HP Envy 6120e review: A cheap printer with high-quality output but slow speeds

The HP Envy 6120e is a basic all-in-one home colour inkjet all-in-one that’s generally available for around £60. Don’t worry if the models you see for sale don’t carry the same number because all the Envy 6100 series printers are the same – the different codes refer to regionality and colour. For example, the 6122e is the purple version of the white 6120e while the 6155e is the North American version of the 6120e and so on.

The Envy 6120e uses a basic two-cartridge ink system and takes HP’s 308-series black and tri-colour cartridges as well as the 308 EvoMore high-yield cartridge black cartridge. There’s no high-yield colour option, though, which makes printing colour pages more expensive in the long run.

HP Envy 6120e review: What do you get for the money?

Given the low price, the HP Envy 6120e has everything and more you can ask of a home printer, including automatic duplex printing – that’s two-sided in plain English – and a 100-sheet A4 (or 10 envelopes) paper reservoir that sits inside the printer rather than hanging out the back like cheap printers of yore.

It isn’t the most robustly made thing, but then you’re not paying a huge amount of money here and it isn’t designed to be carted about, anyway. It’s reasonably compact at 430 x 360 x 135mm, which means it will easily sit in an average bookshelf or Ikea wall unit. The weight of 5.1kg shouldn’t cause any problems either.

The Envy 6120e is controlled via a nicely responsive 2.4in colour capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320 x 240 that sits on the front left corner of the unit next to the paper output tray. Compared to the all-button layout on my old HP DeskJet 3630, the Envy 6120e’s control panel makes the Envy 6120e very easy to use, even if you don’t have the user manual to hand.

You’ll find a physical on/off button around the back which is useful if you don’t want to leave the printer in standby mode for prolonged periods. And on the top is a flatbed scanner, with a hinge that has around 10mm of rise in it, making it well suited to scanning open books or anything else thicker than a few sheets of paper. The scanner supports a maximum resolution of 1,200 x 1,200ppi.

The HP Smart app lets you save scans as searchable PDFs and has a text extract function which pulls a text file from your source document. It works well, but make sure you put the source document in the right way around, because it’s not clever enough to work out that it’s looking at upside-down English.

HP Envy 6120e review: How easy is it to set up?

Connectivity options for the Envy 6120e include USB 2.0, a cable isn’t supplied, Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct, plus you get support for Apple AirPrint and Mopria Print Services.

Set-up is straightforward for Windows and Linux users, which are the operating systems I tested it on. You simply connect the printer via a USB cable or Wi-Fi and add it from the Settings menu with any other printer. I’ve no reason to believe Apple users should experience any difficulties.

Adding the printer to a Windows PC triggers the automatic installation of the HP Smart app from the Microsoft Store, which is a bit sneaky, but you can uninstall the app without hampering the printer’s basic functions.

Unlike many peripherals, the Envy 6120e supports 5GHz Wi-Fi, which is a boon if, like me, you have access points with the 2.4GHz radio turned off. The Envy 6120e does have a Bluetooth radio but it’s only used in the set up process. You cannot serve print jobs to the 6120e via Bluetooth.

If you connect wirelessly, you can also use HP’s desktop and mobile Smart printer app via your smartphone, although this requires you to set up a HP+ account to use it.

The mobile app lets you print PDF files and photos as well as scan documents directly into the HP cloud, and it adds several useful bits of functionality, like faxing and optical character recognition. You can also print directly from OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive in the mobile app, again PDFs and photos only.

There is, however, an issue with signing up for HP+. Once you’ve signed your printer into HP+ or for the Instant Ink service (which requires an HP+ account) the printer will thereafter only work with HP-branded ink cartridges even if you later cancel your Instant Ink subscription.

The printer will also need a continuous Wi-Fi connection to work even if connected via a USB cable, so HP can continue to update the printer’s firmware to block third-party cartridges. In short, signing into HP+ is a path that, once trodden, cannot be walked back along.

HP Envy 6120e review: What about running costs?

