A few years ago, it was unthinkable that we still rely on printed documents as we do today. But the reality of remote work has changed this.
HP’s new Envy Inspire series printers are the first printers designed by quarantine engineers and are suitable for everyone who must live, study and work at home during the pandemic. The printer has experienced a new renaissance in our workflow. The HP Envy Inspire 7900e, priced at $249, is a printer, and it feels like it was created with this reality in mind.
It comes with some useful features that allow us to maintain our work efficiency, because the world looks forward to transitioning to a mixed work environment when everything returns to normal.
Unlike HP’s Tango series, which is designed to integrate with your home, the new Envy Inspire does not hide the fact that it is a printer with a scanner. There are two models of Envy Inspire: Envy Inspire 7200e is a more compact iteration with a flatbed scanner on the top, and the higher quality Envy Inspire 7900e, the model we received for review, is also the first model to be launched, equipped with double-sided Automatic document feeder (ADF) with printing function. The starting price of this series is US$179, but if you have more powerful copying or scanning needs, we recommend that you spend an additional US$70 to upgrade to the US$249 Envy Inspire 7900e.
Each printer model has a variety of colors to choose from, including Green Everglades, Purple Tone Thistle, Cyan Surf Blue, and Neutral Portobello. No matter which method you choose, Envy Inspire is designed to be like a printer-there is no doubt about it.
These tones are used as accent colors to add a touch of bright color to the otherwise boring off-white box. On our 7900e, we found Portobello highlights on the ADF and paper tray.
The 7900e measures 18.11 x 20.5 x 9.17 inches. It is a practical home office main model, with an ADF and a front paper tray on the top. The more compact 7200e can be used as a modern and boxy version of the HP Envy 6055, while the 7900e series draws inspiration from HP’s OfficeJet Pro series.
Like most modern printers, both new Envy Inspire models are equipped with a built-in 2.7-inch color touch screen for accessing printer settings and shortcuts.
Since Envy Inspire is mainly for home users (family and students) and small home office workers, the paper tray is a bit small for the functionality of this printer. On the front and bottom of the printer, you will find a 125-page paper tray. This is more than twice the 50-sheet input tray on Tango X, but the paper tray has many shortcomings for small office environments. The input tray of most home office printers is about 200 sheets, and the HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e is equipped with a 500-sheet tray. This means that every time you change the paper in an input attempt on Office Jet Pro, you must do it four times on Envy Inspire. Since Envy Inspire is not a compact printer, we would love to see HP slightly increase the overall height of the device to accommodate a larger input tray.
A new innovation, which is also commendable, is that the photo printer tray is inserted directly into the carton as a modular accessory, on which you can load standard 8.5 x 11 inch paper. The photo tray can hold standard 4 x 6 inches, square 5 x 5 inches, or panoramic 4 x 12 inches borderless prints.
Traditionally, on most printers, the photo tray is located on the top of the paper tray, but on the outside. Moving the photo tray inside helps prevent dust accumulation, especially if you do not print photos often.
The biggest design change of the new Envy Inspire-which is also invisible to the naked eye-is a new printing mode. The new silent mode uses smart algorithms to slow down the printing process to provide a quieter experience, thereby reducing noise by 40%. This model was developed by HP engineers during the isolation period, and they found themselves disturbed by the noisy printer noise during the conference call-a disadvantage of having to share office space with children who need to print homework.
HP claims that it combines the best features of Tango, OfficeJet and Envy series to create Envy Inspire.
â???? We made what we think is the best printer for home work, study and creation-to really get the job done, no matter what life is like, â????? HP Strategy and Product Marketing Director Jeff Walter told Digital Trends. â???? No matter what you need to create, we can help families do it. â????
Walter added that Envy Inspire is a product that combines the best writing system of HP OfficeJet Pros, the best photo features, and the best application features of the HP Smart application.
Envy Inspire is not built for speed. Unlike office printers, home users do not need to queue around the printer to retrieve their documents. Despite this, Envy Inspire is still a powerful printer that can print color and black and white at up to 15 pages per minute (ppm), with the first page ready in 18 seconds.
The printing resolution of monochrome pages is up to 1200 x 1200 dots per inch (dpi), and the printing resolution of color prints and photos is up to 4800 x 1200 dpi. The printing speed here is slightly lower than the 24ppm output of the HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e, which is one of the best printers on our list this year. Compared with the 10ppm color speed of the older HP OfficeJet Pro 8025, the speed of Envy Inspire is not inferior.
