Here’s a printer that will save its owners a load of ink expense

One of the biggest ironies of our age is that the paperless office has been bit of a bust. According to New Zealand Geographic, each person in New Zealand uses approximately 182.4 kilograms of paper per year. That’s a lot of trees! We might have tablets, smartphones, PCs and other gadgets that can display stuff, but the reality is that we love to print stuff out on paper.

The hidden cost of all this paper is ink. For most of us, printing typically involves selling a kidney/firstborn and handing over a thick wad of cash for ink cartridges so we can print out stuff on pieces of dead tree.

And when I say a wad of cash, I’m not kidding. The cost of ink is eye-watering. A few years back, the UK’s Daily Mail found that a pint of inkjet ink would set the average Brit back a cool £1300 (NZ$2687.75). Their research found that inkjet inks were more costly drop for drop than a 35ml bottle of Chanel No 5 or a bottle of Moet & Chandon bubbly. Ouch!

None of this has been wasted on the folks at HP. They’ve come up with a new range of inkjet printers designed to save users a pile of moolah that’d otherwise be spent on ink. I got my hands on the first of these new printers, the HP Smart Tank 7305 printer. It’s an all-in-one scanner/printer designed for home offices.

Getting set up was a complete doddle. After unpacking it and following the supplied (and idiot-proof) getting started guide, I installed the HP Smart Printing app which found the printer, connected it to my home Wi-Fi network and configured it to work with my phone, PC and the many, many other gadgets scattered around my home. In what must be a first for an inkjet printer, I spent more time unboxing it than I did actually getting it set up.

I found the Smart Tank 7305 to be surprisingly quiet, offering up zippy print speeds with sharp print quality. Its text output could easily pass for 300dpi laser output. Photos and graphics also looked pretty good with no banding or other artefacts. To my naked eyes, photos on photo paper were comparable to old-school film photo prints.

The big news, however, is the Smart Tank’s 7305 printer’s cost-effective ink system. Out of the box you get up to two years of ink in the form of bottles that directly fill up the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink tanks built into the printer. Because you are able to fill the tanks up with large pile of ink, the number of times you’ll need to buy ink is massively reduced. Even better still, the ink doesn’t come in costly cartridges, but in cleverly designed no-spill bottles. The lack of cartridges and larger amounts of ink greatly reduces costs, saving you a sizeable pile of money.

The Smart Tank 7305 printer supports wireless printing, which allowed me to print directly from my smartphone, Mac/PC without cable clutter. If the more reliable wired option is your thing, you’re well covered as it has USB and Ethernet ports too.

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Being able to quickly zap out a document from my phone from the other side of the house has proven to be convenient in more ways than I can count. Further helping things along is a generous paper tray that can hold a significant chunk of the white stuff, thereby reducing the amount of annoying “out of paper” errors and refills. There’s also an automatic document feeder which allows users to scan or copy multiple pages at once without having to stand around the printer manually feeding pages into it, wasting time that could otherwise be used on more productive tasks. Add to this double-sided printing (which halves the amount of paper you’re using), built-in security (incredibly it turns out that printers are a common target for hackers), and self-healing Wi-Fi (so it stays connected) and there’s lots to like.

All told, the HP Smart Tank 7305 printer has proven to be a super reliable and efficient all-in-one printer that offers fast printing, cost-effective ink usage, and a range of user-friendly features. Whether you need to print documents or photos, this printer delivers the goods. With its wireless connectivity options and easy setup process, it provides a hassle-free printing experience and is a solid choice for home/small office use.

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