HP LaserJet Pro M476dn review

HP’s LaserJet Pro M476dn is a colour laser multifunction peripheral (MFP) aimed at home and small office use. It’s reasonably well equipped for the price, supporting wired networks, and capable of printing and scanning to a USB flash drive. Not only can it print automatically on both sides of a sheet of paper (duplex printing), but it can scan both sides of a sheet in a single pass – quicker and less likely to jam than mechanically turning the paper over. Control is via a colour touchscreen which leaves the front panel free of clutter, but we’re not sure this is HP’s finest effort – it seemed slow to respond at times, and doesn’t accept swipe gestures.

This is quite a smart MFP, and in areas it feels particularly well built. The 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) sits on strong hinges which extend up to allow the lid to close flat on thick originals such as a magazine. The 250-sheet paper cassette glides in and out smoothly rather than clattering about.

Unfortunately, the tray itself is unimpressive, feeling thin and flexible, and with the paper orientation stamped into the bottom plate in a way that it’s covered up the moment you load it with paper; not great if you want to manually print on the flip side of a few pages, for example. If you’re printing 50 sheets or fewer you could use the multipurpose feed that folds down from the front panel. With only an optional 250-sheet paper feed available, there’s limited scope to expand this MFP.

The M476dn is simple to set up and install, aside from an odd question where you must decide if it will be self-managed, IT-managed, or whether it will print a configuration sheet. We guessed at self-managed and seemed to get on fine after that, although like many printers the default settings include sending usage data back to the manufacturer: we’ve no idea why this is so widespread, or why it’s always selected by default.

While we’re complaining about HP’s software, it’s unfortunate that this MFP uses the same over-simplified scan interface that we so often criticise. This has no automatic selection or exposure settings, has an advanced settings page that doesn’t include any particularly advanced settings, and offers a limited range of preset resolutions which doesn’t include 150 dots per inch (dpi) – a common setting which we use for one of our timed tests.

On devices with an ADF, such as this one, it’s not possible to select resolutions above 300dpi unless you specify the platen glass as the document source, so it’s odd that the software’s photo setting doesn’t do this for you. The interface remembers neither preview images nor user-defined settings between sessions, unless you save the latter manually.

Fortunately, things are vastly better elsewhere. HP’s simple print driver works well here, using shortcuts to cover the vast majority of print jobs. As an example, we loaded an envelope in the multipurpose feed, selected the envelope shortcut, changed the size from the default size 10 to DL and got perfect results first time, which is surprisingly rare.

Sluggishness aside, the touchscreen menu is extremely easy to use, particularly when it comes to making direct prints and scans – usually it’s just a matter of tapping a couple of times. You can scan to USB while the printer is serving network print jobs. Like other HP devices, there’s the usual comprehensive support for mobile and Cloud prints and scans, including native iOS printing via iPrint and an Android print service, and apps covering both printing and scanning. The Android All-in-One Remote app is simple and flexible, allowing us to start scanning a document while the printer was still serving a test print.

The M476dn produced exceptional text in our tests, with extremely sharp outlines even under magnification. It made a decent job of graphics and photos, too, although these were a touch under-saturated, and our black and white photo was a little lacking in shade detail. This isn’t an especially  quick printer – particularly given that it was prone to pausing mid-job and displaying ‘cleaning’ – but it produced 25 pages of text at a rate of 16.7 pages per minute (ppm), and managed a more impressive 12.7ppm in our mixed colour graphics test.

The M476dn’s scanner is rapid enough at low resolution, capturing an A4 page at 300dpi in 13 seconds, but it’s less impressive at the maximum 1,200dpi, taking almost two minutes over a single 6×4″ photo. Photocopies were quick, particularly over multiple pages using the ADF: we timed a 10-page mono copy at just 43 seconds. Copy quality was fairly good, although colour copies looked better if we lightened them by a couple of stops.

We often find ourselves criticising scans from HP MFPs for looking artificial, but the effect was much less pronounced here. Certainly our 300dpi document scan looked fine, and although photo scans appeared to have been processed, it was more subtle than usual. This scanner struggled to pick out the darkest shades in our test images, but scans to a PC or USB drive were still easily good enough for most purposes.

The M476 uses just four consumables, with high-yield 4,400-page black cartridges available alongside 2,700-page colour supplies. Using these, costs work out at 1.7p per black page and 10.7p for a black and colour print, which is quite expensive. Though it has no great faults, this printer’s strengths aren’t enough to offset these costs, leaving it something of an also-ran.