HP’s OfficeJet Pro 9015e is a compact all-in-one printer for your home office or small business that promises fast print speeds, top quality, and several advanced options that will get the job done reliably day after day.

I went hands-on with this workhorse to see whether it offers good value compared to lower-cost models. It’s not perfect, but with its fast and high-quality printing, I can see why it’s become such a popular option.

Design

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e is an attractive printer with a footprint of just 17.3 inches by 13.5 inches by 10.5 inches. That’s small, considering it’s a robust, all-in-one inkjet that carries the HP’s pro moniker. With accents in medium and dark gray on a white body, it looks good alongside modern décor or in a work environment.

The 2.7-inch color touchscreen makes it easy to access copying, scanning, and printing without needing another device. There’s even a USB port on the side to plug in a thumb drive to load and save documents and images. You can use all of the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e’s basic features with nothing more than a pocketable USB drive.

The generous paper tray can hold up to 250 sheets at a time, so you’ll make fewer trips to the printer to refill, but as it’s the only one, it makes one-off prints more complicated. If you switch media types and paper sizes infrequently, that might not matter.

HP estimates that the XL ink cartridges can print up to 2,000 pages in black-and-white and 1,600 pages in color before being changed. The standard cartridges last for up to 1,000 black-and-white and 700 color pages.

HP annotates paper guides with friendly icons that indicate the correct way to insert blank paper for printing. The flatbed scanner and document feed has similar markings to help you align photos or documents for scanning.

Printing performance

The print speed is immediately apparent from the very first use. Warm-up takes only a few seconds, and the first page rolls out in about 10 seconds. It can print up to 22 pages per minute (ppm) in black-and-white, slowing only slightly to 18 ppm in full color.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e’s color prints shoot out faster than some inkjets can print monochrome. That makes this inkjet competitive with low-cost laser printers when comparing print speed, particularly for small and medium-sized jobs.

Quality is outstanding for both monochrome and color printing. Borderless printing is possible even on letter-sized paper. Most impressive is knowing that performance and quality should continue even with a long and heavy workload. HP rates the OfficeJet Pro 9015e as having a duty cycle of up to 25,000 pages each month.

Such a massive amount of printing would empty a full paper tray 100 times over. Realistically, few people print that much, but it’s nice to know that HP says you can push its printer that hard without affecting performance.

Special features

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e includes a flatbed scanner and automatic document feeder that can process 35 sheets at a time. You can scan both sides of a page when using the feeder. The sharpness looks great, and the colors are accurate. Output can be saved as PDF, JPEG, and other formats.

Scans can be sent to a computer, a smartphone, or a thumb drive. There are even advanced options for scanning to email, a network folder, and the cloud via SharePoint.

The copy controls are easy to use directly from the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e’s touchscreen. Simply place photos or documents on the glass or in the feeder, then hit the copy button. You can reduce documents to as small as 25% of the original size or scale up to 400%.

Software and compatibility

HP printers work with any device. The OfficeJet Pro 9015e is instantly recognized by Windows, macOS, and even ChromeOS. If a driver is needed, the operating system handles that painlessly since HP is such a well-known brand. HP says it’s compatible with Linux, but I don’t have a computer with that operating system for testing.

Setting up the printer takes just a few minutes, and the quick start guide included in the box makes it simple. Power it up, plug in the four ink cartridges, matching each color to the corresponding slot inside the printer. The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e prints an alignment sheet, then asks you to place it in the scanner. It scans and automatically adjusts the print heads, if needed, to ensure optimal quality.

You can install the HP Smart app to use the full features of the OfficeJet Pro 9015e with an iPhone or Android phone. Using a smartphone is recommended since it makes Wi-Fi setup effortless. Wireless is so convenient that I can’t imagine having to route cables or keep the printer near my computer anymore. However, you can connect the OfficeJet Pro directly to a computer with USB or Ethernet cables if you’d like.

The mobile app has an optical character recognition (OCR) feature to convert to text, and an automatic cropping feature allows multiple photos to be scanned at once. Unfortunately, those extra scanning features don’t always produce the best results at this time. Borderless printing is easy to select from a computer, but I could only get it to work from a smartphone by selecting photo paper on the printer’s touchscreen after loading paper in the tray.

HP is aware of the mobile app issues and is working on an update to correct these problems.

Low-cost and economical printing

For a fast and rugged printer, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e has a friendly price. It retails for $290, but is often discounted to slightly more than $200. That’s hard to beat for such a durable and quick all-in-one printer.

It comes with six months of free ink if you sign up for HP+ with Instant Ink. HP will email you before the paid subscription begins, allowing you to cancel and manage supplies for yourself. The Instant Ink plan takes all of the work out of the process and offers discounted prices as well.

