HP LaserJet Pro M476dn review

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.