HP Envy Photo 7120

LARGE, LUMPY AND LOVELY.

THERE’S A CLUE in the name here. The Envy produces excellent images that you’d be proud to frame, and does so with a tri-colour tank, remarkably outperforming other printers with tanks for separate colours. It’s also one of the fastest black-and-white printers we have on test, making it very, well... enviable, despite its caveats.

Like the other HP printers, the setup app takes you by the hand and gets you connected wirelessly, though there is a disc (how quaint) and a USB cord included. It’s one of the few with a touchscreen that offers shortcuts to print your Google calendar (you’ll have to connect your account online). The touchscreen is responsive though a little on the small side, and the text can be a bit of a strain to read. Expect to do a lot of scrolling up and down, and side to side.

Setup is a cinch, and the printer auto aligns the cartridges without you needing to put the test doc back into the scanner. The SD card reader can be used to print photos directly from the card, or you can save scans to it. That’s a boon, as you also have the app, laptop or cloud services making this very flexible. The scanner does a good job, though struggles with representing shiny paper.

Our biggest complaint is the size of the printer, as it takes up a lot of deskspace, and is tall for an all-in-one. While the paper tray offers good dust protection, it permanently juts out.

Our black-and-white print test ran at a fast 8.3 pages per minute (ppm). Scanning test came back at 37 seconds, and the cost for black ink is $0.10 per page (pp), while colour is $0.17pp. Be aware, that if one colour runs out, you’ll need to replace the whole tank.