HP Envy 7640 review

In our recent magazine grouptest of mid- and high-end photo printers, the HP Envy 7640 proved to be the most workmanlike of the bunch. Where other models crammed in as many ink tanks as possible and did away with the more business-friendly features, the HP’s home-office pretensions were betrayed by a 25-sheet document feeder (ADF) perched on top of the unit and its built-in fax capability.

Nevertheless, the Envy put in a surprisingly strong performance when delivering our test photo prints. Colour accuracy was superb straight out of the box, despite the fact that it has only two ink cartridges, a dye-based tri-colour cartridge and a pigment black. The skin tones on our Colour Collective test print were realistic, and the Envy is one of the few printers that avoids burning out the brightly lit left side of the model’s face. Colours in our studio portrait were equally lifelike.

It isn’t all good news, however. The black-and-white photo showed good contrast, but was marred by a blue tinge. The colours in the landscape were disappointingly flat, too, and the HP is the only printer on test where individual ink droplets are visible to the naked eye. Nor is it the fastest inkjet we’ve come across, with our test A4 photo print taking 2mins 8secs to drop into the output tray. Nevertheless, for a business-orientated all-in-one, it punches above its weight.

The Envy 7640 has the cleanest and most responsive touchscreen interface of any of the all-in-ones tested here, making setup a breeze: there’s even a short animation showing how to insert the ink cartridges, which makes the whole process almost idiot-proof.

Its A4 photo print speeds aren’t going to trouble the folks at Guinness World Records, but our five-page colour brochure was waiting in the output tray in less than a minute. That ADF makes it much quicker than any of the other all-in-ones in this test when it comes to copying or scanning multipage documents.

Overall, we’re fond of the HP Envy 7640. It won’t deliver photos you’ll want to hang on the walls, but quality is fine for casual snapshots or business use, and otherwise it’s an excellent all-in-one at a reasonable price.