Before I begin to discuss the running costs of an HP printer, I need to address the elephant in the room, which is HP’s Instant Ink subscription service. This, as the name suggests, sends you replacement ink cartridges when the printer tells HP it’s running low.

Subscription costs start at £1.49 for ten pages a month, then rise to £3.99 for 50 pages, £5.49 for 100 pages, £12 for 300 pages and finally £25 for £700 pages. You can read more about the Instant Ink service in a sponsored article we ran back in October.

HP handily offers a free three-month, 700-page subscription to potential subscribers, so they can test the waters, but as I said above, once you’ve signed in to HP+ to take advantage of the free trial, you can kiss goodbye to using non-HP ink cartridges in the future – ever.

If you buy your ink from HP you’ll pay £16 for a standard black cartridge and £14 for colour. You can pick them up cheaper but not by much, so for the sake of this review I’ll use HP’s prices.

HP reckons the standard black cartridge is good for 160 pages, the tri-colour for 120 pages while the high-yield black should produce 320 pages. This is more than double what the setup cartridges that come bundled with the printer can produce.

Given HP’s stated likely page yields, that equals 10p per page of mono printing and £0.117 per page for colour. That’s very expensive for mono and about on par for the course for colour printing on this type of printer.

However, if you subscribe to the £5.49/100 page Instant Ink service, you’ll only pay 5.5p per page regardless of the colour/mono use balance: That’s a pretty good deal for a budget inkjet printer.

Of course, making the most out of Instant Ink means you need to print close to the maximum number of pages allowed each month without going over the limit. Print less and the price per page rises. Print more and you pay more – an extra 10 to 15 pages in a month will cost you £1 – although you can roll unused pages over up to three times your monthly allowance.

HP Envy 6120e review: What are the speed and print quality like?

You may not want to print all that much, however, because the HP Envy 6120e is far from quick. In our printing tests, it only managed a pedestrian 8.5 pages per minute in black, while in colour it did even worse, running at just 3.6 pages per minute. The first page of my print test took a glacial 29 seconds to land in the out-tray.

That makes the Envy 6120e one of the slowest printers we’ve ever tested. But, to be fair, if you want your pages to fly out at the sort of high speed Ben Bradlee would have expected when he shouted “Roll the presses!” you need to spend considerably more than this.

If the Envy 6120e is slow, it is at least thorough; the quality of its printing is above serious criticism. For the purposes of this test, I used bog-standard Tesco Home Office A4, 80gsm stock, but when it came to printing photographs I also turned to some Kodak Ultima ultra glossy paper that I happened to have lying around.

The print quality of black-and-white documents is tip-top with text looking impressively crisp and clear, while even and smallest and finest of elements were faithfully reproduced.

The Envy 6120e kept its end up with colour printing too, churning out excellent quality colour documents and images, although the latter is dependent on the quality of the stock you are printing on. Colours were well saturated, vivid and nicely balanced. I’ve not seen better on a printer for this sort of money.

Budget printers are never the quietest of things but the Envy 6120e doesn’t make as much of a racket as some printers I’ve owned. Let’s put it this way, I was able to take a phone call with the printer running next to me and didn’t feel the need to pause the job to hear what was being said to me.

HP Envy 6120e review: Should you buy it?

Away from the Instant Ink service, the Envy 6120e is expensive to keep topped up with ink. If you are an infrequent printer then that’s probably okay. It’s a price worth paying for the quality of the Envy 6120e’s output, which is good for a cheap printer.

If you print more regularly, the Envy 6120e still makes sense, because the Instant Ink subscription is good value and convenient. If you plan on printing around 300 sheets a month, the Instant Ink price of under £0.04 per sheet, regardless of colour, is excellent value. Where the 6120e trips over its shoelaces is if you can’t predict how often or how you’ll print and you tend to print in large volume. If this is you, then it makes no sense to pay a subscription and then occasionally have to pay through the nose for a job and wait ages for it to appear in the output tray. In this case, you’re probably better off with a different brand, or an ink-tank printer like the Epson Ecotank ET-2850.