Comment Scanner Sur Hp Deskjet 3632

TechRadar Verdict

The HP Deskjet 3630 will divide opinions. Deduct ii stars if you don't become for Instant Ink: normal cartridges have loftier per-page costs.

Pros

+
It's really, actually cheap
+
Decent quality and speed
+
Instant Ink offers genuine savings

Cons

-
Looks and feels flimsy
-
Shop-bought cartridges are expensive
-
Bones paper treatment

The HP Deskjet 3630 all in one printer (opens in new tab) has now been discontinued and has been replaced past the HP Deskjet 2630 (opens in new tab) which costs £29.99 at John Lewis and comes with two twelvemonth warranty and a 3-month trial to Instant Ink.

Alternatively, grab the superior HP Envy Photo 6230 (opens in new tab) at £59.95. It comes with wireless connectivity and up to 16 month of HP instant ink subscription, great if yous program to impress a lot.

Printers don't come much cheaper than this. The HP Deskjet 3630 has an RRP of £forty including VAT and Amazon's currently doing it for £35.

We know what you're thinking: cheap printers (opens in new tab) mean expensive ink. Does that apply hither? The reply is aye, simply also no, because this is an Instant Ink printer. That means you tin can pay a monthly subscription for ink and cutting the cost of cartridges dramatically. But should you consider the Deskjet 3630 for anything other than occasional use? Does Instant Ink represent good value for money? Let's detect out.

Setup and specifications

You don't get luxuries such as touchscreens or automatic double sided printing at this price, and the plastic feels awfully flimsy, especially the output tray. But you can forgive the wait and feel, because HP is giving you an awful lot of features for xl quid.

The Deskjet can impress, copy and scan, and in improver to the ubiquitous USB connectedness it supports HP ePrint, Wi-Fi networks and Wi-Fi Direct. That latter choice ways yous tin can impress wirelessly from devices including smartphones and tablets even if yous don't take a wireless router. One thing you don't become is very much ink: the 3630 ships with starter cartridges, so you'll demand to replace those after around 100 pages.

The lack of a touch screen means you take to configure Wi-Fi via HP's own app (on the supplied disc or free from 123.hp.com), which is simple plenty: information technology's but a affair of telling the app which network the printer should use. The app is bachelor for Macs as well as Windows, and it downloads the necessary drivers and utility software once the connection has been established.

There'southward a 60-sheet input tray and a 25-sheet output tray with support for normal newspaper (up to 90gsm), HP card and HP photo newspaper (300gsm); if you're printing on photo paper the prints are borderless, and on A4 the margins are a tiny 3mm. Print quality is upward to 1200 x 1200, with an constructive 4800 x 1200 if you're printing on specific HP photo papers and your source is 1200dpi. The scanner is 1200dpi, and photocopying delivers 600 x 300 dpi.

The Deskjet 3630 is clearly designed for people or businesses with pocket-sized press needs: the recommended volume is 250 sheets per month.

Performance and running costs

As yous'd wait from a low price printer the Deskjet isn't the fastest inkjet around. Official ISO speeds are 8.5ppm in blackness and 6ppm colour, although draft way speeds things up to 20ppm for black. You tin await the first page out in around 14 seconds. There'south a Tranquility Mode that makes the printer slower and marginally quieter, just nosotros didn't find the normal mode to exist peculiarly noisy.

The Deskjet 3630 takes HP 302 blackness and HP 302 tri-colour cartridges, which price £11.99 and £13.99 respectively. The black cartridge delivers 190 pages and the color 165, then you're paying 6.3p per folio for black and 8.5p per page for color. Like other tri-colour cartridges you lot'll have to replace the whole cartridge when one of the colours runs out.

The running costs are pretty atrocious with standard cartridges, but the printer besides supports HP's Xl cartridges, which are £nineteen.99 for blackness and £22.00 for colour. Twoscore cartridges deliver 480 pages of black and 330 color, which works out as 4.2p per folio and 6.7p respectively. That'southward still quite pricey for black but information technology'south not bad for colour.

There'due south another option, and that's called Instant Ink. HP's Instant Ink is a subscription service based on usage, and it costs £1.99 per month for up to 50 pages, £3.49 for 100 pages and £7.99 for 300 pages. HP reckons that'll save you lot between £78 and £516 a year in ink costs compared to buying standard cartridges as and when you demand them.

Will information technology? Instant Ink does bring the per-page costs down to nether 4p on the cheapest programme and 2.6p on the £7.99 programme, but of course you're only saving money if yous use the whole page allowance. You tin can roll over unused pages in much the aforementioned mode you lot roll over unused mobile telephone minutes, bailiwick to limits: you can ringlet over 50 pages on the cheapest plan, ascent to 100 and 300 on the more than expensive plans. If you're sure you'll use the assart then it's clearly better value than buying cartridges whenever they run out.

We liked

Information technology's inexpensive to purchase, like shooting fish in a barrel to install, simple to use and reasonably cheap to run if you subscribe to HP'due south Instant Ink service. While information technology doesn't match the specs of more expensive models such as HP'due south ain Green-eyed information technology covers the nuts perfectly well. Telephone and tablet support is a bonus.

We disliked

It looks similar a big Tupperware basin and feels very flimsy. Without Instant Ink the running costs are relatively high thanks to fairly expensive low-yield cartridges. It's clearly designed for dwelling house and very small office use; don't consider information technology if you lot intend to impress hundreds of pages per month.

Last verdict

The Deskjet 3630 is a surprisingly good printer for such a depression cost. Information technology's reasonably tranquillity, reasonably quick, offers decent print quality, connects to phones and tablets and has a reasonably good scanner and copier too. Its running costs are loftier if you purchase your cartridges in shops, but if you go for Instant Ink the per-page costs plummet, particularly for color printing. Information technology isn't pretty, its newspaper handling is basic and it would probably explode if you shouted "boo!" at it, but it'due south an attractive option for buyers on a upkeep who don't need to print too much too oft.

Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall (Twitter) has been writing well-nigh tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites also as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Human being, volition be published in November 2022. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR.