Reviewed on: February 2015
Suitable For
The HP X476dw is tailor-made for nearly any size office that need a multi-function printer that can do scanning, faxing and colour printing at a low price. If you're printing between 1,000-9,000 pages per month this machine is perfect for you.
Features & Connectivity
Well, what doesn't the HP X476dw come with? This machine provides:
- Wireless and networking
- Duplexing (2 sided prints)
- Automatic document feeder (ADF)
- Fax, Scan & Email
- Direct printing by USB
The touchscreen is actually helpful as well, with clear easily-navigated menus opening up the full functionality of the printer. You can get everything out of the printer without ever touching your PC after installation which is very impressive. It took us a matter of minutes to set up a full contact address book for faxing & emailing scanned documents to. A big thumbs up compared to other touchscreen attempts.
The scanner isn't the best for colour images or photo's, but it never is on printers. If you require that functionality we'd heavily recommend getting dedicated scanner hardware. Otherwise the scanner is more than good enough and the ADF works a treat.
Print Speed & Quality
The X476dw uses a new Pagewide technology where the printhead is the width of a page, making a single pass over each sheet instead of it sliding back-and-forth. This gives printouts a tiny page margin, just 0.17-inches, but more importantly huge print speed increases.
An average office inkjet printer gives you ~10 pages per minute (ppm), lowering to 4-5ppm when printing colour. The HP X476dw gets up to ~55ppm. Duplexing barely slows it down too, printing double-sided pages quickly with ease That's faster than many lasers.
Impressively this speed has no impact on quality, with solid looking blacks and clear colours no matter what you are printing. The blacks aren't as crisp as a high end laser printer nor the colours as vivid as more dedicated photo printers, but the printouts are still superb and if you handed a page to a standard reader we very much doubt they'd tell it wasn't from a laser.
An added benefit is the smell. Anyone who has worked in an office can attest to the ozone emissions from laser printers being pretty noxious. An office inkjet churning out the pages is emission-free, and far quieter, making a much more pleasant experience. Big thumbs up.
Cartridges & Running Costs
With a yield of up to 9,200 pages from the black and 6,600 pages from each colour your inks will last and last. Installation is hassle free, just slide the cartridge into clearly marked slots, and accurate on-screen ink levels give you plenty of warning when your ink is running low.
Running costs are competitive with even the best laser printers. Full colour prints work out under 1p a sheet, with black prints as low as 0.7p per page. You'll be hard pressed finding cheaper running costs in printers under the £1,000 bracket.
Need up to date figures? Live prices are at the bottom of this review or visit the full HP X476dw cartridge list here.
Who Should Buy This Printer?
Anyone in a busy office needing a multifunction machine, it's that simple. At time of writing this is the best office machine on the market, so good we replaced all three of our office machines with it at Stinkyink Towers.
We tested the X476dw as we doubted an inkjet printer could ever match the performance of lasers in an office environment. It's safe to say our incredulity has been sated.
