Review: HP OfficeJet J4680 All-in-One Printer

For $ 130, you might not be surprised to locate print, scan, and copy capabilities in HP’s OfficeJet J4680 multifunction ink-jet printer. But the J460 also has a built-in fax machine, wireless connectivity, and a 20-sheet auto document feeder. HP boasts about the J4680’s 20-page-per-minute black-and-white print speeds and 17-page-per-minute color print speeds, but in our actual-world tests, the printer proved to be one thing of a slowpoke.

Setting up the printer was effortless sufficient: just attach the included USB and power cables, install the software program and print cartridges, and you’re ready to go. There were also a couple of cool setup features I hadn’t seen just before in an HP multifunction device. Initial, when running the software installer, you’re asked if you want to install HP’s Inkjet Utility Widget, which runs in OS X’s Dashboard. The widget gives you a fast glimpse of your ink supply and makes it possible for you to launch the regular HP printer maintenance utility software program. Second, after you install the print cartridges, the printer asks to insert a sheet of paper so that it can print out an alignment page. In itself, this isn’t unusual, but several printers require you to analyze this test output your self, selecting which bars line up very best and then utilizing the printer’s on-board menus to input that info. With the J4680, you just lay the printed sheet on the scanner bed and press OK. The scanner reads the sheet and makes any required adjustments.

The J4680 uses two ink cartridges, one black and 1 tri-color (cyan, magenta, and yellow), that claim to yield 200 and 360 prints, respectively. Replacement cartridges price $ 15 for the black and $ 25 for the tri-color. HP also sells a high-yield black print cartridge at $ 28, it costs a little less than two standard-yield black cartridges, and promises to print 700 pages before running out of ink. Unlike some HP printers, the J4680 doesn’t provide support for a photo color ink cartridge.

It was simple to set up the J4680 to connect to the office wireless network. The printer showed up as a Bonjour printer automatically, and you can join individual wireless networks via HP’s Control Center software program on your Mac. That positive beats configuring the device utilizing the printer’s on-board menus and controls, like I’ve had to do with other multifunction printers. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that push scanning from the J4680 to my MacBook over an Airport network worked seamlessly as properly, as many printers we’ve tested in the past either skip support for network scanning or give it via some tedious workaround.

We printed a wide selection of test pages on the J4680 and found the prints to be of great top quality. Prints of our standard Photoshop test files had been a little over-saturated, and a bit too red all around. The J4680 doesn’t provide an ICC color profile, so you’re greater off letting the printer manage the color management. The 4-color printer also lacked the smooth, continuous tone you may find from a six-ink photo printer, but the results had been acceptable. Text, when printed in Normal or Very best modes on plain paper, earned a Great rating. Text was clean, with sharp letters legible at even extremely tiny point sizes but when text was printed with a colored background, there was a tendency for bleeding that looked messy.

Print times were slow. It took 19 seconds to print a 1-page black-and-white Microsoft Word document 1 minute and 47 seconds for a 10-page text document over 4 minutes for our Photoshop test file and a whopping 22 minutes to print our 4-page PDF document at Very best quality (not the greater Maximum DPI mode also obtainable) on plain paper.

The J4680 also features a 1,200-dpi, letter-sized flatbed scanner. It can produce 48-bit scans, but only after you discover and enable that feature deep in the HP scanning software’s preferences. That’s my greatest complaint about the scanning software: most settings are hidden up in the menu bar pull-downs, requiring a search for the correct controls to customize your scan. Once I figured out the software program, I was able to get very good top quality scans that were color accurate with lots of detail. I was able to scan into Photoshop CS3, as properly as directly from HP’s scanning software. You can choose to scan a document to OCR in TextEdit, scan to PDF, scan to e-mail, or scan to file.

I tested the copier with a selection of documents, from pictures to magazine covers to text documents. The copies of photos had a slight yellow tint, but the magazine cover looked very great. A copy of a grayscale test page was a small light but maintained a good quantity of detail. You can place the original either on the scanner’s flatbed or in the automatic document feeder, which can hold up to 20 sheets of paper. It took about 4 minutes to copy a 10-page black-and-white Word document. The J4680 doesn’t offer two-sided printing or scanning.

The J4680 also features a built-in fax machine that worked as advertised, and the included automatic document feeder takes the hassle out of sending multi-page faxes.

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