HP office Jet J4680 smaller printer smaller price

Over the last couple of years all in Inkjet printers have pushed single function printers out of the market. A multifunction peripheral offers more convenience in less desk space than a separate copier, printer, and scanner, not to mention a huge savings on cost.

The new Hp Officejet J4680 is not three but a four in one adding the business staple of faxing to the expected printing, copying, and flatbed scanning capabilities. The color or monochrome fax isn’t a bare-bones affair, either, with 99 speed-dial numbers, enough memory to store 140 incoming pages, and Caller ID junk-fax blocking.

The office jet J4680 looks quite similar J6480 and there are many customers who get confused between the two models. It is designed in dark slate grey color with muted shades of white and silver coating the sides and the control panel. This model stands firm at 17 inches length by 15.81 inches width by 8.53 inches depth and weighs around 13pounds.

This compact printers needs very little space as it is compact and secondly because the output tray is removable, but the catch is that the output tray doubles as the input tray, meaning that all the outbound prints rest almost directly on top of the blank paper, with only a two small plastic tabs separating the two “trays.” In addition the input tray can hold only 100 sheets of paper against the J6480 which can hold 250 sheets. Another drawback in connection to paper handling is that the adjustable arms that shrink to support 4×6 inch photo paper sit all the way inside the mouth of the printer, which could pose a loading problem. Two side printing is also not possible in this model. The star attraction of this model lies in its integrated 802.11b/g wireless and fax connectivity, and its 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), so you needn’t stand around opening and closing the lid, placing and replacing pages on the scanner glass, when copying or faxing multi page documents which are rare features on such a low-priced machine.

The control panel lies on the front side of the printer and consists of a one-line monochrome LCD and a second line of simple arrows that point to different function labels beneath the display you also have access to various buttons like a directional pad, a Wi-Fi toggle key, and a variety of access buttons including power, cancel, back, and OK on the control panel. There are two lights placed on the control panel to indicate the status of the printer. Navigating the menus on the LCD is very confusing due to the horizontal layout of the screen however helpful instructions pop up on the LCD when you hover over an item for quite sometime.  Main disadvantage in the officejet J4680 is that it does not include a media card reader or even a USB port which makes direct printing from the digital cameras impossible.

Equally noteworthy, the J4680 is ready to join a small office network not a wired one, since there’s no Ethernet port alongside its single USB 2.0 port, but a wireless one, with 802.11b/g WI FI built in

The scanner is situated on top of the printer and measures 8.5 inches to 11.7 inches to fit a variety of media sizes. However if you wish to scan to thick or uneven media scanning would face problems as there are no hinges on the door of the scanner. The only scanning destinations would include scanning directly to a file a Word document, an e-mail, or a PDF file, as there is no reader transferring directly into the memory card is impossible.

The copier function is quite simple and straightforward. There are features where you can fit the copy to a single page or enlarge/decrease the size, alter the quality of the reprint to save ink, and make the copy lighter or darker in contrast to the original image. You can make up to 100 copies at one time.

HP officejet J4680 is designed with a WI FI connection that is different from the other printers. It has the capability to turn on or off using a button on the front panel. The installation of the WI FI in the printer is a very easy procedure. The whole process of installation takes less than 10 minutes.

The most important way of keeping the size and cost small is by incorporating the two-ink cartridge bay into the middle section of the printer, as opposed to adding a completely separate drawer just for ink. The printer pulls all of its color ink from the single cartridge. This model is capable of printing a standard 200 page with a black cartridge and a 360 page tricolor cyan, magenta and yellow cartridge. Both cartridges yield consumables costs of around 7 cents per page which are reasonably good. Replacements are priced at $25 for a tricolor and $28 for a black cartridge with estimated lives of 360 and 700 pages, respectively which can be calculated an estimate of around 4 cents per monochrome and 11 cents per color page.  If you compare HP Photo smart Premium Fax all in one that came out to 2.4 cents per page of color and 4.3 cents per page of black the J4680 will run you double to replace each.

When we saw the prints we concluded that the black text prints came out a rich, bold black with clear readability all the way down to 2-point text. Color text and graphics on standard 20-pound white paper look equally pleasing: equal saturation, sharp detail in fine lines, and accurate color representations especially in facial tones. The graphic preference located on the driver helped to make slight adjustments to saturation and hue, as well as eliminate red eye, we also found that some of the 4×6 photos which were printed could use a little warmth, however they required no tweaking to produce a realistic feeling.

Overall you can conclude that The HP Office Jet J4680 may be too slow to show well in our rankings, but it’s still a nice machine. It is ideal for a small office that  does not do much printing would probably be happy to have the Office Jet J4680’s feature set in such a compact, low-cost package.

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