HP Officejet 4630 review

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.

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.

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’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.

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.