HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-in-One Review

We enjoy Dilbert in the comics and "The Office" on television, but the corporate antics we'd really like to see are Team Spirit Days at HP. The company is one of the foremost vendors of color laser printer/scanner/copier/and sometimes fax machines, such as the $699 Color LaserJet CM1017 we reviewed in April.

On the other hand, HP also makes the color inkjet Officejet Pro L7680. It's the $399 device at your local retailer with a big advertising sticker on top, bragging, "World's fastest desktop all-in-one for business color" and "Print for less -- Save up to 25 percent per page over laser all-in-one products."

Can an inkjet printer/copier/scanner/fax really compete with, or even outdo, today's affordable color laser models? Well, the L7680 isn't shy about it: In addition to quoting the draft-mode theoretical maximum downhill print speeds that every inkjet advertises -- in this case, 35 pages per minute for black and white and 34 ppm for color -- the Officejet Pro promises "laser-quality speeds" of 12 monochrome and 10 color ppm.

Laser quality? Well, we could waffle and say that any inkjet output -- i.e., liquid ink drying on paper, seeping at least a tiny bit into even the best coated stock -- can never look completely as sharp under a magnifying glass as dry toner fused onto paper, blah blah.

But the L7680's stuff looks damn good, and arrives faster than pages from quite a few of the under-$1,000 color lasers we've sampled -- delivering our 55-page Adobe Acrobat document, for instance, one-third faster than the Color LaserJet CM1017. And either our math is wrong, or the all-in-one's ink can indeed cost less per page than many laser printers' toner. Actually, the claim of 25-percent savings is too modest.

Do you think the HP laser guys invite the HP inkjet guys to their office birthday parties?

Four-Sixths Photogenic

The Officejet Pro L7680 is a four-in-one (including fax as well as printing, copying, and scanning capabilities) peripheral with USB 2.0 and Ethernet ports for single and shared operation; it takes about 21 by 25 inches of desk space and stands 14 inches tall. Feeling anything but flimsy at 35 pounds, the unit has a 250-sheet input tray front and center; pages perform a U-turn to finish face up on what HP calls a 150-sheet output tray but which looks a lot like the lid of the input tray.

A duplexer that snaps onto the back of the Officejet for automatic double-sided printing is standard equipment. Atop the lid of the flatbed, legal-sized scanner is a 50-sheet automatic document feeder for multipage copying or faxing jobs.

Though the HP's name indicates its focus on office productivity, digital photographers -- whether entrepreneurs printing their own marketing materials or family members invading a home office after hours -- will notice the front-mounted Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard, xD, CompactFlash, and Memory Stick flash-card slots and PictBridge USB connector for loading images from a digital camera, as well as the 2.4-inch color LCD that lets them preview and select shots for printing (or copying to the attached PC) or print a proof sheet with thumbnails of all the images on a card.

These functions are handy for occasional use, though you won't confuse the L7680 with a photo-savvy inkjet like the HP Photosmart D7360 we tested last December: The all-in-one's pushbutton controls and LCD menus for imaging tasks aren't as friendly as that printer's, and instead of offering a dedicated tray for 4 by 6-inch photo paper, it obliges you to awkwardly push the media wrist-deep into its maw.

Most of all, the Officejet Pro is an old-school, four-color inkjet, sticking with the trusty CMYK quartet instead of the six or more ink colors that make up the smoother hues of a photo printer. Opening a door at the front left of the machine reveals the palm-sized black, cyan, yellow, and magenta cartridges, which plug in with just a bit of wiggling and shoving.

Less Costly Consumables

Initial setup also includes snapping two printheads -- one for black and yellow, one for cyan and magenta -- into place. These are estimated to last for some 41,000 pages; if you keep the printer that long, replacement printheads are $60 each.

The supplied cartridges are the printer's standard-size ink tanks, which HP's published page-yield listings rate at 850 pages for the $20 black and 900 pages for the $15-apiece color trio. (Disclaimer: Our tests yielded only about three-fifths of those estimates, but that included heavy PDF and photo printing with full- or nearly full-page color instead of the 10- or 15-percent coverage commonly used in print-life predictions.)

When the regular cartridges run dry, smart shoppers will presumably replace them with HP's XL-sized alternatives -- a $35 black cartridge rated at 2,450 pages and three $25 color cartridges rated for 1,700 pages. A few minutes with the solar-powered calculator reveals that the larger cartridges end up costing about 1.5 cents per black and just under 6 cents per color page.

That compares favorably -- very favorably -- to other inkjets and to many of the entry-level color lasers that have crossed the Labs, Weather, & Sports Desk over the last half-decade. No inkjet printer is cheap to operate, but the L7680 could be the least outrageous in a long while.