With any printer, supply costs can significantly impact the long-term value. In the case of the OfficeJet Pro, ink costs are quite low, even without an HP+ subscription. That means the total cost of ownership for an HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e might be less than cheaper printers that have a lower initial price, but more expensive ink.

Based on HP’s estimated number of pages per cartridge, the ink cost for black-and-white printing could be as low as two cents per page. If you buy standard-yield cartridges, an average color page might use 10 cents worth of ink to print. When using XL color ink cartridges, that would drop to seven cents. Paper cost is not included in this calculation.

That’s very affordable and makes the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e a great value choice if other aspects of this all-in-one printer work well with your intended use.

Is this the printer for you?

If you often switch between printing documents, envelopes, and photos, the paper tray must be emptied and refilled between every media change. Then you have to select the correct paper from the touchscreen menu. Many printers, including the slightly more expensive HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e, have a secondary input tray that takes the hassle out of printing envelopes and photos.

That might be enough to put you off of the otherwise excellent HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e. But if you want a home business printer that can do everything, including scanning, copying, and rapidly knocking out big print jobs without breaking a sweat, it’s hard to beat this solid all-in-one printer from HP.

Editors' Recommendations

Tommy Gardner, chief technology officer at HP Federal and vital participant in Executive Mosaic’s GovCon Expert program, is a seasoned veteran of the government-serving technology space. He has nursed a fascination with engineering since he was a young child, taking after a lineage of mechanical engineers in his father and both grandfathers. His career began with 28 years in the U.S. Navy, a time which he deems “a lot of fun” due to intensive engineering and information technology work.

The executive’s trajectory after the Navy has been a storied and highly accomplished timeline, heading up the technological outfits of a series of high-profile government contracting companies. He was director of science and technology at Raytheon and chief technology officer for lengthy stints at ManTech, Jacobs and Scitor. He says he aims to continuously accrue knowledge so that he brings a little more wisdom and expertise to each new organization.

“I’m still a little mole hill, but at least I can look up to the mountains and understand what they’re talking about,” Gardner said humbly. He sat down with GovCon Wire for an Executive Spotlight interview where he proved himself far more than small-statured. During the conversation, he touched on the knotty issues surrounding digital ethics, the immense threat posed by cyber bad actors and why he thinks application interfaces, or APIs, are the most concerning cyber threat.

Interested in learning more about the most pressing cyber trends and issues of today? Register for Potomac Officers Club’s upcoming 2023 Cyber Summit! It will be a packed day of informative keynotes and dynamic panel seminars, with ample networking opportunities.

Can you talk about the importance of AI ethics? Explain why we should be paying more attention to ethical AI.

AI ethics are something that we don’t focus on enough. We focus on cyber ethics even less. I teach a course on this subject Monday nights to graduate students at Catholic University. There are not a whole lot of courses in the U.S. on cyber ethics. Ethics is kind of baked into other courses, I’m sure, but not a course focused on that.

When I was at Black Hat DEF CON last year, I asked the founder, Jeff Moss (Dark Tangent), if he could recommend a book on the subject and he suggested Ethical Machines by Reid Blackman. The book is a very good explanation of how to think about things as they relate to technology and cyber. The subtitle is Your Concise Guide to Totally Unbiased, Transparent and Respectful AI. If we want to be ethical, we have to learn to be respectful of people and genders and ethnicity and age. If we can’t do that correctly, we’ve got to step back and decide, is AI beneficial or is it harmful? We want to create things that benefit society at HP, so certainly we’re going to be taking an ethical track to the development of our products and our software and our offerings to the public. I’m trying to look at the broader cyber ethics arena, more than just AI, including digital ethics at large, so Jeff additionally pointed me toward This is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth. Nicole is a writer for the New York Times who wrote about some of the espionage that was going on in the National Security Agency, specifically, Edward Snowden.

When I taught my course and the students and began talking about cyber ethics with this book, the main issues we wrestled with were: is it okay for your company to sell to governments that are trying to learn about national security? Should we be working with people like the FBI or the NSA or the Central Intelligence Agency? Is that okay? Is that ethical? To answer that question, you have to understand what your ethical framework is. What is the basis, the first principles that you believe in?

Can you talk about how cybersecurity has impacted or changed the national security paradigm? What new trends or shifts are you seeing at the intersection of cybersecurity and national security, and how are those trends influencing the public sector today?

Cybersecurity has impacted our national security in many ways. When we started creating all of the digital information that is out there, no one thought about it getting into someone else’s hands. Previously, you needed physical access to secure espionage information or corporate intelligence information for criminals to act. That no longer is the case. National borders became irrelevant in the cyber world.

