Solid family printing—if you subscribe to its ink

If you sign up for HP Plus, the Envy Inspire 7955e gains six months of free ink, making it a reasonable value for a home or home-office multifunction printer.

HP says that its Envy Inspire 7955e All-in-One Printer, a $269.99 multifunction inkjet designed for family rooms or home offices, comes endowed with "first-of-its-kind...advanced photo features." More to the point, it comes with six free months of HP's Instant Ink subscription or cartridge-delivery service if you sign up for the company's HP Plus plan. (See our explainer about HP Plus and Instant Ink.) The subscription makes the Inspire 7955e's operating cost low enough to make up for its purchase price, which is excessive when compared with several photo-centric competitors with higher capacities or longer feature lists. If you can make that tradeoff, there's a lot to like about this AIO, despite its antiquated two- instead of four-cartridge design.

While they don't look much alike, the Envy Inspire 7955e is a successor to the Envy Photo 7855 reviewed here back in 2017. The newer all-in-one is white and boxy-looking, while the older model was matte black, with curved and sloped chassis surfaces. It's similar in size and girth, at 9.2 by 18.1 by 15.1 inches (HWD), measured with its trays closed, and weighing 17 pounds.

The Inspire is somewhat larger than other consumer-grade, photo-optimized AIOs such as the Canon Pixma TS8320 Wireless Inkjet All-in-One and the bulk-ink Pixma G620 Wireless MegaTank Photo Printer and Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500. However, several others, including the Epson Expression Premium XP-7100 Small-in-One and the Canon Pixma TR8620, are a few inches taller and heavier. (If you're thinking this is a crowded market, you're not wrong.)

One reason some AIOs are a little bulkier is the presence of an automatic document feeder (ADF) mechanism attached to the scanner, which lets you copy or scan multipage documents without having to place your pages on the glass one at a time. The Envy Inspire 7955e has a 35-sheet, manual-duplexing ADF, meaning it can't scan double-sided multipage documents without user intervention.

In contrast, the Canon TR8620 has a manual-duplexing ADF that holds 20 sheets, while the Epson XP-7100's auto-duplexing feeder holds 30 sheets. In addition to printing, copying, and scanning from a computer or handheld device via HP Smart App, you can also perform walk-up copy and scan jobs from a 2.7-inch touch-screen control panel.

From here, you can not only manage copy and scan tasks but also configure security and other options; manage consumables; and generate print usage and other types of reports. The same features are available through the Envy's built-in web portal, a common feature among today's printers. The web interface is accessible via most browsers, including those on your smartphone or tablet. You'll likely find that jobs such as setting up security options are easier and less cramped in the web portal than on the small control LCD.

It's important to note that, like many of HP's consumer-grade AIOs, the 7955e uses only two ink cartridges—one black and one tricolor—instead of deploying a separate cartridge for each of the four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, commonly abbreviated CMYK). We have for many years objected to this configuration as wasteful, since it makes you throw away the tricolor cartridge as soon as one color runs out, no matter how much of the other two ink colors are left.

We'll look further at ink issues, including cost per page and output quality, in a minute. To finish with the printer's physical features, the Inspire's paper handling consists of a 125-sheet input tray with a 15-sheet photo paper insert inside. HP rates the Inspire's maximum monthly duty cycle at 1,000 prints, with a suggested monthly volume of 300 to 400. That marks the 7955e as a low-volume solution, but it's more data than Canon and Epson give you—those manufacturers haven't published volume ratings for their consumer photo printers for several years. For the record, both the Pixma TS8320 and TR8620 have two 100-sheet paper trays, while the Canon G620 holds 100 sheets of plain paper or 20 sheets of photo paper. Epson's XP-7100 and ET-8500 each hold 100 sheets of plain paper and 20 sheets of photo paper.

