As a budget inkjet multifunction printer (MFP) geared to home offices, the HP Officejet 4630 e-All-in-One has a solid if not splashy set of MFP features. It provides good overall output quality, though it was relatively slow, and showed a tendency to quickly run through color ink.
The 4630 can print, copy, scan, and fax. It can act as a standalone copier. It has a 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for copying, scanning, or faxing multipage documents unattended. It has a 100-sheet paper tray, modest by home-office standards, plus an auto-duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper.
The glossy black 4630 measures 7.4 by 17.6 by 21.6 (HWD), small enough to find room for on most desks, and weighs 13.7 pounds. The front panel holds a non-touch monochrome display with Home, Back, OK, up and down arrow controls, an alphanumeric keypad, and buttons for Wi-Fi, ePrint, and Help, plus the on/off switch.
Mobile Printing Features
The 4630 can connect to a computer via a USB cable (I tested it over a USB connection) or to a network via Wi-Fi. ePrint is an HP service that assigns an email address to the printer so that you can print out documents simply by emailing them to the printer. It supports Wi-Fi printing from mobile devices, as well as HP's Wireless Direct Print, which lets you walk up to the printer and print from a smartphone or tablet even when not connected to a Wi-Fi network. HP Printables offers news, crossword puzzles, family activities, coupons, and more for download over Wi-Fi for printout.
Printing Speed
We don't expect blazing speed from a budget inkjet, and with the 4630, we didn't get it. I timed it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at an effective 2 pages per minute (ppm), slow for its price but not unusually so. The Canon Pixma MX392 Office All-In-One Inkjet Printer tested at the same 2-ppm speed, while the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J430w was clocked at 4.3 ppm, and the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J870DW at 4.7 ppm. The Canon
Output Quality
The 4630's overall output quality was good, with average text quality for an inkjet, graphics quality on the high side of average, and average photo quality. Text was good enough for most home and business uses; I'd draw the line with resumes or formal documents with which you're trying to create a good visual impression.
With graphics, colors generally were well saturated. Several images showed mild banding (a regular pattern of faint striations), and many showed dithering (graininess). Graphics should be good enough for PowerPoint handouts; whether you'd give them to a client you were seeking to impress depends on how picky you are.
Photos were of average quality for an inkjet, about that of drugstore prints. Colors were generally good, though a monochrome photo showed a slight tint. There was a loss of detail in some bright areas. One image showed posterization—a tendency for abrupt shifts in color where they should be gradual.
Ink Issues
One issue that I ran into in testing is that the printer tended to run low on color ink, with notably degraded print quality, relatively quickly, even with the largest capacity cartridges. (Cost per page for the XL cartridges, based on HP's price and yield figures, are 6.2 cents per monochrome page and 16.9 cents per color page; the color costs are on the high side.) This same issue occurred with two test printers; I had requested the second unit because I was worried that an issue with the printer itself could be causing this; there was no difference with the second.
The 4630 uses one cartridge for black while a second cartridge combines cyan, magenta, and yellow, which means that you can't replace the individual colors when one color runs low. When one color goes, the whole cartridge has to be replaced. Some other lower-priced printers use similar systems, but it's very rare that a printer can't make it through our current test suite without running out of ink. This shouldn't be an issue with text or monochrome graphics, but could be if you print a lot of color graphics or photos.
One thing that could mitigate ink costs is that the 4630 is one of the first printers to be included in the HP Instant Ink program, in which customers receive ink for a fixed rate depending on the number of pages they print (there are 3 levels: $2.99 per month for 50 pages, $4.99 for 100 pages, and $9.99 for 300 pages; additional pages can be bought, and unused pages rolled over). New cartridges are delivered direct to the consumer. It has the potential to provide significant ink savings to consumers with compatible printers; how well it works in practice has yet to be seen.
Although best for use in a home office, the 4630 could also be used for light-duty home use. The single cartridge for all 3 colors may be a disadvantage, though, if you print a lot of photos.
For $50 more than you'd pay for the 4630, the Editors Choice Brother MFC-J870DW adds the auto-duplexer, as well as other features such as Ethernet and NFC (near-field communications), which lets you print from a compatible device just by tapping the printer. It was even faster than the MFC-J430w. But the HP Officejet 4630 e-All-in-One Printer combines a solid set of home-office MFP features and good output quality at a very modest price.
The 4630 has similar features and speed to the Canon Pixma MX392; the Canon lacks an auto-duplexer. The 4630 has slightly better output quality for text and photos.
The HP Officejet 4630 e-All-in-One Printer is not the fastest printer on the block, but has a solid set of features for a budget home-office MFP, and good output quality. The Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J430w zipped through our business printing tests in less than half the time as the 4630. It doesn't have the range of mobile printing features of the HP, and it lacks an auto-duplexer, so if those features are important to you, the 4630 could be your printer of choice, despite its much slower speed. We were concerned about its rate of ink consumption for color printing that we noted in our testing, though enrollment in the HP Instant Ink program has the potential to reduce ink costs.
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