HP ENVY 5530 Pro Reviews

Designed specifically for the home user, the Envy 5530 does a good job of providing a nice feature mix in a very attractive package. The 5530 proved a little disappointing in print quality that’s made from a scan, but it is otherwise capable of generating excellent photo quality output from an image file. We were also unimpressed with cartridge yield, and the use of the outdate tri-color ink cartridge seems wasteful. No one wants to know that they are tossing a cartridge with usable amounts of two colors if a third color runs out. With a street price of about a hundred bucks, the 5530 is a good, affordable contender the next time you need a multifunction printer for your home.

Low-cost home printers tend to be unexciting, but this one stands out for having better-than-usual print quality and a new, cloud-controlled Instant Ink program that is cheaper per page than its regular cartridges are.

The HP Envy 5530 prints nice-looking documents and photos, and its scanner reproduces documents and images better than some pricier machines we’ve seen. It’s also small, light, and easy to set up and use. Apart from its print speeds, from a quality-product standpoint, it hits most of the high points. An ADF would make it a much more capable and well-rounded home-office machine, but not everybody scans and copies multipage documents. Our primary concern with this Envy is the same one we express often about small, expensive-to-use AIOs like these: They perform well, but unless you print very little, many higher-volume AIOs out there provide much better value despite their higher prices. If you print several hundred pages each month, it just doesn’t take that long to recoup the difference between what you pay for the higher-volume model and a $129 model like this one. And once you reach that tipping point, each print after saves you money.

The HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One is meant primarily for home use, with features like built-in templates for printing notebook and graph paper.