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HP Officejet 4630 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £81.46
inc VAT

Great looks and specifications, but you can buy a better home office MFP than this

HP’s Officejet 4630 is an inkjet MFP aimed at home office users, and has support for printing, scanning, copying and faxing, along with wireless networking and duplex (double-sided) printing. It also supports Apple’s AirPrint and HP’s ePrint app, and has a big 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for unattended multi-page copies, scans and faxes.

HP Officejet 4630

The Officejet 4630 looks stylish and understated. Its control panel comprises a simple screen with a small set of dedicated function buttons. The screen’s only black and white and isn’t touch-sensitive, but it looks uncluttered and is pleasant to use. Our only gripe is that the OK button used for selection is below, rather than between, the up and down buttons used to navigate the menus.

HP Officejet 4630

Sadly, we’re less impressed with the 4630’s minimal paper trays. The captive input tray initially seems as though it has no adjustable width guides – in fact these can only be accessed when you slide it forward, which you must do to load smaller paper sizes. Even more basic is the output tray, which consists solely of a weedy grey paper stop that swivels out of the input tray. Printed pages come to rest over the input stack, with their leading edge poorly supported by the narrow stop. While very basic, we should say that the arrangements did keep paper tidy in practice.

This isn’t a particularly fast printer, with 9.4 pages of letter-quality text appearing every minute (9.4ppm) in our test. Draft mode saw this rise to 12.9ppm, but our colour graphics test plodded along at only 1.9ppm. Photocopies were also on the slow side, with a single page taking 24 seconds – twice that in colour. When copying multiple pages, 10 mono pages took five minutes, and in colour copies took almost seven minutes. We’d expect a good home office MFP to be twice as fast.

HP Officejet 4630 Scanning Options

HP’s scan driver is too simple, with too few advanced options

We found the print and scan interfaces to be overly simple. In brief, these are fine for the most basic jobs, but can prove irritating if you need to set more advanced options. Our scan results replicated another common grumble. While the focus, colour accuracy and dynamic range of images were all above average, scans appeared artificially sharpened at 600 dots per inch (dpi) and above, with no option to switch this off. Scan speeds were unhurried even over a USB connection, with an A4 preview taking 20 seconds and a 1,200dpi photo scan almost three minutes.

HP Officejet 4630 Advanced Settings

We’re not a fan of HP’s print drivers. Here, you must access the Advanced Settings to change the paper size

These small disappointments, along with running costs of more than 9p per page, let down the Officejet 4630. For lighter use we’d buy the cheaper and otherwise very similar HP Envy 4500. For a busier home office, we’d pay more for the HP Officejet Pro 8610, which is faster, has more features and is cheaper to run.

Basic Specifications

Rating***
Maximum native print resolution4,800×1,200dpi
Max optical resolution1,200×1,200dpi
Output bit depth24-bit

Tested Print Speeds

Time for two 10x8in photos 1.018m 42s
Time for six 6x4in photos 1.026m 54s

Physical and Environmental

Standard printer interfacesUSB, 802.11b/g/n wireless
Optional printer interfacesnone
Size188x445x331mm
Weight6.2kg
Noise (in normal use)52dB(A)
Duty cycle1,000 pages (maximum)

Paper Handling

Maximum paper sizeA4/legal
Maximum paper weight250gsm
Standard paper inputs1
Standard paper input capacity100
Maximum paper inputs1
Maximum paper input capacity100
Duplex (code, cost if option)Yes

General

Printer technologythermal inkjet
Supported operating systemsWindows XP or later, Mac OS X 10.6 or later, Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows RT
Other inkjet featuresnone
Other inkjet optionsUG195E Warranty extension to three years with standard exchange, UG071E warranty extension to three years with next day exchange

Buying Information

Price£81
Consumable parts and prices£18
Price per colour A4 page5.6p
Quoted life of supplied black cartridge190 pages (ISO/IEC 24712)
Quoted life of supplied colour cartridge(s)165 pages (ISO/IEC 24712)
Quoted life of supplied photo cartridge(s)N/A
Warrantyone year RTB
Supplierhttp://www.morecomputers.com
Detailswww.hp.co.uk

Print Quality

Number of ink colours4
Number of ink cartridges2
Maximum number of ink colours4
Maximum number of cartridges2
Quoted photo durability50 years
Quoted photo durability sourceHP

Tested Scan Speeds

Full scan area preview20s
A4 document at 150dpiFail
A4 document at 300dpi23s
6x4in photo at 600dpi42s
6x4in photo at 1200dpi2m 50s

Tested Copy Speeds

Time for single A4 mono copy 1.024s
Time for single A4 colour copy 1.048s
Time for 10 A4 copies using feeder 2.06m 52s

Photo Features

PictBridge supportNo
Borderless printingA4
Direct (PC-less) printingYes
Supported memory cardsnone
CD printingNo

Copy Features

Maximum number of copies20
Max mono copy resolution300x300dpi
Max colour copy resolution600x600dpi

Fax Features

Max mono fax resolution300x300dpi
Fax memory (maximum mono pages)99