HP Envy Pro 6432
Packed with features and with respectable photo prints, but don’t consider it without an ink subscription
SCORE
PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
The HP Envy Pro 6432 is one part multifunction printer, two parts light show. When switched on, the output tray is lit up by an LED strip that glows different colours depending on what state the printer is in. There’s no screen, but the control panel, which is invisible when not in use, lights up like the deck of the Starship Enterprise when its called upon. There are even coloured lights to guide you through problems: a light near the case’s release handle lights up when a cartridge runs out, along with a light on the inside to indicate which ink needs replacing.
The rest of the design is cool white and grey, and it’s compact considering it incorporates a scanner and a 35-sheet automatic sheet feeder. HP even finds room for th the mechanism necessary nece to turn a sheet over ov and print on the back automatically.
It’s the only printer we’ve reviewed that uses just two cartridges, one mono and one containing three colours. This is a simple option but wasteful: one of those colours is going to run out before the others, at which point you’ll have to replace it. It’s surprising, then, that it’s the black ink that costs the most per page of any printer in this test at 6.7p per sheet.
The printer itself is cheap to buy, though, and is a prime candidate for using HP’s Instant Ink service; this could halve the running costs if you use it enough. Ink capacity is also disappointing, with even the highest yield colour cartridge only managing 200 pages.
For the price and considering the restrictions of the cartridge technology, it produced surprisingly good photos. Compared to the similarly priced Epson XP-4100, the photos were bright, vibrant and saturated with colour. HP sacrifices some fine detail in places, but the overall effect is more vivid. We noticed some banding on our colour document when printed in standard mode, but it isn’t as prominent as on the Epson.
We wouldn’t recommend the HP Envy Pro 6432 if you can afford something better but, for the price, it carries an extraordinary set of features. Its prints are expensive, but they’re at least of acceptable quality. It’s only really worth it, though, if you are printing enough to take advantage of one of the higherpriced subscription levels.