HP Envy Photo 7830 review

HP’s range of Envy inkjet printers are for the most part, family-friendly multifunction devices, but at the top of the product tree, is the HP Envy Photo 7830, which also offers a fax and automatic document feeder (ADF) making it attractive to anyone who works from home. 

For the modest asking price of £129 (around US$172, AU$230) it packs in a lot of other features too. Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth with NFC for making a one-touch connection with Android devices. It can print from and to email, as well as scan to cloud services such as Dropbox. There’s an SD card slot and a USB port in the front panel and separate feeder trays for photos and plain paper. The box includes only two ink cartridges, one black and one containing the other three colours in a single cartridge. 

Design

HP’s design team have hidden the front SD card slot and USB port behind a discrete circular flap and made the out tray spring loaded so that it emerges from the front of the printer automatically when you print. Another welcome feature is the colour touchscreen interface that has even been designed to look a little like an iPhone embedded in the panel. 

On the whole though, the abundance of curvaceous, glossy black plastic seems unnecessary, and the result is a printer with a larger-than-average footprint which takes up too much desk space in a cramped home office.

Features

For the money, the HP Envy Photo 7830 has a long list of features. The ability to print, scan, copy and fax is enough to make it worthy of consideration by anyone setting up a home office, features such as duplex printing, scanning to popular cloud services and printing by email are all features a good office printer should offer. The HP can do all this and gives you access to them via a touchscreen interface.

Connectivity is also strong, with an Ethernet port, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with NFC to choose from. There are USB ports at the front and rear and even an SD card slot. Two paper trays feed in plain A4 paper, photo paper of all sizes and a variety of envelope sizes. A total of 125 sheets can be preloaded, but the out tray can only handle one or two pages at a time.   

Setup and operation

Setting up the HP Envy Photo 7830 is rather easy, with only two ink cartridges to install and the briefest of step-by-step instructions printed on a card. You can use the touchscreen interface to key in passwords when it comes to joining your Wi-Fi network and entering your email address, which is much easier than contending with hard buttons and a cursor. 

The touchscreen is smaller and considerably less sensitive than that of the Canon Pixma TR8550, but the menu system is very intuitive, so you shouldn’t find yourself wasting time trying to figure it out. 

Performance

In terms of print quality, the HP Envy Photo 7830 produced mixed results. It turns out pages at an unhurried pace, somewhat below the quoted speed of 15 per minute for black and white single-sided and considerable slower when printing on both sides, or in colour. Black text on plain paper can look crisp, but the weight of ink varies slightly from line to line. Coloured documents appear vivid, but also unevenly shaded.

Photographs, which this machine claims to specialise in, look bold on glossy paper, but there’s a lack of contrast that makes images look flat. Presumably, using only four colours, as opposed to the five and six ink systems favoured by Epson and Canon in their photo printers, simply cannot produce the same breadth of colour.

The other disadvantage of HP’s two-cartridge system is that when you use up all the magenta, for example, you have to throw away the whole colour cartridge, thereby wasting the unused colours.

The standard three-colour cartridge that comes in the box is only good for around 165 pages, so you should certainly upgrade to the XL size when it’s time to replace it. At around £35 ($45.78) for a colour XL, or £31 ($40.55) for black, it is still prohibitively expensive to print in mono or colour, which herds you towards HP’s Instant Ink program.

According to the packaging, you will save 70% on ink when you agree to a subscription, but this is only true if you take out the most expensive £7.99 ($10.46) per month option. This will give you enough ink for 300 pages per month and if you know you are going to print that much, it is worth it.

However, if you print that frequently, we would recommend one of the far more cost effective and rather less environmentally damaging ink tank systems. Though more expensive initially, the Epson EcoTank ET-7750 and Canon Pixma G4510 are superior machines that will save money in running costs in the long term. 

It’s difficult to comment on the longevity of products in bench tests, but in this case we called in two samples of the Envy Photo 7830 and both were faulty, raising the question of reliability. It feels rather flimsy and prints noisily, which suggests a poorly made machine.

Final verdict

The Envy Photo 7830 might be considered stylish in its glossy black finish, and the touchscreen interface is certainly a major plus point. It makes this feature-packed device, mercifully easy to use. The companion app is similarly user-friendly and adds yet more functionality, like printing from social media, or email.

The Envy takes up more space on your desk than it needs to and doesn’t make enough room for loading paper, or collecting printed pages. It prints slowly and the quality is inconsistent. Photos lack contrast and look flat. The tri-ink colour cartridge is wasteful and running costs for colour and mono are relatively high unless you subscribe to HP’s Instant Ink system. This adds cost and commitment and we’re not convinced this machine warrants that.

The low asking price, high feature count and bright touchscreen all make this machine stand out among the ranks for home office printers, but the performance is disappointing. It prints slowly, noisily and with mixed results. Replacement ink cartridges are among the most expensive and taking out an Instant Ink subscription will only deliver the promised 70% saving if you print at least 300 pages per month. If your business needs to print that frequently, we would recommend spending more money on a more reliable printer.  

• We've highlighted the best photo printers of 2018 in this roundup