HP Envy Inspire 7921e Printer – the perfect home office workhorse?

Printers. Are they the spawn of Satan? I say this because they seem designed to make you pull your hair out, yell, scream, froth at the mouth and mutate into something like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

Having your printer refuse to print when you need to get a signed document emailed back ahead of a deadline is stressful and exasperating. Don’t get me started on the wonders of paper jams…

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I think the folk at HP must be acutely aware of this. The Envy Inspire 7921e has been designed to take the pain out of printing. It’s the first multi-function printer that HP’s engineers designed as the whole work from home thing became the norm. The upshot is that once set up, it just works and keeps on working.

Design-wise, the 7921e isn’t going to win any beauty prizes. It’s a sizeable,  boxy device that marries a scanner, printer, document feeder and paper trays. The focus here clearly isn’t aesthetics but functionality and ease of use. To this end, it’s finished in a subtle off-white and surf blue colourway.

It mightn’t be pretty, but it is green. This takes the form of it being crafted from 45% recycled plastic. Even better still, as an HP+ printer, HP has said they’ll plant trees based on your print usage.

One of the big selling points with the 7921e is its document feeder. Once you’ve experienced the sheer utility of an automatic document feeder, there’s no going back. I love stacking a bunch of pages into the feeder, telling it to copy them and walking away. Wandering back a few minutes later, I have a neatly stacked pile of copied and original documents. This works for scanning. It’ll feed a pile of pages through the scanner to generate a multi-page PDF that will be saved in whatever folder you’ve nominated.

If that was all there was to the 7921e’s usability, that’d be fine, but there’s plenty more. Perhaps the most useful is the small colour touch screen control interface. Compared to printers with cryptic and confusing buttons/status LEDs, the colour display is incredibly user-friendly. You can get its status at a glance, and tasks such as printing, scanning, and copying are so much more intuitive.

Setting up printers is usually a chore I prefer to avoid, but with the 7921e, the whole process was pretty bomb-proof. After installing ink cartridges and being prompted to install the HP Smartphone app, I was guided through the setup process. Once that was done, I was good to go. HP has also baked in a bunch of nifty Cloud smarts. With it, you get added security – so your printer doesn’t become a vulnerability for hackers to exploit later – and self-healing network/Wi-Fi tech. In short, once it was connected, the 7921e stayed securely connected, greatly reducing stress levels.

If you’re working from home, you’ll probably also like that it has a quiet print mode. Instead of sounding like an accident at a Tupperware party as it prints or scans while you are in the middle of that important Zoom meeting, the 7921e can be set to run super quietly. Nice!

Being an HP+ printer, you get access to some pretty cool stuff. Aside from the usual warranty and 12 months of online tech support, you also gain the ability to remotely access your printer. This means scanning documents to a remotely connected tablet/phone/PC is a doddle, as is printing from remote devices. The most compelling feature, however, is Instant Ink. When you buy a 7921e, you get a free six-month Instant Ink subscription.

In non-techie speak, this sees the 7921e automatically ordering replacement ink, delivered to your door along with a courier bag so the used ink can be returned and recycled. Instant ink might be incredibly convenient, but it’ll save you a pile of cash too. It can be up to half the price of buying ink cartridges at a shop.

Last (but not least) is the 7921e’s dual paper trays. It’s a very capable photo printer. HP’s engineers cottoned on that having to empty A4 paper out of the paper tray to load photo paper isn’t much fun. To this end, there’s a paper tray for photo paper that sits above the A4 paper tray. Feature-wise it won’t set the world on fire, but it is super handy if photo printing is your thing.

Suppose you’re spending too much on ink, manually feeding documents, and finding your current printer unreliable and confusing. In that case, you should check out the HP Envy Inspire 7921e. It’s a super reliable and easy-to-use wee beauty, so I gave it a 10 out of 10. While you’re at it, you could be in to win your very own HP Envy Inspire 7921e, just sign up for the Witchdoctor newsletter, and you’re in to win!

https://www.hp.com/nz-en/printers/envy-printers.html