Reviewed on: February 2015
Suitable For
Perfect little workhorse for a home printer, both for normal family use or as a home office machine. It's ideal if you need to scan or copy documents as the quality and speed of these functions, plus the photo quality, is top notch.
Features & Connectivity
The HP 7520 e-all-in-one printer does not disappoint with it's feature list, you get a lot for your money:
- Fax
- Wireless
- Automatic 2-sided printing (Duplex)
- Scanner & Automatic Document Feeder (ADF)
- Easy access USB and Memory card slots
- ePrint, AirPrint and Google Cloud Print
- 4.3 inch touchscreen
- Quick photo editing and red eye removal via touchscreen
- Two paper trays
One downside is that there is no ethernet port so if you need to be connected to the internet, it has to be via Wi-Fi. You can use HP's ePrint which means you can email files direct to the printer from your mobile device.
The ADF can handle 25 pages, so if you need to scan/copy or fax multiple pages it will save you so much time!
If you don't own a computer or someone is using it, don't worry you can still print directly from the USB or memory card and even use the touchscreen display to edit photos before printing but as this printer has Airprint and Google Cloud connectivity so you can edit photos on your mobile device and print directly from there.
There is two paper trays on this printer. The main tray can hold up to 120 sheets of plain printer paper then it can hold 20 sheets of photo paper. The photo paper tray is very simple to use and built into the lid of the normal paper tray. Just lift the protective cover and place the paper in the tray and close. The design of these paper trays keeps the printer very tidy and sleek looking without paper just hanging out of it.
Print Speed & Quality
While this printer is stated to do 14 pages per minute (ppm) for black and 10ppm for colour, we've found that it prints closer to 11ppm in black and just under 6ppm for colour. Decently fast for a home printer, unless you're using it for office purposes you won't need it any quicker.
One downside is the size reduction on duplexing. The duplexer unit uses wider margins so you will notice a reduction in the size of your print when printing on both sides of a page.
As you can imagine, you will get less pages per minute when printing double sided. A 10 page test gave us just over 7ppm.
But what about the quality? You get stunningly sharp crisp text and bright solid colours. Text prints are so good, they are close to a mono laser printer quality with legible text even at very small font. The printer has a black cartridge dedicated to text and a separate photo black for images, so if the kids print a lot of photos on the printer, don't worry, you will still have black ink to print off your work documents.
Photos on this printer will be very close to store-bought quality and more than good enough to frame and display. (photo printing speed?) It's almost if this printer takes that little bit longer to print the photos to get them just right.
Cartridges & Running Costs
The printer runs with 5 separate ink cartridges, four normal colours plus a Photo Black, which helps make this printer cheap to run as you only replace what you use. Installing these inks is very simple. Just remove the packaging, protective clip and yellow tape covering the air vent (for compatible inks) and click into the cartridge holder.
You have 2 sizes per cartridge, with higher capacity inks (XL) for higher volume users. We recommend sticking to the larger inks to minimise your running costs, which work out competitive with other home printers at around 1.38p per page. These aren't the cheapest inks around, some Epson printers will be cheaper to run, but it won't break the bank.
There's live prices for these ink at the bottom of this review or a full list of HP Photosmart 7520 ink can be seen here
Who Should Buy This Printer?
If you work from home or need a family printer this machine is for you. It's simple to use, gives you print/fax/scan/copy facilities but also the ability to print stunning photos. All this with the added wireless printing this truly is one of HP's best all in one machines.
