Original HP 303 Black Ink Cartridge by HP Envy Photo 7830 All-in-One Printer

Product Information

If your business needs to print that frequently, we would recommend spending more money on a more reliable printer. Photographs, which this machine claims to specialise in, look bold on glossy paper, but there’s a lack of contrast that makes images look flat. Typing in a wi-fi password on a tiny onscreen keyboard is no picnic while swiping through the icons left to right can be frustrating. It’s a similar story when printing; you have to dive quite deep to find the options to set resolution to maximum and make sure you’re getting the best quality.

per month (for up to 300 pages), with no difference in cost between black and white and colour prints. for black, it is still prohibitively expensive to print in mono or colour, which herds you towards HP’s Instant Ink program.Windows XP SP3 or higher (32-bit only): any Intel Pentium II, Celeron or 233 MHz compatible processor, 850 MB available hard disk space, CD-ROM/DVD drive or Internet connection, USB port, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. It turns out pages at an unhurried pace, somewhat below the quoted speed of 15 per minute for black and white single-sided and considerable slower when printing on both sides, or in colour. The Envy Photo 7830 turns out to be a great all-rounder, pumping out everyday black-and-white or colour prints at decent speeds and delivering consistently good output. What’s more, it’s a printer that’s at home with smartphone printing, with Bluetooth and NFC pairing plus photo printing direct from the cloud or HP’s smartphone app.

There are no extra photo inks or photo blacks involved, and you suspect that there’s only so much resolution and dithering can do. Though more expensive initially, the Epson EcoTank ET-7750 and Canon Pixma G4510 are superior machines that will save money in running costs in the long term. HP wins points for smooth tones and natural colours, but you won’t get the depth of colour or dynamic range that you’ll see from more expensive photo printers. Even printing text documents in duplex – itself a rare feat for a home printer – it reached speeds of 7ppm. Presumably, using only four colours, as opposed to the five and six ink systems favoured by Epson and Canon in their photo printers, simply cannot produce the same breadth of colour.The Envy Photo 7830 doesn’t make a great first impression, just because it’s unusually big by home printer standards. The Envy takes up more space on your desk than it needs to and doesn’t make enough room for loading paper, or collecting printed pages.

The USB Type-B, 100Mbit Ethernet and fax modem sockets sit just where you’d expect them at the rear, while a USB Type-A port and an SD card slot are concealed behind a revolving circular flap near the front-left corner. However, if you print that frequently, we would recommend one of the far more cost effective and rather less environmentally damaging ink tank systems. Along with the basic print, scan and copy capabilities you’ll find in HP’s DeskJet, OfficeJet and Envy printers, it packs in a dedicated photo paper tray along with the promise of authentic colours and lifelike detail from professional quality photo inks. This will give you enough ink for 300 pages per month and if you know you are going to print that much, it is worth it. capacitive screen on the Envy Photo is a lot easier to use and more responsive than the old-school resistive horrors you used to find on HP’s all-in-ones, but it’s still not great.There’s an SD card slot and a USB port in the front panel and separate feeder trays for photos and plain paper. GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor, 2 GB available hard disk space, CD-ROM/DVD drive or Internet connection, USB port, Microsoft Internet Explorer. When even office printers are beginning to look stylish and compact, the Envy Photo’s 46 x 43cm desktop footprint seems massive, and that’s not helped by its 20cm height. True, this isn’t a device for professional photo studios – or even expert amateurs – but we’d like the options available and a little closer to the surface.

The Envy Photo 7830 might be considered stylish in its glossy black finish, and the touchscreen interface is certainly a major plus point. Trying to tap settings options in the top quarter of the screen often seems to take two or three tries. On the whole though, the abundance of curvaceous, glossy black plastic seems unnecessary, and the result is a printer with a larger-than-average footprint which takes up too much desk space in a cramped home office. Windows Vista: 800 MHz 32-bit (x86) processor, 2 GB available hard disk space, CD-ROM/DVD drive or Internet connection, USB port, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.These costs aren’t horrific by low-volume, home printing standards, but you might want to hold back a little on those 8 x 10in colour photos. These twelve test pages include text of varying font sizes and colours, mixed image and text pages, a set of photos and a series of test patterns designed to assess sharpness, colour fidelity, contrast and grey scale. Black text looks crisp and really dark, graphics print bright without any sign of banding or the ink smearing, and whether you’re printing out homework or a draft of a small business plan, you’re going to get great results.