HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e vs Canon PIXMA TR8620a: Which Home-Office All-in-One Should You Buy?

These two sit in the same aisle at the same kind of price but are aimed at different jobs. The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e is a document machine - bigger tray, faster engine, duplex on both print and scan. The Canon PIXMA TR8620a is a household all-rounder with a five-ink system that handles photos properly and a much smaller footprint. Neither is wrong; the right answer depends on what leaves the printer most days.

Quick verdict first

1. Printing mostly documents, more than about 200 pages a month? Take the OfficeJet Pro 9015e.
2. Printing a mix of school work, forms and photos? Take the PIXMA TR8620a.
3. Short of desk space? The Canon is meaningfully smaller in every dimension.
4. Scanning multi-page double-sided documents regularly? The HP's duplex ADF saves real time.
5. Printing fewer than 20 pages a month? Consider a mono laser instead - see the note near the end.

Side-by-side specifications

Paper handling: the difference you will notice daily

The OfficeJet Pro's 250-sheet enclosed tray is its single biggest practical advantage. You load a half-ream and forget about it for weeks, and because the tray is closed, dust and household humidity stay off the paper - which measurably reduces jams over time.

The PIXMA splits its capacity between a 100-sheet rear feed and a 100-sheet front cassette. That is genuinely useful if you want plain paper in one and photo paper in the other, and it is a real convenience for households. But the rear tray is open at the top, so paper sitting there for weeks picks up dust and curl, and you will refill more often.

The document feeders are the other gap. HP's 35-sheet ADF scans both sides in one pass. Canon's 20-sheet feeder is single-sided, so double-sided originals mean two passes and manual reordering. If you scan contracts, tax paperwork or forms regularly, this is worth more than the price difference.

Print quality: documents versus photos

For text, both are excellent and the difference is invisible on ordinary paper. The OfficeJet Pro uses pigment black ink which is more water-resistant and gives slightly crisper edges on plain paper - noticeable if you print documents that get handled.

For photos, the Canon wins clearly. The five-ink system separates pigment black for text from dye-based inks for images, which produces smoother gradients and better skin tones than a four-ink office machine. If someone in the house prints photos for albums or school projects, that difference is visible on the page.

Both will produce disappointing photos on the wrong paper with the wrong driver settings - the media type setting matters more than the hardware gap. Our guide to wrong colours when printing covers why.

Running costs

This is where the decision usually gets made, and it is not simply about cartridge prices.

The HP is designed around a subscription ink service. If your volume is steady and reasonably predictable, the per-page cost on a subscription is difficult to beat with any cartridge printer, including the Canon. If your volume is erratic - three pages one month, 300 the next - subscriptions punish you at both ends, either wasting an allowance or pushing you into overage.

The Canon's five separate ink tanks mean you replace only the colour that runs out, which suits low-volume households better than a tri-colour design. But five cartridges is five things to buy, and the individual tanks are small.

Whichever you choose, buying XL cartridges rather than standard ones roughly halves the cost per page. Our guides on reducing printing costs and third-party ink go into the detail.

Setup and connectivity

The OfficeJet Pro has dual-band Wi-Fi and Ethernet, which makes it the more flexible machine on a modern router - it can join a 5 GHz network, and a wired connection is available for anyone who wants the printer to simply never drop off. That matters more than people expect, because band steering on ISP routers is the leading cause of printer connection problems.

The PIXMA has Ethernet too, plus Bluetooth for setup, but its Wi-Fi is 2.4 GHz. On most home networks that is fine; on a network with a single merged name and aggressive steering, it is a source of frustration.

On the software side, HP's setup routes through HP Smart (now branded the HP app) and expects an account sign-in, which is where a lot of people get stuck - see our guide to HP Smart saying something went wrong. Canon's setup through the Canon PRINT app is more conventional and generally less fussy, though it is also less polished afterwards.

What goes wrong with each

Since we spend our days on printer faults, this is worth saying plainly.

The OfficeJet Pro range generates most of its support traffic around setup, account requirements, cartridge recognition and going offline after router changes. The hardware itself is robust for its class. Our HP printer offline and HP ink cartridge guides cover the recurring ones.

The PIXMA range generates more mechanical complaints - support codes for paper feed and carriage errors, and the waste ink absorber limit that produces code 5B00 late in life. Those are covered in our Canon support code 6000 guide.

Which should you buy?

Buy the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e if you run a home office, print documents in volume, scan double-sided paperwork, want dual-band Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and your monthly volume is predictable enough for a subscription to pay off.

Buy the Canon PIXMA TR8620a if desk space is limited, photos matter, you want to load two paper types at once, and you would rather buy cartridges as needed than commit to a plan.

If neither is right for you

Be honest about volume before buying either. Households that print a handful of pages a month are poorly served by any cartridge inkjet: ink dries in the head, cleaning cycles consume ink you never put on paper, and the waste ink absorber fills with ink that was never printed. For text-only low-volume printing, a mono laser costs less to run and simply works after months of neglect - see inkjet versus laser printers. For high-volume colour, an ink tank machine changes the maths entirely, as covered in ink tank versus cartridge printers.

And if you already own one of these and it is misbehaving rather than genuinely worn out, replacing it may not be the answer - most faults on both machines are setup, driver and consumable issues rather than hardware failures. If you would like someone to confirm which before you spend, you can get help from a printer specialist.

See also our HP and Canon support hubs, and our guidance on choosing a printer for a home office.