HP Envy 5540

Costing just under £80, the Envy 5540 provides a printer, scanner and copier in a compact unit that measures just 156mm high, 454mm wide and 410mm deep. The black plastic box doesn’t look particularly exciting, but HP has managed to squeeze in two paper trays – the main tray holds 125 sheets of A4, while the second can accept 15 sheets of 10x15cm postcard paper, so you can switch between photos and conventional documents without having to replace the paper.

There’s a USB port, though we imagine most people will prefer the convenience of the built-in Wi-Fi, which supports Apple’s AirPrint for iOS devices. There are apps available for Android, Windows and Chromebook devices, too.

It even manages to include automatic double-sided printing, which is relatively unusual for a printer in this price range.

Print quality is very good, with smooth, sharp text and graphics that will meet the needs of people who work from home, or students who need smart presentation for reports or essays. It’s not all that fast, though. While in our tests, it managed a respectable 10 pages per minute for text documents, we found text and graphics pages were more sluggish at around 4ppm.

Photo prints also came out very well when using glossy photo paper, and took a reasonable 65 seconds for a postcard print. However, the Envy prints only with four coloured inks – cyan, magenta, yellow and black – so serious photographers may prefer to opt for a dedicated photo printer that uses extra inks.

Low cost printers such as this often come with a sting in the tail, in the form of very expensive replacement cartridges, However, calculating running costs for the 5540 is complicated by the fact that the printer offers both standard and high-yield XL-size cartridges, as well as three different subscription options for HP’s Instant Ink scheme – for details see page 112.

The standard-size black ink cartridge costs £10 and lasts for just 200 pages of mono text, while the three-colour ink cartridge costs £15 and manages only 165 pages. That works out at a hefty 5p per page for mono and 9.1p for colour. The XL cartridges are a little better – both cartridges cost £20, and you’ll get 600 pages from the black cartridge and 415 from the colour cartridge. That brings the cost of mono printing down to 3.3p per page – which is still high – while colour printing comes down to a more reasonable 4.8p.

Verdict

The HP Envy 5540 is good value for people who need to produce a lot of colour documents or photo prints, and provides good quality for such a low-cost printer. However, simple mono text documents remain relatively expensive and there are cheaper options available if you need to print a lot of mono documents on a regular basis.