HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One review: Home printer has print quality and cheaper inks in its favor

The $130 HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One color inkjet multifunction (copy/print/scan), will cover a low volume of home use nicely. It's exceptionally easy to use, surprisingly capable, and produces impressive output. On the downside are its lack of speed and pricey inks, but HP’s new Instant Ink program might help that somewhat.

The HP Envy 5530 is rather compact for a multifunction printer. The scanner lid is so thin that at first glance, you might not recognize it as such. However, there’s an A4/letter-sized scanner on-board, and it produces good-looking copies and scans. You can even push-scan to a PC across the network—not a feature you see in every printer at this price point.

The Envy 5530 offers automatic duplexing, which isn’t a guarantee in this price range. Everything else about the paper handling is pretty modest: just 100 sheets (input) and 30 sheets (output)—if having printed pages fall right on top of blank pages counts as an output area. If you print any more than 200 pages per month, you should be looking at a more robust machine.

Setting up the HP Envy 5530 is easy whether you use USB or Wi-Fi, and thanks to a 2.65-inch touchscreen and exceptionally well thought out menus, so is operation. The display and all the controls are on the top left of the unit, and intuitively arranged. The only other feature worth mentioning is the SD card slot for direct printing and off-loading scans.

HP doesn't bundle a lot of software with the Envy 5530, but what's there is easy and capable. The driver and scanning utilities are nicely rendered and offer all the features most users need. There's also the now usual suite of remote printing options, including HP ePrint via email and Apple AirPrint.

While the assumption is that this printer isn’t going to be used much, it still bears mentioning that the Envy 5530 is pretty slow. It managed an anemic 5.9 pages per minute (ppm) printing plain text and a few simple, monochrome graphics on both the PC and Mac platforms. Snapshot-sized, 4-by-6-inch photos printed at about 2.5 ppm to plain paper, but to glossy paper that slowed to 0.8 ppm. Full-sized photos printed at about 0.4 ppm on glossy paper, while copies exited at about 3 ppm. Scan times are bearable, albeit two to three times longer than what you'll see from top-shelf units.

Along with minimal paper capacity and slow performance, the Envy 5530 suffers (as most low-cost printers do) from expensive ink. At least if you buy on your own: The standard 61 series black and tri-color cartridges cost $15 and $21 respectively, yet last for only 199 and 165 pages. That's 7.5 cents per page for the black and 12.75 cent per page for the colors, or a daunting 20.15 cents per four-color page. You can reduce those costs considerably with the $30 black and $32 tri-color 61XL cartridges, to about 16 cents per four-color page, but black still comprises a high 6.25 cents of that amount.

As to that "buy on your own" comment, the Envy 5530 is eligible for HP's new Instant Ink service. With Instant Ink, HP sells you massively capacious ink cartridges, then doles the ink out on a monthly basis. You can print 50 pages of anything—a bit of text, or a heavy-coverage photo for a flat fee of $3 a month (6 cents per page), while 100 pages costs $5 a month (5 cents per page), and 300 pages are $10 (3.3 cents per page). That's a whole lot cheaper than manual user replacement, but only if you print fairly close to the number of pages in the plan. If you barely print 100 pages a year, then just buying the cartridges on your own might be a better deal. Also, the whole Instant Ink deal depends on your printer having an Internet connection, and your being comfortable with HP’s managing your printer in the background.

Along with ease of use, the Envy 5530's other major strength is its output quality. Text is clear and sharp, even in draft mode, and color graphics are also surprisingly accurate. You might want to tweak the photo settings a bit for a warmer color temperature on glossy photos, but other than that it's all good.

The HP Envy 5530 is in many ways a typical home printer: It’s somewhat slow, with adequate features, and its low purchase price is balanced out by higher-priced inks. However, its Instant Ink program is intriguing for its savings potential, and its output quality and ease of use are distinctly better than usual for this price class. It’s well worth considering for a home user.

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Samsung Chromebook 3: Cheaper, more productive alternative to a tablet

Samsung’s latest Chromebook – the Series 3 XE303C12-A01US – is small, slim, and speedy. This little laptop weighs less than 2.5 pounds and packs a decent performance punch, assuming you’re comparing it to the right machines.

GoogleThe Samsung Series 3 runs the browser-based Chrome operating system.The Samsung Series 3 looks like a laptop, but it's not. It's equipped with a mobile processor and very little internal storage, and it runs the browser-based Chrome operating system instead of the Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows platform. It performs more like a tablet or advanced smartphone than an ultraportable. If you’re looking to do much more than surf the web and create cloud-based content (via Google or another service), then this is not the laptop for you. But if you’re looking for a tablet with much better content-creation functionality--namely, an integrated keyboard--then the Samsung Chromebook is an appealing option.

Our review model, which costs $249.99 as configured, sports a 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos 5 dual-core ARM processor, which is the same mobile system-on-a-chip found in the Google Nexus 10 tablet. Like the Nexus 10, the Chromebook pairs the Exynos 5 with 2GB of memory and 16GB of hard drive space.

The Chromebook also sports built-in Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, two USB ports (one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0), a 3-in-1 card reader, and a headphone/microphone combination port. There’s also an HDMI-out port on the back of the machine. Samsung offers USB dongles for VGA-out and Ethernet (sold separately).

Because the Chromebook is technically a tablet, with a mobile system-on-a-chip and no discrete graphics card, we tested it using our tablet benchmark tests – Peacekeeper, SunSpider, and WebVizBench.