From a speed point of view, Envy Inspire’s boxy internal structure allows it to print at a much faster speed than a cuter, more design-centric home printer. HP Tango X is another top-ranked printer with a monochrome printing speed of about 10 ppm and a color printing speed of about 8 ppm, which is about half the speed of Envy Inspire.
The number of pages per minute is only half of the printing speed equation, and the second half is the preparation speed of the first page. According to my experience, I found that the first page was ready in a little over 15 seconds, and HPâ????’s print speed statement is largely accurate, with the speed hovering between 12 ppm and 16 ppm. between. The printed text looks clear, even in small fonts, is clear and easy to read.
Color prints are equally clear. Photos printed on Epson glossy photo paper look sharp, and the quality presented by HP’s Envy Inspire—sharpness, tone, and dynamic range—comparable to prints created by the online photo service Shutterfly. Compared with HP’s photo printing effect, Shutterfly’s printing effect is slightly warmer. Like Shutterfly, HP’s mobile app allows you to access a variety of different templates to create posters, greeting cards, invitations, and other printable content.
I cannot comment on the performance of HP’s photo function on HP photo printing paper, because this review did not provide any content. Generally speaking, most printer manufacturers recommend that you pair their printers with their branded photo paper for best results. HP said that the new ink technology on Envy Inspire can provide a 40% wider color gamut and new ink technology to render realistic photos.
HP claims that when printing to 4 x 6, 5 x 5, or 4 x 12 paper, the printer will be smart enough to choose a photo tray—rather than a standard letter-size tray—for printing. I did not test this feature because I do not have photo paper of these sizes to test.
Although it is admirable that HP is promoting its cloud-based printing method, Envy Inspire could have been simpler to set up. Out of the box, you need to download the HP Smart app and follow the prompts to start printer setup before you can print or copy. The app will guide you to connect to the printer’s ad-hoc Wi-Fi network so that you can connect to your home or office Wi-Fi network. After the printer is connected, it takes a few minutes for the printer to update its firmware.
This means that, unlike traditional printers, not only is the whole process a bit complicated, but you actually have to use the process specified by HP before you can perform any operations on the printer.
Unlike dedicated photo printers, Envy Inspire does not have separate color ink cartridges. Instead, the printer is powered by two ink cartridges-a black ink cartridge and a combination ink cartridge with three ink colors of cyan, magenta, and yellow.
You need to install ink cartridges and paper to start setting up the printer, so we recommend that you do this immediately after taking the printer out of the box and removing all the protective tape—and there are many more!
The ADF on the top of the Envy Inspire 7900e can scan up to 50 pages at a time and can handle up to 8.5 x 14 inches of paper, while the flatbed can handle 8.5 x 11.7 inches of paper. The scanning resolution is set to 1200 x 1200 dpi, and the scanning speed is approximately 8 ppm. In addition to scanning with hardware, you can also use your smartphone’s camera as a scanner with HP’s companion mobile application, which can be used on Android and iOS smartphones.
This printer can scan, copy and print on both sides of the paper, which will help you save paper when you need it. If you are worried about saving ink, you can set the printer to print in draft mode. This mode will produce lighter prints, but you will use less ink and get faster printing speeds.
The advantage of Envy Inspire is that it has more advanced features to simplify your document workflow, making it feel like a more powerful office printer. You can set up custom shortcuts to simplify the operations you need the printer to perform. For example, small businesses with more bookkeeping needs can program shortcuts to make physical copies when scanning receipts or invoices and upload digital copies of documents to cloud services (such as Google Drive or QuickBooks). In addition to saving documents to the cloud, you can also configure shortcuts to send scans to you via email.
Other useful features include the ability to create Printables, which are photo cards and invitations from templates. These are great for making or sending birthday cards, for example, if you forget to pick one from the grocery store.
Another application function is the ability to use the application to send mobile faxes. HP includes a trial of its mobile fax service, which you can configure to send digital faxes from an application. Envy Inspire itself does not include a fax function, which may be a useful function when you need to generate a fax.
I really appreciate HP’s new silent mode, which reduces the noise level by about 40% by reducing the printing speed by about 50%.
