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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Brother MFC-J6920dw review: a fast, capable MFP stuck with mediocre print quality

Brother MFC-J6920DW $300.00 With a massive A3-size scanner platen, excellent performance, decent output, and 500-sheet paper capacity, this inkjet MFP will make short work of office chores and do it on the cheap. But there are flaws.

The Brother MFC-J6920DW’s most unique feature is its sideways paper path—paper is inserted long-side first, rather than short-side first. This allows outstanding performance out of a relatively inexpensive ($300) color inkjet MFP (copy/fax/print/scan). However, this is the second sideways printer from Brother we've seen (the MFC-J4510DW being the other) that suffers banding issues, especially in draft mode. Also, Brother has yet to shake the stereotypical inkjet's faded look in color graphics printed to plain paper. This printer’s strongest points are speed and super-cheap inks, plus, it has great scanning capabilities. It’s worth considering for a medium-volume small office with modest graphics needs.

While my editor thinks the Brother MFC-J6920DW looks like an squared-off mushroom, I like the way it's larger on top than on the bottom. (Star Wars meets Gumby?) Of course, the reason for its bulk—a large, ledger/A3-sized scanner platen, which allows no-stitch scanning of larger documents, has a lot to do with my liking. There's also a 35-sheet automatic document feeder, and the MFC-J6920DWsports dual scanning elements so it can copy a two-sided document in a single pass. If you regularly scan both sides of the paper, that's the next best thing to a sheet-fed scanner.

Nearly everything is done via the 3.7-inch color touchscreen display with its intuitive menu structure. The ink cartridges are found under a flip-open panel to the right of the output tray. A similar door on the left houses the Memory Stick, Secure Digital, and PictBridge ports for direct printing and storing of scans. The MFC-J6920DW may be connected via Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or USB. Setup is easy, and the scanning software and drivers are top-notch.

Paper capacity is one of the MFC-J6920DW's strengths, with two 250-sheet paper cassettes on board. That's a good chunk of the unit's 1500-page recommended monthly volume (the official monthly duty cycle is 26,000 pages). Two-sided (duplex) printing is automatic, and in my hands-on, it didn't bog down printing as much as it does on other units.

One flaw I noted was that the MFC-J6920DW had difficulty picking up the last sheet of paper in the cassette. This even occurred when I was using photo paper. It's not the worst thing in the world having to put two sheets in the cassette instead of one, but it isn't confidence-inspiring. Also, after a last sheet mis-feed, the job wasn't automatically restarted, and the first subsequent page was a partial print.

Speed is excellent nearly throughout. Text and monochrome graphics print at 13.7 pages per minute on the Mac, and 12.8 pages per minute on the PC. Snapshots (4-inch by 6-inch) print at just over 4 ppm on plain paper and 1 minute, 1 second to print on glossy paper. A full-page photo printed on the Mac took a whopping 4 minutes, 14 seconds on the Mac, though in my hands-on with the PC, it was more around two minutes. Copies also arrived quickly at around 5 pages per minute.

Scans were decently quick at about 6 seconds for previewing, 30 seconds for 600 dpi, and about a minute at 1200 dpi.

The quality of the MFC-J6920DW's output is the usual Brother yin and yang. Text isn't the sharpest or blackest we've seen, but it's adequate even for correspondence. Photos printed on glossy stock are also good, though the colors are a bit over-saturated. Plain-paper graphics is where the quality dips. While okay for charts or spot color, there's a definite faded look to photos.

An unfortunate print-quality effect is banding between passes of the printhead. When printing in draft mode, there was a noticeable difference in the brightness between the right and left sides of the page. There was no evidence of banding at the default or best settings, but in our color copy, which has a lot of solid color, we noticed fine white lines running vertically down the page at consistent intervals.

Scan quality was decent, but color images showed harsh, dark shadows, and line art tended to be a little fuzzy or jaggy.

The Brother MFC-J6920DW's ink comes in XL and XXL sizes, which are referred to by Brother as high-yield and super high-yield. While this begs the question of what happened to regular-yield, the ink is cheap regardless. You have to search around for the 2400-page LC109BK XXL black cartridge: We found it for online $38, off from $40 retail, which makes for a very attractive 1.5 cents per page.

Per the numbers at Brother's site, the LC103 XL cartridges all last for 600 pages with the black costing $25, or 4.165 cents per page. The colors cost $15 apiece, or 2.5 cents per page so you wind up with an approximately 11.5 cent four-color page. The more capacious, 1200-page LC105 colors cost $23 each, which drops per-page color costs to about 5.75 cents. With the LC109BK, that would make for super-cheap, four-color page of about 7.25 cents.

The MFC-J6920DW is a bit rough around the edges, but it could serve many mainstream offices competently. It's especially suitable if you regularly scan large and two-sided documents.

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How to Set Up Google Print on Your Chromebook

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Review: Picture Collage Maker helps you design and print calendars, cards, and more

Picture Collage Maker 3.3.7 is similar to an online photobook service like Mixbook, Shutterfly, or Snapfish, except it offers you more control when customizing your project. Even though Picture Collage Maker is a relatively small download (53.4 MB), it includes a number of backgrounds, templates, resizable clipart, and other embellishments. The 15-day free trial is really a feature-limited demo, as it adds watermarks to your art. Purchasing either the standard $30 Picture Collage Maker (which can only produce single page artwork) or the $40 Pro version will eliminate these watermarks from saved projects. A $70 commercial use license will do the job as well.

You can begin with a Picture Collage Maker template and customize the background (which is essentially the main theme of the template), add and remove photo frames and clipart, and add your own photos. The templates included with the trial version of Picture Collage Maker are themed for most common (and some unusual) Holidays and events, including April Fool's Day, Easter, Father's Day, Halloween, sports, and pets.

You can also download additional Picture Collage Maker templates from the program's website. The templates are free and range from 14 MB to about 20 MB. The template packs are grouped by theme, and include a wide variety of very nice styles, clipart, and layouts.

All three editions of Photo Collage Maker help you put images together, but you'll have to buy one to get anything usable: The free trial watermarks all images.

Picture Collage Maker is very easy to use, and has a few well-thought out features—such as buttons that make selected images the exact same size, or align them on your page. But even with these features, it seems pretty basic for the price. Picture Collage Maker doesn't warn you if your image is not sufficient resolution for your project. Plus, you need to manually change the orientation of the template: If you switch from a vertical template to a horizontal, for example, the new horizontal template will be distorted and display vertically. The photo editing tools are limited to Photo Size, Position, and Rotation.

Picture Collage Maker is best used for creating standard size photo collages, scrapbook pages, greeting cards, posters, or calendars. You can print them out using your home printer, and save them as a Picture Collage Maker's own .PMP file or as JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, or TIF. Additionally, you can email your project using Picture Collage Maker's Wizard, which allows you to resize your project before you send it (although unfortunately doesn't give you a file size for each option). If you purchase the full license, you can also get your project printed on Custom Collage Products (t-shirts, bags, etc.), however, you may not use Picture Collage Maker for commercial use without first purchasing the commercial version of the license for $70.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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