The older HP Envy Photo 7855 had more-robust connectivity options than the Envy Inspire 7955e, with support for Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi and a USB cable. The 7955e has only the latter two plus mobile printing via HP Smart App, Apple AirPrint, Mopria, and Chrome OS. It can also use a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connection for printer setup from your phone or tablet. The 7855 could also print from a USB flash drive or SD memory card, which the Inspire can't.

HP Smart App is more than just a printer driver and interface for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. It allows you to create and modify workflow profiles or scripts for various tasks, such as scanning to or printing from your favorite cloud sites, or scanning to email, PDF, or an optical character recognition (OCR) program. You can even use your smartphone's camera as a scanner, sending snapshots of pages to Smart App for treatment as scanned documents.

HP rates the Envy Inspire 7955e at up to 15 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome and 10ppm for color pages. Like most of HP's AIOs, the unit comes out of the box ready to print two-sided automatically. When a printer's default setting is auto-duplexing, we report both single- and double-sided test results. I tested the Envy over a USB connection to our Intel Core i5-based Windows 10 Pro testbed.

First, I clocked the 7955e as it churned out our 12-page Microsoft Word text document. It printed the single-sided pages at 15.1ppm and the double-sided document at an average of 6.7 images per minute (or ipm, where each page side is an image). The other printers discussed here were within 2ppm or 3ppm of that, except for the Canon Pixma G620 at a slow 6ppm.

Next, I timed the HP as it printed our collection of complex business documents, which include Adobe Acrobat PDFs packed with colored typefaces at varying weights and sizes, as well as charts and graphs with intricate gradients and dark fills; Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and charts; and Microsoft PowerPoint handouts with full-page, colorful business graphics. Merging those results with that of the text file, I came up with an average overall score of 7.2ppm. That's the second fastest among the AIOs mentioned in this review; the Epson EcoTank ET-8500 was quickest, at a bit over 10ppm, and the Canon G620 the slowest, at 3.4ppm.

Finally, I timed the Envy Inspire 7955e as it printed a couple of brightly colored and highly detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots. It took about 45 seconds per print, which is right on the money for an entry-level consumer photo printer.

HP positions the Envy Inspire 7955e as sort of a Swiss Army knife all-in-one, with an emphasis on photos, for homes and home-based offices. Before talking about its photographic output, though, let's look at how well it prints letters, flyers, handouts, and other business documents. 

Text quality proved excellent, with well-shaped and highly legible characters. Our full-page graphs, PDFs, and PowerPoints include gradients and deep black and other dark fills that some inkjets have trouble reproducing. But that wasn't the case here—the 7955e performed well, though its relatively low-yield ink cartridges weren't made for turning out lots of high-ink-coverage pages. The graphics printed nicely, but I found myself swapping out ink cartridges often.

That brings us to the Envy's photo output. Over the years, HP's two-cartridge Envy inkjets have become capable photo printers that churn out brilliantly colored images with little to no graininess and respectable detail; the 7955e will indeed do your family's snapshots justice. That said, its black-plus-tricolor configuration cannot and does not match the wide color gamut or vivid range you'd get from a photo printer with five or six ink colors, such as the Pixma TS8320 or Expression Premium XP-7100.

As for the advanced photo features HP brags about, they include a couple of output options other than the usual borderless photos in sizes such as 3 by 5 inches, 4 by 6 inches, and 8.5 by 11 inches. The Envy can produce print panoramas and, for Instagram addicts, 5-by-5-inch square prints. It can also print captions or custom messages on the back of 4-by-6-inch photos.

The ink math for this printer varies quite a bit depending on from where you source your ink. If you buy replacement ink cartridges at retail, the Envy Inspire's operating costs would be roughly 7 cents per black-and-white page and 18.1 cents per color page, in both cases based on letter-size sheets with 5% to 25% content coverage.

If you're willing, however, to sign up for HP Plus (creating an account with HP during setup), you get the first six months of an HP Instant Ink subscription gratis, with no obligation to continue beyond the initial free period. How much you pay for ink after that depends on the monthly subscription plan you choose—HP offers five options, ranging from 15 pages per month for 99 cents to 700 pages per month for $24.99.