You can attack from anywhere in the world. The threat vectors instantly multiplied when that became a realization. Even before the internet, back in the 1990s, you had digital information, but no one really thought about it being risky to hold and carry that around. It was like a briefcase, a stack of papers. You just had your floppy disk and your information was held there. Today, you have a constant threat of bombardment, a constant threat of attack. At HP, we have a software program to protect against ransomware. Because when you experience a loss of data that you incorporated, it’s stopping your operations and you may have to pay vast sums to get things back up and running. Our ransomware protection is very effective at a reasonable cost.

The world is changing and attackers are adapting quickly. The attackers learn from every attack to know what worked and what didn’t. And they’ve tried every possible approach. They have AI algorithms to make sure they leave no stone unturned. We are monitoring that, and we should be monitoring that because as they get better, we have to get better too.

We have the world’s most secure PCs and printers because of the work we put in to the design of our products. Zero Trust principles were started in 1992 by HP, when we designed products with a trusted compute module. That was seven years before the term Zero Trust became mainstream. Why? Because it was the right thing to do. We wanted our customers safe, and we wanted them protected. As such, we create these protections in our products with a Zero Trust philosophy.

The national security implications are just tremendous. It took a while for countries to wake up to the reality of their vulnerabilities. Once they realized the vulnerabilities, they started putting up defenses. At first it was like: ‘we’re going to put a castle with a moat around it and protect everybody.’ Well, all of a sudden you realize, there are threats that are inside the castle already. A quest for the most secure option got away from perimeter defense into only forming a basis of trust and work in order to allow access either by individuals or other machines that have been Tested trustworthy.

Cybersecurity is very important to economic security, which is very important to national security or defense security. They’re all intertwined. Cyber is now finally being recognized as a major domain in warfare along with air, sea and land warfare, even though electronic warfare has been with us since before World War II. It has changed and evolved over time. Right now, it’s probably one of the biggest threat vectors and can be one of the biggest differentiators in warfare.

Cybersecurity impacts the broader economic, diplomatic and even the critical infrastructure protections that we have in our country.

What is the biggest threat facing U.S. cyber systems today, and what is being done to protect against that threat?

Ransomware is probably today’s biggest threat. There are many solutions out there which is good. You want a variety of solutions for the public to choose from.  This competition in products is good for the country and cybersecurity overall. I’m actually not as worried about ransomware as I used to be. Today, I’m most worried about application interfaces.

While teaching the Catholic University course, which is about cyber attack methodologies and covers certified ethical hackers, we focused on how easy it is to hack into an API and manipulate things and to get into systems. APIs are talking software to software. There’s no person in the loop between them. And that’s why they’re very vulnerable, because they have to be open to other software packages trying to approach and either provide information or take information. I have some concerns that we, as an industry, must shore up capability in APIs.

Do you think the United States’ cybersecurity efforts are keeping up with demand? If not, how can we accelerate and broaden cybersecurity?

It’s a dynamic world and it’s nonlinear, so it’s not like you can project a path of cyber defenses and try to jump or leapfrog ahead to get there before the enemy does. No, it’s going in multiple directions at the same time. I liken it to a quantum computing problem where you’ve got a computer that’s not just dealing with zeros and ones, but it’s dealing with zero, one at the same time, simultaneously going in 360-degree spherical directions exploring vectors. That’s the way the cyber problem is expanding. We need to recognize the inherent issues of that expansion to foster protection or help folks see the path they’re on and then try to leapfrog, when we understand the direction they’re going, the motivations they have and most importantly where the money’s going.

We need to demand that all companies be the best that’s available and then have a commitment to continuously Boost as we see the threats changing. We must rapidly change and shift to get ahead of them or get a solution or patch is the best it could be or the holes that are there. That’s both in the hardware and the software side. You can’t just pick one. You have to do both. You have to pick the best hardware and the best software and master the combination of the two and how they work together.

There are plenty of MacBook Pro alternatives, but perhaps none come as close to Apple's minimalist aesthetic as the HP Dragonfly Pro (OK, maybe the Samsung Galaxy Books, too). The Razer Blade 14's slab-like enclosure is a close facsimile to the sleek yet sturdy 14-inch MacBook Pro, but it's geared toward gamers -- an entirely different audience than the MacBook Pro's. The 14-inch Dragonfly Pro boasts a similarly clean and rigid design and targets the same mainstream "pro" users. And priced at a reasonable $1,400, it costs hundreds less than the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

HP designed the Dragonfly Pro for a more narrow audience than simply mainstream laptop users, though. The specific target is on-the-go, constantly connected freelancers and hybrid employees splitting time between home and office. To attract them, HP made a couple of unusual inclusions. 

