HP Envy 4500 review: Capable and cheap, but it’s not the all-in-one we’d buy

The HP Envy 4500 may be cheap but its specifications are those of a more expensive printer. There’s support for wireless networking and automatic duplex printing, for example. Unlike budget entries in HP’s Deskjet range, even those with Wi-Fi, the Envy 4500 also supports HP’s ePrinting standard. This means you can set it up with an email address, and it’ll print anything sent to that address. There also support for printing from Android and iOS mobile devices, which is common to most printers and all-in-ones with either wireless or wired networking.

It’s worth noting that HP sells the Envy 4500 under a variety of very similar model numbers, though, so whether you’re looking at an HP Envy 4500, Envy 4523, Envy 4524 or Envy 4527, you’ll end up with the same printing, scanning and copying features as the model we’re testing here. 

Once set up, you begin to see where HP has made some savings to produce the Envy 4500 at its price. It takes black and tricolour ink cartridges, rather than the individual tanks found on more expensive printers, which means you’ll need to replace your colour cartridge as soon as you’ve drained one of its colours, rather than replace colours separately based on your usage. Its monochrome display isn’t touch sensitive either. Neither compromise is unreasonable for the price, but the paper handling is perhaps a little too basic. The input tray is captive in the base, and when loaded with A4 paper the front panel can’t be closed. Mono print costs are a surprisingly high 4p per page, even using HP’s high-yield XL cartridges. This is balanced out by a low colour cost of 5.75p per page, which gives you a reasonable mixed black and colour cost of 9.8p. However, it’s worth noting that tri-colour cartridges can have some hidden costs in that you have to replace the whole cartridge if you run out of any one colour of ink.

Slightly dubious interface design for both scanner and printer elements of MFPs is something that’s sadly familiar in HP’s devices. In this case the interface in the Envy 4500 print driver is far too simple for an MFP aimed primarily at family users. It tidies away too many common options in the unfriendly Advanced section. Incredibly, this includes paper size, which is a basic setting for anyone who needs to print photos, particularly as the Envy range has full support for borderless photo printing, unlike HP’s Deskjet range. The TWAIN scanner interface is similarly over-simplified, and only provides predefined resolution choices that don’t include 150dpi, which is one of our standard test resolutions.

Fortunately, there’s a lot to like about the Envy 4500 when it comes to print quality. It produced fairly good black text on plain paper, while colour graphics were excellent. Colours had real strength, and there was little sign of banding or other inkjet weaknesses. With only three colours, given that the pigment-based black isn’t used for the task, this isn’t an amazing photo printer. However, the results were still quite good on a variety of coated papers. Our one gripe was that the paper transport mechanism’s grip wheels left tiny tracks in the glossy finish of our A4 black and white test print. While black tones initially looked decidedly pale and bluish, they developed over a couple of days to a deeper shade, although they never quite matched up to prints produced by devices with a dedicated photo black cartridge.

We’re not keen on HP’s over-simplified scan interface, which lacks genuine advanced options

This Envy 4500’s scanner performed general-purpose jobs well, although high-resolution scans appeared to have been processed to boost their contrast, giving them an artificial look. The irritating software is unfortunate because the scanner’s ability to distinguish every shade on our test pattern suggests that the underlying hardware is very good.

The print driver is also over-simplified; you need the Advanced settings for things as basic as paper size or maximum resolution

In prints and copies this is an unhurried device, with standard quality text emerging at 8.7ppm, although pleasingly sharp draft text was a bit nippier at 13.5ppm, and good enough to use for a fair of day-to-day printing. Although colour print quality is very good for a budget inkjet, the Envy’s colour print speed of 1.8ppm is still sluggish in our book. Photos were very slow indeed, with six postcard-sized borderless prints taking nearly 27 minutes to print. Tested over Wi-Fi, scan speeds were on the slow side of typical, although at two and a half minutes our 1,200 dots-per-inch photo scan was just slow.

HP Envy 4500 review: Verdict

Despite some niggles this MFP performs well, and is about as smart-looking as a printer gets. When we originally reviewed the Envy 4500 it cost £59, but prices fell steadily after its release and despite it now being end of line, you may find it going cheap in various places across the web. It remains a reasonable MFP with wireless capabilities, although you do end up making concessions in terms of consumables. That said, rather than replace the tri-colour cartridge every time one of the ink tanks runs low, we’d much rather spend slightly more on a printer with individual colour inks. For instance, the excellent Canon Pixma MG5750 will only set you back around £80 – it’s a much better buy and remains our Best Buy winner in this competitive price range.