The Envy Inspire 7220e is a budget home office all-in-one colour inkjet printer, scanner, and copier from HP, capable of printing on both plain and glossy photo paper.
Newly launched, it’s available to buy now for just over £100, and offers buyers a lot for that very attractive price. It boasts fast printing times for both text documents and colour photos, fast scanning times, and it’s covered by HP’s Instant Ink subscription plans, which can work out is good value for money long-term for families, busy households, or anyone who needs to get a lot of printing done.
With support for Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, iOS and Android devices, the HP Envy Inspire 7220e can fit into practically any home office set-up, and thanks to Wi-Fi and USB support, there are wireless and wired connectivity options.
Design & Build
- Compact plastic chassis
- Two colours
- Built-in touchscreen
The HP Envy Inspire 7220e is a compact all-in-one with a low profile. Predominantly made of white plastic, there are coloured accents on the scanner lid and paper tray, which can either be Surf Blue or Portobello Beige – I was sent a beige one.
It might look bulky, but the HP Envy Inspire 7220e is reasonably light, weighing roughly 7kg. It features recesses on the sides, making it easy to pick up and move around.
All of the HP Envy Inspire 7220e’s discrete sections, from the scanner lid to the paper tray to the printer hood are clearly demarcated either by differently coloured plastic or indentations that show you exactly where to grasp and pull things. It is quite literally easy to get to grips with.
While you can control the printer remotely with the HP Smart mobile and desktop apps, there’s also a built-in 2.7 adjustable touchscreen control panel. The touchscreen itself is pretty responsive, and the Android-style user interface is easy to navigate.
Set-up, Apps & Wireless Printing
- Wide OS support
- HP Smart apps
- Wi-Fi and USB
You can set up the HP Envy Inspire 7220e either from a Windows, Mac OS, or Chrome OS device, or an iOS or Android mobile device via the HP Smart apps – whichever way you do it, it’s simplicity itself. The only thing you’ll need to have to hand is your home network’s Wi-Fi password.
As the HP Envy Inspire 7220e is Apple AirPrint compatible, there’s no need for any drivers to be installed – Windows users may have to download and install these from HP’s site, and Chromebook owners may need to install this extension.
The HP Smart apps are good at guiding you through the set-up process and make things easy for anyone who hasn’t set up a printer before. The cartridges slot into the cradle easily, and the printer arm feels reassuringly robust.
Of the two, the mobile HP Smart apps are more convenient, and probably what you’ll be using most of the time. You can print from Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox and Facebook via both apps, but the iOS version adds Box, Evernote, and, naturally, Apple iCloud support as well.
Finally, the Mopira app for Android devices is also supported, which allows for quick printing of files and photos stored on your phone’s gallery. Handy, if you don’t want to have to use the HP Smart app.
If you want to run any maintenance cycles, you’ll need to use the desktop apps, or better still, just use the HP Envy Inspire 7220e’s control panel.
The HP Envy Inspire 7220e features HP’s ‘self-healing’ Wi-Fi technology, which helps to establish the best Wi-Fi connections, and automatically reconnects if there are any interruptions. It has a dual-band Wi-Fi antenna, and via the HP Smart mobile app, you can set it to make use of the less-congested 5GHz band.
Performance
- Up to 14.63ppm
- 300dpi scanning
- Glossy doesn’t support A4
The HP Envy Inspire 7220e prints pages of black text quickly, and pages with text and colour graphics are produced pretty quickly as well.
Printing a 20-page test document took 1 minute and 22 seconds, giving me a pages-per-minute score of 14.63ppm. As expected, printing a test document with a mixture of text and colour pie charts and bar graphs took a bit longer – 2 minutes and 4 seconds, which works out at 9.6ppm.
That’s lower than the 15ppm and 10ppm speeds HP claims that the Envy Inspire 7220e is capable of, but only slightly, and these are good speeds for a home office inkjet in this price range.
Read More: https://www.techadvisor.com/review/hp-envy-inspire-7220e-3813601/