A bargain in every way but several
When inkjet printers were first introduced, they cost a small fortune. Then they started to get cheaper. Then they got really cheap. Eventually, they were practically being given away. Eventually, of course, we began to twig what was going on. They weren’t charging us much for the printer, but they were charging us a small fortune for the ink.
Today, printer ink is still, pound for pound, one of the most expensive liquids you can buy (up there with Chanel No5 perfume). So you’d still be right in thinking that when you buy a very cheap printer, like this one, it’s the cost of ink that you should really be looking at. With HP’s 302XL cartridges, at about £18 for black and £18 for colour if you shop around, printing a standard page of text and colour graphics on the Deskjet 3630 will cost you 9.3p. You could save a bit by subscribing to HP’s new Instant Ink service (www.snipca.com/20078), but the plans are so arbitrary and complicated that it’s hard to be sure.
Those cartridges aren’t horrendously expensive, and for 40 quid you’re getting a very attractive printer, complete with the almost obligatory glass under the top lid for scanning and photocopying. HP’s breadbin-style design is a thing of beauty compared to the usual dour black box, and although there’s no touchscreen, the basic controls are easy to use. There’s no memory card slot or double-sided printing, but Wi-Fi is built in for access from your PC, phone and tablet.
To set up the Deskjet 3630, however, you first have to connect it to a computer via USB while you install HP’s software, and that’s when things start looking less attractive. Unless you untick the option, Google’s Chrome also gets installed as your default browser (along with HP’s Smart Print web extension), something you might not want. Then the printer starts in the slower-performing Quiet mode, which you can’t even change from the Print command, only in the separate HP Toolbox app. Other advanced options are also difficult to track down – a typical failing of HP’s current software.
With Quiet mode disabled, the Deskjet 3630 printed our black-text document at a sprightly 11.5 pages per minute (ppm), but colour pages fell to 2ppm and a 6x4in photo crawled out in an agonising four minutes. A colour A4 photocopy took a whole minute. This is not a machine for anyone in a hurry.
VERDICT
It looks nice and is cheap, but slow output and software complexities put us off.
SPECIFICATIONS
4800x1200dpi maximum print resolution • 1200x1200dpi maximum scan resolution • USB • 802.11n Wi-Fi • 158x438x310cm (HxWxD) • 4.2kg • One-year warranty