The HP Officejet 4630 multifunction printer is a product perfect for modern home offices. It scans, faxes, copies, prints, is wireless and USB connected, and has automatic duplexing. The only thing it doesn't do is make you a cup of tea in the morning.
This particular model was actually one of the first to accommodate printing from a smartphone or tablet, and it features AirPrint, the Apple protocol from OS X Lion and iOS 4.2 onward. There's also a scan-to-email feature, and through the wi-fi functionality you also get HP ePrint, which allows you to send a print to the printer's email address. In fact, you can administer the printer remotely if needed.
The design is surprisingly compact considering the dirty great 35-sheet document autofeeder that sits atop the printer. It's actually quite a handy feature and one that you'll soon come to appreciate, especially if you're housing the printer on limited desktop space.
It's finished in a matt-black effect, with a glossy, polished area for the front control panel. The control panel itself is reasonably simple to understand, with touchpad buttons to cycle through the various menus, a home button to return you to the start and OK to enable the highlighted selection. Alongside the LCD display you'll find buttons for the wi-fi, ePrint or AirPrint and a rubberised number pad for the fax function.
Getting everything up and running and using the more modern aspects of the printer are also easy enough, thanks to the accompanying software. Once up and running, the printer performs well enough, with printing speeds of around 8ppm for text and 5ppm for colour, making the colour prints a little quicker than the previous Canon Pixma.
The standard black cartridge can handle 190 pages, and the individual colour cartridges (yellow, cyan and magenta) have a yield of 165 pages. The XL versions of each cartridge can offer a lot more pages, obviously, with black XL having a yield of 480 and the colours at 330 each. Price per page, based on the
standard cartridge, comes out with black at £8.50 from Amazon at 4p per page. Colour, £11.19 from Amazon, was calculated at roughly 7p per page.
Finally, the print quality. Thankfully, the quality of both the text test and the photo test were very good. The lettering was clear, with no signs of stray ink blots, and the colours were generally good, although probably not as deep or rich as the Pixma iP2850.
The HP Officejet 4630 is a good enough printer for the home office worker. There's a Swiss Army knife kind of functionality to it that's hard to fault, although who uses faxes these days? For a price of just £42 (ignore the HP store price of £69), it's certainly one to consider.