â???? When we developed it, it was really interesting,…because we also experienced it personally when we were developing [Quiet Mode], â???? Walter said. â???? So now, if you are working at home and there are multiple people using the printer at home, you can schedule the quiet mode between 9 am and 5 pm. At this time, you may be using Zoom to call and let the printer Print 40% quiet at these times. â????
Because I don’t need a printer to be the speed champion at home, I usually always enable quiet mode instead of scheduling it on weekdays, because the noise level produced by the system varies significantly.
â???? What we did was essentially slow down a lot of things. We tried to optimize around this adjustment to roughly halve the noise, â???? Walter explained. â???? So we ended up slowing it down by about 50%. There are some things, you know, how fast the paper rotates? How fast does the ink cartridge go back and forth? All of these will produce different decibel levels. So some things are much slower than others, and some things are adjusted more than others, so we just adjusted everything. ? ? ? ?
The company explained that the print quality is not affected by the quiet mode, and I found it to be accurate.
For home users who want to print photos or deal with scrapbook items during lock-in, Envy Inspireâ????s double-sided photo printing is a good addition. Envy can not only print beautiful photos, but also extract exchangeable image file format data from the smartphone’s camera to print the geotag, date and time on the back of the photo. This makes it easy to remember when the memory was created. You can also add your own personal notes-such as “???? Grandmaâ????s 80th birthday â????-as the title.
Currently, double-sided photo printing with date, location and time stamp is limited to mobile applications, but the company is working hard to introduce it to its desktop software in the future. Hewlett-Packard stated that the reason for launching this feature on mobile devices in the first place is that most of our photos are already on our smartphones.
Envy Inspire is designed to work with PC and Mac as well as Android and iOS devices. In addition, HP has also partnered with Google to make Envy Inspire the first printer to pass Chromebook certification.
â???? We also considered all the equipment at home, â????? Walter said. â???? Therefore, as more and more children are doing their homework, or technology becomes more and more important for students, what we do is to cooperate with Google, which has a Chromebook certification program. We ensure that HP Envy Inspire is the first printer from HPâ????? to pass the Chromebook certification. â????
HP Envy Inspire joins HP’s printing field as a powerful printer, suitable for all your home, crafts and work projects. With Envy Inspire, HP has not only fulfilled its promise to integrate the best inkjet technology into a printer, but it has also created a tool whose features may change as more people work from home during the pandemic. Proven to be useful, including quiet mode and powerful photo functions.
HP’s Envy Inspire uses inkjet printing technology, and the company claims that it combines the best features of the Tango, Envy and OfficeJet Pro series. Suitable inkjet alternatives include the HP Tango series. Be sure to check our recommendations for top inkjet printers.
If you need a faster printer to process documents, HP’s OfficeJet Pro 9025e is a good choice. According to the evaluation, Envy Inspire 7900e is priced at US$249, which is US$100 cheaper than HP’s dedicated office products. Envy is designed for the mixed work/home market, making it a more versatile solution because it is designed to print documents and photos. Envy Inspire’s flatbed scanner version-Envy Inspire 7200e will be launched early next year-will make the price more competitive, as the model is expected to sell for $179 when it is launched.
Budget-conscious shoppers who are worried about ink prices, such as Epson’s EcoTank ET3830 refillable ink cartridge printer, will reduce your long-term cost of ownership through cheaper refillable ink cartridges.
HPâ????s printers have a one-year limited hardware warranty that can be extended to two years. The printer benefits from regular software updates to help it stay safe, and may even gain new features over time through the HP Smart printing application.
The printer is not designed to be upgraded every year or every two years like a smartphone, and the HP Envy Inspire should be usable for many years, provided that you continue to provide it with fresh ink and paper. The company offers a subscription ink service to make refilling ink easy, but it does not provide the same service for paper. A joint subscription to replenish ink and photo paper will make this printer a great printer for craft rooms, family historians, and budding photographers.
Yes. If you are looking for a home printer that can print, scan and copy, HP Envy Inspire is a good choice. Unlike previous Envy printers, Envy Inspire will not reinvent the printer design. Instead, HP takes full advantage of the practical aesthetics of this printer to provide a sturdy and versatile workhorse model that is very suitable for your home or home office workflow.
Upgrade your lifestyle. Digital Trends helps readers pay close attention to the fast-paced technological world through all the latest news, interesting product reviews, insightful editorials and unique previews.
Post time: Nov-09-2021
