HP Envy 7640
A stylish and versatile home inkjet that delivers highquality prints and scans at a decent pace
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £115 (£138 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk
The HP Envy 7640 delivers the kind of print, scan and copy functions we’re used to seeing from HP’s consumer line of printers, but with the addition of duplex printing and an ADF. While the latter looks a little odd when combined with the sleek curved lines and glossy surfaces of the printer, it makes the Envy a more versatile machine, and it still looks more fashion-conscious than your average OfficeJet.
This isn’t a business printer, even if it does have fax and copy capabilities. The recommended monthly workload is between 300 to 1,000 pages, while the use of one mono print cartridge and one combined colour cartridge, each with a modest 600- or 415-page capacity, indicate that print costs will be high. In fact, black-and-white pages come in at a whopping 3.9p per page, with colour pages costing a more palatable 7.8p. The main tray only holds 125 sheets, with another 15 fitting in the photo paper tray above, while there’s room for only 25 sheets in the output tray. To compensate, the photo paper tray accommodates 6 x 4in and 5 x 7in prints.
The HP wins points for being so easy to setup and use. The responsive 8.9cm capacitive LCD screen actually shows videos of cartridge installation during setup, while the web-based configuration and Wi-Fi setup process is so easy that you barely know it’s happened before it’s complete. There are some minor annoyances, such as the way it pushes you to install HP’s All-in-One Printer Remote Windows Store app to control the printer, but forgets to tell you to install the separate HP Scan and Capture app until you try to scan. In addition, we could do without the promotion of HP’s Instant Ink service during setup.
Wireless and cloud connectivity is a major selling point. It has Wi-Fi direct printing and NFC for printing at a touch from mobile devices, not to mention easy mobile printing, management and scanning using HP’s All-in-One Printer Remote iOS and Android apps. You can also print via email or the cloud using HP ePrint, and the printer actually prints out the relevant information during setup, with no additional configuration required. Apple AirPrint, Mopria and Google Print are also supported.
Not all aspects of the design are quite so ingenious. When copying or scanning something large, for example, you’ll find the hinge on the scanner gives precious little room for manoeuvre, while having to align the corner of the page with the front-right corner of the flatbed is a pain when there’s a spine or binding. Scanning speeds are good, however: the HP takes just 1min, 13secs to tackle a full-colour page at 600dpi, while text document pages shift through the ADF at just under 11ppm; not bad for a consumer-grade printer.
It’s a similar story with print speeds. For example, our full-page A4 photomontage took 2mins, 16 secs to appear – not lightning-fast, but good by the standards of other colour inkjet printers. At 12.5ppm blackand-white and 5.5ppm colour, it’s slightly faster than Epson and Canon’s consumer-level printers. Doublesided printing slows monochrome print speeds down to 6ppm, but that’s not a deal-breaker with a printer of this type.
Black text doesn’t quite have the clean-edged crispness you’d get from a laser, but business charts and photos are up there with the best in test. View photo prints from the HP next to those from a dedicated photo printer and you’ll note a tendency to flatten dynamic range and lose subtle shifts of colour, but they fare better against the output from most of the business printers on test here.
The HP Envy 7640 isn’t the ultimate consumer inkjet, but it offers a strong combination of decent speeds, good quality and affordable colour printing. While we certainly wouldn’t buy one for the office, it’s a stylish option for moderate home use.