HP’s latest style-centric printer, the HP Envy 7640 adds extra features but loses some of its style along the way.
HP’s Envy line of printers have long had a slight dash of style to them. That’s style in the printer sense, but previous models have tended towards a flat and unobtrusive style rather than the more printer-esque look that the HP Envy 7640 sports. It feels like I’ve been reviewing HP Envy printers for some time, and that’s because I have, all the way back to the Envy 100 four years ago and the Envy 120 last year.
The $229 HP Envy 7640 doesn’t have the same straight visual appeal as its predecessors, although it does have nice curved lines that mark it out a little from your ordinary everyday inkjet printer. Still, given the style focus of previous Envy models, it’s something of a mark against the HP Envy 7640.
The HP Envy 7640 is a full all-in-one, which means it encompasses printing, scanning and faxing for those folks who still haven’t left 1998. It uses just two ink cartridges; a single black and tricolour cartridge, which HP sells for $21 and $26 respectively. Stated yield for the black cartridge is stated at 200 pages, which gives the Envy 7640 a relatively pricey cost per page of around 10.5 cents.
HP rates the HP Envy 7640 as being capable of up 22ppm in draft mode, dropping to 21ppm in colour mode. In connectivity terms it supports USB 2.0, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and connected USB flash drives and SD cards through a rotating cover on the left hand side of the printer body. The scanner is a 1200dpi 24-bit model with a claimed 15 second scan time.
With an eye to the tablet and mobile market, the HP Envy 7640 is certified for both HP’s own ePrint solution, as well as the newer Mopria standard.
From a suspended start, the HP Envy printed out a standard draft text page in 12.5 seconds, which included the time for it to automatically extend its paper tray to catch the output page. The HP Envy 7640 couldn’t quite live up to HP’s lofty page print claims, but then very few printers ever really do. Averaged out, it managed 13.5ppm in draft mode covering a single page at a time. Print quality in draft was very solid, however, so you could conceivably get a bit more than your 200 allotted pages out of a single black cartridge.
The HP Envy 7640 also supports duplexing to save on paper waste, although that does predictably impact on print speeds, dropping to 6.5ppm over three and half pages. The duplex feeder also had some issues picking up too much paper as it went during my tests.
Mobile printing through the HP Envy 7640’s Wi-Fi Direct mode, where the HP Envy 7640 sets itself up as a Wi-Fi connection point was flawless, but using AirPrint was less successful. An iPhone 6 Plus could see the HP Envy 7640 and start communications with it on the same Wi-Fi network, but there it stalled on printing. That’s less than ideal, although not unheard of with mobile printing.
The HP Envy 7640 also features a separate photo paper tray, although printing from a single tricolour cartridge is never going to give you superb quality prints. A single 4×6″ photo took around 55 seconds to print on the HP Envy 7640, which is very much middle ground territory. As you might expect from a printer with a single colour cartridge, photo prints weren’t exceptional, with a tendency to print a little darker than their source material.
There’s no shortage of all in one printers on the market, and while the HP Envy 7640 has a certain dash of style, the shift to a more regular printer body detracts from that ideal, making it a more office-suitable device. The issue there is that print costs aren’t particularly low, photo quality isn’t particularly great, and ultimately the price is just a little high for a printer that tends towards the average.