HP Envy 4500 Wireless Color Photo Printer with Scanner and Copier | Best Product 2014

HP Envy 4500 Wireless Color Photo Printer with Scanner and Copier

CUSTOMER REVIEW



Did not expect a lot for a printer this inexpensive, but needed on to replace an old monster for which printer cartridges have become hard to find (and expensive). Picked this one based on the promise of easy print from phone/tablet. I have tried other mobile print options and they have never worked to my liking but for this price, what the heck.



Set up was easy - never even opened the picture book or the instruction guide. I used the USB cable option to the computer since I had one from the old printer that fit and just assumed it would be a more reliable connection but you can hook it to computer either through a wireless network or directly with the printers own wi-fi.



On screen prompts easy to follow. the Disk that comes with the printer, after you load it, gives you the option of loading everything from the disk or from the web. I chose the web option as it promised to have the latest updates if any. Again no problem on the set up. HP does walk you through a lot of screens to get you to sign up for things and watch what boxes you are checking if you don't want email ads or data checking. One thing you will want to do is give the printer its own email address. You do this during the set-up and have to print out a special code from the printer you will type into a field.



After all hooked up it prompts you to print off a test page then have the printer scan the page. The initial print quality was not very good but assumed that could be from ink that has been sitting in the box for a while. Ran the clean cartridge option and tried again and the print quality was very very good for a unit this size and price. You need to do the scan so it can fine-tune the print quality.



Printer allows you to print, copy, scan. You can scam a photo or document to file, directly to an email or in TIFF format.



The real star of this is the mobile printing option. You have to download a free app to phone or tablet and then you can print any document or photo to the printer from your phone one of two ways. First, you can connect to the printer over its own wi-fi connection (not sure what the range on this is yet, so far been right next to the printer) or you can send the doc or photo to your printer via the printer email address you set up. That way you can have something spit out of the printer from anywhere. Works great so far.



It has two ink cartridges that are not very big. One for Black one Tri-color. Printer will take photo paper but have not tried that yet. Photos printed on plain paper look like.....photos printed on plain paper.



Only negative I have run across so far is that you have to adjust print options (draft/normal/best quality, paper type, etc) from your computer not from the printer itself. Would be much easier often to just be able to hit a button on the printer for that. Other than that, nothing bad to speak of.



It is not going to be as fast or as razor sharp as a $1,000 office printer but I cant see anyone that would not be happy with this for 99% of what you would ever want to do at home except perhaps if you want to do lots of professional quality photo printing. I imagine a dedicated photo printer with separate color ink cartridges would be better for that.