HP dedicated keyboard space for four hotkeys, one of which connects you to HP's 24/7 live support, included for the first year. The other inclusion will likely be more useful to you: a high-res webcam for looking your best during Zoom meetings and the like. Even if you don't use the complimentary concierge support or extend it past the first year, the HP Dragonfly Pro is a great pick for Windows users yearning for a laptop that matches the best that Apple offers. 

 We reviewed the baseline HP Dragonfly Pro model for $1,400. It features an AMD Ryzen 7 7736U CPU, 16GB of RAM, integrated AMD Radeon Graphics and a 512GB SSD. The step-up model costs $1,550 and doubles the RAM to 32GB and the SSD to 1TB. The only other configurable item is the color: ceramic white or sparkling black; we received the latter. The 14-inch touch display features a 1,920x1,200-pixel with a 16:10 aspect ratio and is rated for 400 nits of brightness. 

By the way, there's also a Dragonfly Pro Chromebook. Given the pricing of the Windows 11-based models, it feels overpriced at $1,000 for a Chromebook with a 12th-gen Core i5 CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Oddly, the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook has a better display with a 2,560x1,600-pixel resolution and an impressive rated brightness of 1,200 nits.

As configured, our Dragonfly Pro test system produced solid performance results. It finished in the middle of the pack on most of our benchmarks among a group of similarly priced laptops that feature an Intel Core i7-12700H CPU. It lasted roughly 7.5 hours on our demanding battery drain test, another average result. You'll be able to eke out a longer runtime when you aren't constantly streaming a video. In anecdotal testing, the Dragonfly Pro felt peppy, operated quietly and didn't lag during a variety of multitasking scenarios.

In proximity to another Pro

The Dragonfly Pro is a stunner. The chassis is a matte-black thing of beauty. The finish has a soft texture to it that's pleasing to the touch -- it feels like the world's finest-grit sandpaper. Branding, as well as the ports, are kept to a minimum to complete the minimalist expression. HP's funky logo is centered on the lid and again on the center of the bottom screen bezel. Tiny Bang & Olufsen wordmarks sit on each side of the laptop. And that's it for branding. I appreciate the distinct lack of AMD Ryzen CPU and Radeon GPU stickers on the wrist rest.

The aluminum-and-magnesium alloy body feels rigid and sturdy. Like the MacBook Pro, the Dragonfly Pro prioritizes a rock-solid chassis over chasing headlines for being extraordinarily thin and light. That's not to say it's a hulking desktop replacement you can't carry with you. The Dragonfly Pro weighs 3.4 pounds, which is about 1.5 ounces lighter than the MacBook Pro 14. The edges are gently rounded, making it slightly thicker than the 14-inch MacBook Pro: 0.7-inch thick compared to the MacBook Pro 14's 0.6. 

The Dragonfly Pro sits on two wide rubber feet on the bottom panel. Between them is a strip of venting that's the only visible venting on the chassis. The wide feet allow for airflow underneath the laptop and also make convenient and comfortable grips with which to carry the laptop.

Apple added some ports back to the latest MacBook Pros after a few iterations of limited connectivity. However, the Dragonfly Pro offers extremely limited connectivity. There are three USB-C ports, and that's it. Two of the ports have Thunderbolt 3 support, and the other is a plain USB Type-C port with a 10Gbps transfer speed. The pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports offer four times the transfer speed. There isn't much of a difference between Thunderbolt 3 and 4 -- both offer 40Gbps speed, but Thunderbolt 3 can support only one 4K display while Thunderbolt 4 can support two. Thunderbolt support on AMD-based laptops is a rarity, however, so at least that's in HP's favor.

What's missing from the port selection? There are no USB-A ports or an Ethernet jack. There's no SD card slot, micro or full-size. And most notably, there's no headphone jack. If your go-to headphones are Bluetooth, then this audio-jack omission isn't a big deal. If you have a wired set, then you'll need to get -- and then not lose -- an adapter, which is always a pain.

The keyboard is a pleasure to use. The keys have a firm response with just the right amount of travel. The stiff magnesium keyboard deck creates a flex-free foundation on which to type. There's two-level backlighting for the keyboard, and helpful LEDs on three of the function keys: the volume-mute key, the microphone-mute key and the webcam kill-switch button. They glow orange when engaged, so you know at a glance when you are muted or have killed the power to the webcam.