The Chromebook performs very well compared to tablets in all three of these tests. It scored 1233 on Futuremark’s Peacekeeper HTML5 browser test, which is more than twice the score of Apple’s iPad 3 (516). The Chromebook was also very fast on SunSpider, taking 0.69 seconds to complete the same JavaScript test that the iPad 3 took 1.78 seconds to complete, and that the fairly speedy Asus VivoTab RT took 1.03 seconds to complete. On WebVizBench, another HTML5 test, the Chromebook scored 5.4, slightly behind the Windows Surface RT tablet (6.9) and, surprisingly, the HTC Windows 8 phone (5.9).

The Chromebook also loads pages quickly. In our page-load test, it took just 7 seconds to load a page that took the Asus VivoTab RT 23.3 seconds to load.

The Samsung Chromebook looks a lot like the 11-inch Apple MacBook Air. It’s thicker (0.8 inches to the MBA’s 0.68 inches) and slightly heavier (2.43 pounds to the MBA’s 2.38 pounds), and it’s made of plastic instead of Apple’s standard aluminum. However, it clearly took cues from Apple’s ultrathin, ultralight premium laptop, right down to the island-style black keyboard and smooth, button-less trackpad.

The Chromebook may be lightweight and made of plastic, but it feels very sturdy. When closed, the laptop feels solid, and when open, the hinge is practically unshakeable. Speaking of the hinge, that’s the only major eyesore on the machine: When the laptop is closed, the hinge juts up about a half-centimeter. This breaks up the otherwise clean, smooth lines of the machine.

The Chromebook sports a solid, matte-silver lid featuring both the Google Chrome logo (in the upper left corner) and the Samsung logo (left, center). Inside, the laptop is all matte-silver plastic, including a silver plastic bezel surrounding the machine’s 11.6-inch screen. There’s another Samsung logo below the screen.

The keyboard is still a full-size QWERTY keyboard, but Google and Samsung have modified the layout to better suit the Chrome experience. First, there’s no Windows or Apple key (after all, this isn’t a Windows or Apple computer), just larger Ctrl and Alt buttons. There’s also no Caps Lock key – instead, there’s a Search key that, when pressed, brings up a list of apps installed on the computer. This is sort of like the Windows key, since it essentially brings up the apps in a Start Menu-esque format.

GoogleThe Samsung Series 3 sports a silvery design and an extremely sturdy hinge.

There’s also no Fn key. Instead of function keys along to the top of the keyboard, above the numbers, there are dedicated keys for various tasks. From left to right, you’ll find: Escape, Back, Forward, Refresh, Full Screen, Next Window, Brightness up/down, Mute, Volume up/down, and Power. This setup shouldn’t take too much getting used to if you’re a Mac person – MacBooks’ function keys are, by default, set to perform tasks instead of the typical F1, F2, etc.

The keyboard, which sports Chiclet-style keys, is fairly comfortable to type on, though it’s certainly not the best keyboard I’ve ever used. The keys offer somewhat light tactile feedback, which can be an issue if you’re typing quickly. The keys are also a bit small, though the keyboard itself is full-size.

The Chromebook’s multi-touch-enabled trackpad sits below the keyboard. Similar to Apple trackpads, it has no discrete buttons, just one big, clickable pad. Unlike Apple’s trackpads, however, the one on the Series 3 lacks a setting for a physical right-click (that is, you can’t set it to right-click if you click in the lower-right corner). All right-clicks must be performed by tapping the pad with two fingers.

The trackpad supports some multi-touch gestures, such as two-finger scrolling. It does not support pinch-to-zoom, which is unfortunate considering the Chromebook’s screen is so small. The trackpad is comfortable, responsive, and otherwise easy to use.

The Chromebook’s display is adequate, considering the size and price of the system. The laptop sports a matte-finish LED display with a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels – the same resolution you’ll find on the 11-inch MacBook Air. This resolution is perfectly acceptable for an 11.6-inch screen, and images and text look crisp and clear. Color fidelity is fairly good, though some colors look a little washed-out when the screen is cranked up to its brightest setting.

That said, the screen's brightness could be an issue, considering this is designed for portability. The screen is 200 nits (a term for a unit of measured brightness). This is fine for basic indoor work, but I usually like at least 250 nits for working outdoors or in direct sunlight. Apple’s MacBook Air has a very bright screen, at 354 nits.

Video looks and sounds surprisingly good on the Chromebook, considering it has no discrete graphics card (and a mobile chip, at that). High-definition streaming video plays well, though darker scenes suffer from quite a bit of artifacting. Audio from the Chromebook’s two 1.5W stereo speakers sounds decently full and loud, and the headphone jack is clean. I wouldn’t make this your main video machine, but for casual watching and listening it works just fine.

The Samsung Chromebook is designed for a user with very specific needs. Because it runs the Chrome OS, you can’t use traditional applications – you have to use web-based apps or apps that are built within the Google infrastructure.

Melissa RiofrioThe Chromebook comes with several apps built-in, including the Chrome browser, Google Maps, and YouTube.

The Chromebook comes with several apps built-in, including the Chrome web browser, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Drive, and a calculator app. You can download additional apps, either paid or free, at the Chrome Web Store.

This Chromebook is really designed for people who do little more than surf the web and create documents and spreadsheets, and who want something light, portable, and with a physical keyboard. It only has 16GB of internal storage, but never fear: Chromebook users get 100GB of free Cloud Drive storage for two years.

While the Chromebook isn’t for everyone, it’s certainly a cheap and productive alternative to a similarly-equipped tablet. You don’t get a touchscreen, but you do get extra Cloud Drive storage, better performance, and a keyboard.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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