Speeds are surprisingly good for a home rather than home office printer, with the Envy Photo printing out black text documents at 16ppm and colour documents with inlaid graphics at 4. for black, it is still prohibitively expensive to print in mono or colour, which herds you towards HP’s Instant Ink program. Detail and colour accuracy were fine, but if you’re using scans for any serious design work, this isn’t really going to cut the mustard.

These costs aren’t horrific by low-volume, home printing standards, but you might want to hold back a little on those 8 x 10in colour photos. capacitive screen on the Envy Photo is a lot easier to use and more responsive than the old-school resistive horrors you used to find on HP’s all-in-ones, but it’s still not great. Black text looks crisp and really dark, graphics print bright without any sign of banding or the ink smearing, and whether you’re printing out homework or a draft of a small business plan, you’re going to get great results.Looking for a home all-in-one that can tackle all the usual family printing tasks but also output decent photos? It’s a similar story when printing; you have to dive quite deep to find the options to set resolution to maximum and make sure you’re getting the best quality.

per month (for up to 300 pages), with no difference in cost between black and white and colour prints. Windows Vista (32-bit only): 800 MHz (x86) processor, 2 GB available hard disk space, CD-ROM/DVD drive or Internet connection, USB port, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. Along with the basic print, scan and copy capabilities you’ll find in HP’s DeskJet, OfficeJet and Envy printers, it packs in a dedicated photo paper tray along with the promise of authentic colours and lifelike detail from professional quality photo inks. The chunky auto-document feeder at the top of our review sample fell off at one point during testing when we opened the lid, and while said review sample appears to have been all around the houses, this still doesn’t inspire confidence overall. These twelve test pages include text of varying font sizes and colours, mixed image and text pages, a set of photos and a series of test patterns designed to assess sharpness, colour fidelity, contrast and grey scale.A total of 125 sheets can be preloaded, but the out tray can only handle one or two pages at a time.

The Envy Photo 7830 doesn’t make a great first impression, just because it’s unusually big by home printer standards.There’s an SD card slot and a USB port in the front panel and separate feeder trays for photos and plain paper.