Function-row LEDs aside, the big news with the keyboard is the four gray keys along the keyboard's right edge. They open up the MyHP app, where you can access settings and live support. The top button opens up a general settings page in the MyHP app that's not all that useful. The second button opens the support page in MyHP, where you can speak to or chat with a member of the 24/7 Pro Live Support team. The third button opens a page in MyHP where you can adjust audio and video settings for the webcam. The fourth button can be configured to open an application, website, file or folder of your choosing.

I tested the chat feature and asked about the MyHP hotkeys. After taking a minute to create an account, I chatted with a support tech within three minutes, who was cheerful and helpful in outlining the purpose of the four hotkeys. 

As satisfying as my encounter with the 24/7 Pro Live Support team was, dedicating four buttons to the cause is overkill. Three of the four keys just open different parts of the MyHP app. Why not just have one button for that? Once you're in the app, it's easy to navigate to the live support and settings pages that each of the buttons takes you to. Plus, I question the need for most people to contact support so regularly it would require a dedicated key. Just a single MyHP hotkey on the function-key row would likely suffice. And then supply me the Home, Page-up, Page-down and End keys where the four hotkeys reside. 

Adequate display, stellar speakers

The display offers touch support along with sufficient resolution and brightness. While it's true you won't get a touch display with a MacBook (yet), you do get a crisper and brighter display. The Dragonfly Pro's 14-inch, 16:10 display features a 1,920x1,200-pixel resolution and is rated for 400 nits of brightness. I measured its peak brightness with a lux meter to be even a bit higher than its rating, coming in at 450 nits. Still, my 14-inch M1 MacBook Pro measured 500 nits and looked clearly brighter with both machines set to max brightness. The Dragonfly Pro's glossy screen coating also makes whatever you're viewing difficult to see in sunny or otherwise well-lit environments. And the M1 MacBook Pro's 14-inch Liquid Retina XDR display has a much finer 3,024x1,964-pixel resolution. 

Images and text look fairly sharp on the Dragonfly Pro's display, but if I had to stare at text all day, I'd much prefer to stare at a MacBook Pro where text looks inky black and smooth. In comparison, the text on the HP looked a bit blurry and pixelated when seated up close to the Dragonfly Pro.

The webcam does not lack for resolution, though. It's a 5-megapixel camera that can capture 1440p video. You'll look your best on video calls -- the image was free of the graininess you get with a typical 720p webcam. And colors and skin tones looked accurate.

Similarly impressive is the audio output. HP outfits the Dragonfly Pro with not two but four speakers, and they produce richer, fuller sound than that of the usual laptop stereo setup. It's actually enjoyable listening to music on the Dragonfly Pro (at least in a small room), something I rarely say about a laptop.

With its sturdy, minimalist chassis, the HP Dragonfly Pro can rightly take a seat at the table of MacBook Pro alternatives. Its display can't match the MacBook Pro's, but its matte-black chassis is every bit as sleek and sturdy as an Apple's. I wish you could bump the display up in resolution a notch or two, and while I like getting a year of dedicated and complimentary support, I certainly don't need four separate buttons to access it. Those quibbles aside, the HP Dragonfly Pro offers a gorgeous design and solid build quality and is about as close as you can get to a 14-inch MacBook Pro in a Windows laptop.

© Thomson Reuters FILE PHOTO: A screen displays the logo for HP Inc. at the NYSE in New York

By Samrhitha A

(Reuters) - Shares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co slumped more than 10% on Wednesday as its lackluster revenue forecast fanned worries of a slowdown in cloud spending this year.

The company was set to shed nearly $2 billion in market value if losses hold through the session. They have lost about 3% this year as of last close, failing to benefit from a broader rebound in tech stocks.

Brokerages expect economic uncertainty to weigh on demand for HPE's server and storage systems and led six analysts to cut their price target. Their median view fell to $17, which is about 10% higher than the last closing price of $15.52.

Faced with the possibility of a recession, businesses have dialed back cloud spending and delayed large orders, sparking a slump in the tech sector after the pandemic-led boom.

"We believe the traditional server/storage markets will be most impacted by the challenging macro backdrop," analysts at Barclays said.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Tuesday projected third-quarter revenue to be between $6.7 billion and $7.2 billion, below estimates of $7.24 billion and missed sales expectations for the second quarter.

Its stock now trades at around seven times Wall Street's average earnings estimates for the next 12 months. That is lower than the average of 17.1 for the tech sector, according to Refinitiv.

Some analysts said the AI boom could help the company, after it signaled that rising customer inquiries about the tech were expected to turn into orders over the coming months.

"As businesses scale AI models, HPE is the undisputed industry leader and has considerable growth potential," said Shejal Ajmera, director at India-based research firm CrispIdea.

(Reporting by Samrhitha Arunasalam in Bengaluru)