black and white is around 6 cents/page with the standard HP 902 Black Cartridge while for printing the paper in colour is about 4 cents/page. However, if we take HP 902XL the pricing for the Black and white printing cost per page is 2 cents/page while for the colour is same as well. 

If your home office requires a lot of black and white document printing then the HP 906XL can be of great use. It can print around 1500 pages and costs you 3 cents/page.

But there’s nothing to worry about the ink, this printer model supports the Instant Ink Subscription from HP. You can save 50% on the ink.