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The HP Officejet 4630 has a solid if not splashy set of MFP options. It offers good overall output quality, though it was comparatively slow, and showed an inclination to quickly run through colour ink.
HP Officejet 4630 can print, copy, scan, and fax. It may act as a standalone copier. It has a 35-page ADF for copying, scanning or faxing multipage documents unattended. It has a hundred sheet paper tray, modest by home-office requirements, plus an auto-duplexer for printing on each side of a sheet of paper.
The glossy black HP Officejet 4630 measures 7.4 by 17.6 by 21.6 (HWD), sufficiently small to find room for on most desks, and weighs 13.7 pounds. The front panel holds a non-touch monochrome display with Home, OK, Back, up and down controls, an alphanumeric keypad, and buttons for Wi-Fi, ePrint, and Assist, plus the on/off switch.
HP Officejet 4630: Features
HP Officejet 4630 can connect with a PC via a USB cable or to a network through Wi-Fi. ePrint is an HP service that assigns an e-mail address to the printer so that you can print out documents just by emailing them to the printer. It supports Wi-Fi printing from mobile units, as well as HP’s Wireless Direct Print, which helps you to walk up to the printer and print from a smartphone or tablet even when not connected to a Wi-Fi network. HP Printables offers crossword puzzles, news, family actions, coupons, and more for download over Wi-Fi for printout.
HP Officejet 4630: Printing Speed
We do not expect blazing speed from a budget inkjet, and with the HP Officejet 4630, we did not get it. I timed it on our business applications suite, at an effective 2ppm, slow for its value but not unusually so. The Canon Pixma MX392 Office All-In-One Inkjet Printer examined on the same 2-ppm speed, whereas the Editors’ Choice Brother MFC-J430w was clocked at 4.3 ppm, and the Editors’ Choice Brother MFC-J870DW at 4.7 ppm.
HP Officejet 4630: Output Quality
The HP Officejet 4630 overall output quality was good, with average text quality for an inkjet, graphics high quality on the excessive side of average, and average photo quality. Text was good enough for many house and business uses.
With graphics, colours generally were effectively saturated. A number of images confirmed mild banding (a regular sample of faint striations), and lots of showed dithering (graininess). Graphics needs to be ok for PowerPoint handouts; whether you would give them to a client you were in search of to impress depends on how picky you’re.
Images were of average quality for an inkjet, about that of drugstore prints. Colours were typically good, although a monochrome photo showed a slight tint. There was a lack of detail in some vivid areas. One picture showed posterization—a tendency for abrupt shifts in color where they need to be gradual.
HP Officejet 4630: Cartridges
One issue that the printer tended to run low on color ink, with notably degraded print quality, comparatively quickly, even with the biggest capacity cartridges.
The HP Officejet 4630 makes use of one cartridge for black whereas a 2nd cartridge combines magenta, cyan, and yellow, which means that you may not replace the individual colours when one color runs low. When one colour goes, the entire cartridge has to be changed. Another lower-priced printers use comparable systems, but it’s very uncommon that a printer cannot make it through our present test suite without running out of ink. This should not be an issue with text or monochrome graphics, but might be if you print lots of shade graphics or photos.
HP Officejet 4630: Verdict
It’s quite quick, produces high-quality print and has flexible wireless support. It’s not that cheap to run, though.
Pros
- Low profile design
- USB link for PCs/Macs
- Fax with 99-page memory
Cons
- No NFC connection
- Fragile output paper support
- Tri-colour cartridge can be wasteful