HP Officejet 5740 review

HP’s Officejet 5740 is essentially the great looking Envy 5640 inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP) with a fax modem and a compact, 25-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). It’s not quite as sleek, but has similar colour touchscreen controls and the same excellent build quality: the scanner tilts up on heavily-damped hinges to grant access to the ink cartridges, while the USB and SD card slots are hidden behind a neat rotating door.

We’re not a fan of captive paper input trays positioned in the printer base, but it’s not too hard to load the 125-sheet one found here. It also includes a second tray for 6×4″ photo paper that automatically engages when needed. Printed pages collect in an output tray which extends automatically, although you need to push it in yourself to close it again. Automatic double-sided (duplex) printing is standard.

^ HP’s iOS and Android apps offer a better experience than its PC driver software

Touchscreens on printers have come a long way, and the system used here is superb. The sharp colour display is perfectly responsive, controlling an intuitive menu system that uses a mix of tap, drag and swipe gestures to control web features as well as core functions. The feature set isn’t exhaustive, however, as you can’t scan to or print from cloud storage services.

^ Use the printer’s web admin interface to monitor supplies or configure web features

The Officejet 5740 looks and sounds promising, but unfortunately it’s disappointing to use. It’s not an especially fast text printer, delivering our letter test at 11 pages per minute (ppm). Colour prints were more competitive, with our complex graphics document arriving at a healthy 7.7ppm. The scanner wasn’t particularly fast, needing 23 seconds to capture an A4 page at 300 dots-per-inch (dpi). The glacial ADF slowed things down further; a 10-page photocopy took two minutes and 22 seconds in black, and in colour the job needed a further two minutes.

^ HP’s print driver is a bit too simple for our tastes, but it’s fine for everyday jobs

^ You need the advanced settings to print photos at the maximum dots per inch setting

It’s hard to fault the quality of prints and photocopies on plain paper, and its photos aren’t bad either. Unfortunately we can’t say the same for its scans, which are fine at low resolutions, but seemed processed and artificial at 600dpi. This is compounded by HP’s over-simplified scan software which, among other things, doesn’t offer auto-exposure. As with the Envy 5640, we couldn’t complete our 150dpi scan as the resolution isn’t available, and our test scan at 1,200dpi came out as a completely black image.

^ We’re bored with complaining about HP’s over-simplified TWAIN scan interface

After the Envy 5640, the Officejet 5740 became the second printer ever to run out of ink during our standard tests – it’s a good job it’s compatible with HP’s Instant Ink, where the printer itself orders more cartridges as needed. While it ships with cartridges rated for 200 black and 165 colour pages, the former expired with little warning after 50 pages of text, 34 pages of text and graphics, 22 black and colour photocopies and two A4 photos.

Extra large replacements have three times the capacity and equate to running costs of around 7.3p per page. That’s reasonable, but it’s not low enough to offset patchy performance elsewhere. We’d spend more on the Epson Workforce WF-3520DWF. If that doesn’t suit your needs either then check our reguarly-updated Best Printers and Buying Guide.