Sunday 22 February 2015

HP Envy 4507

HP Envy 4507

The HP 4500 range of multifunction printers were very much the darling of the high-street electrical store's shelves early last year. This was the newer range of inkjets from HP covering 2013/14, and for the most part they did a reasonably good job and flew off the shelves quick enough to replace the older Deskjet 3500s.

This is a fairly slim, low-profile, all-in-one printer offering print, copy and scan functionality. In terms of connectivity, there's USB and wi-fi, with Apple AirPrint and HP ePrint support. As with the Officejet, you can also send documents to print via your smartphone or tablet and, if needed, you can also administer the printer remotely.


It's a fairly discreet unit, looking not too dissimilar to the HP Deskjet 3520 that came out earlier in 2013. The same kind of LCD is used, as are the touch-sensitive buttons for navigating the system menu, enabling a highlighted function or going back to the beginning with a home option. There's also the same three wi-fi on/off, help and ePrint buttons as you'd find on the Officejet 4630.

Unfortunately, we found the Envy 4507 to be a little too cheaply produced. The quality leaves a lot to be desired, and there were plenty of times where the paper was fed through the printer at an angle, which then caused all manner of problems when it came back out again. It was also the only printer to actually jam from the word go. The first print sent through scrunched up like a concertina and proved to be quite the pain to unfold and clear away. After that, the rest of the pages were left with a slight fold along the top or with some ink smudges.

The text test we ran saw a print rate of around eight pages per minute; the colour managed to score a faster than normal five pages per minute. The quality of each, however, was less than average. The text was a little faded and not anywhere near as sharp as the other printers, and the colour was pretty drab and felt washed out.

The print cartridges used are the 301 range, once more, which means you'll get the same as the Officejet 4630.

This model is priced toward the top end of the group, averaging out at around £49.99. Considering we've already looked at better-quality printers, with better functionality and better printing, there's not much here to recommend this printer.