The most appealing aspect of Instant Ink is that you pay a flat rate per page—a nickel if you subscribe to the 100-page plan for $4.99 a month, or just under 3.6 cents for the 700-page plan. It doesn't matter how much ink an individual page contains—both a double-spaced page of black text and an 8.5-by-11-inch borderless color photo will cost you 3.6 cents under the thriftiest plan. If you print a lot of photos and other content-heavy pages, HP Instant Ink can be a first-class value.

As for the other printers discussed here, only the two bulk-ink machines—the Canon Pixma G620 MegaTank and the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500, which hold their ink in reservoirs you refill from bottles—cost less to use than the Inspire with Instant Ink. Both are six-ink designs, which makes calculating exact per-page costs difficult, but Epson says that the ET-8500 churns out 4-by-6-inch snapshots for 4 cents each, while Canon claims the G620 produces the same prints for 2.5 cents apiece. Both have higher initial purchase prices than the HP (though the Canon not by much). Whether they're worth the expense for you depends mostly on how much you plan to print.

Like its predecessor, the HP Envy Inspire 7955e is a good fit for families and home offices with a wide range of print and copy needs. It supports many types and sizes of media, including square and panoramic photos, and signing up for HP Plus will get you not only six free months of Instant Ink but a second year of warranty coverage. As said above, $269.99 isn't cheap for an entry-level inkjet, especially a two-cartridge model, but the subscription service improves the overall value considerably. If you are willing to commit to that recurring cost, the 7955e should make short work of your family's homework, snapshots, church flyers, and coloring pages.

If you sign up for HP Plus, the Envy Inspire 7955e gains six months of free ink, making it a reasonable value for a home or home-office multifunction printer.

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I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)

In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years I have also written for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. I also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com (now Lifewire).

The SOHO, SMB, and enterprise printer and scanner markets

Printer and scanner technology (and accompanying software)

Consumer-grade and pro-grade photo printing

When testing products, whenever possible and/or logical, I use our current testbed, an Intel Core i5-equipped PC running Windows 10 Professional. But I don’t, of course, use the same machine for writing and editing photos and graphics.

Instead, I use a Dell XPS 17, a 17-inch laptop with an 11th Generation Core i7 processor with 32GB of RAM and running Windows 11 Pro. When working in my home office, I connect the laptop to a 49-inch monitor, which allows me to view three windows at once comfortably. I traded in three 24-inch monitors (all from different manufacturers) for that single panel, Dell’s UltraSharp 49 Curved Monitor (U4919DW), in early 2021, and I haven’t looked back. (When you work the hours of a freelance journalist, you need all the help you can get to increase comfort and productivity.)

My smartphone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 running the latest version of Android. (Yes, it’s time to look for a 5G model, but this Note still works great…)

I write in Microsoft Word 365 and organize and save research in OneNote. OneDrive is my cloud service of choice, though I also use Dropbox and Google Drive. I create and edit artwork for my stories with Adobe Photoshop, which is overkill in many cases but an indulgence I’m not ready to give up. (I also don't want to forget how to use it!)

For email and other personal information management, I use Microsoft Outlook on my laptop (primarily because I’ve used it forever), but Gmail on my phone. And finally, after working all day, many evenings I like to settle in for an hour or two of gaming. As I write this, I’m deep into Ubisoft’s Anno 1800—and it plays well and looks beautiful on my 17-inch XPS and on the 49-inch curved monitor.

My first computer (after a year or so on a dedicated word processor) was an off-brand AT clone with two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives. The monitor was a big and heavy monochrome CRT. Moving to the XT with a 10MB hard drive was wonderful, but Windows was oh-so-sluggish and far from stable enough—yet!—to run any serious software. Everything was still pretty much text-based.

Alas, I don’t recall my first cell phone, though I do remember it costing so much to use that few people distributed their mobile numbers freely.

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