HP Officejet J4680 All-in-One Inkjet Printer

The HP Officejet J4680 is a decent, and very small, all-in-one printer. Set up for wireless networking was a breeze, and after testing a number of very large printers, I appreciated the relatively small footprint of the J4680. It lacks a versatile LCD screen and with only two print cartridges it may not be first choice for heavy-duty or serious photo printing, but otherwise a handy, useful, and compact office tool.

The HP Officejet J4680 is a relatively small all-in-one printer that puts out excellent prints, though not all that quickly.

This printer didn't compete well with many other all-in-ones with regard to print times for most jobs. For example, a 10-page PDF took 3.5 minutes total, not counting the time to flip sheets using the manual duplex feature. However, on printed pages the black-and-white quality was excellent. Black font had sharp edges and there was no bleed into the paper.

Colors on graphics pages looked excellent. Colors were realistic and nicely nuanced, despite all colors coming from a single ink tank. A 4x6 photo, printed on both glossy and matte photo paper, looked excellent in both cases. In about 1:13, the photos came out vivid and sharp.

Setting up a wireless print function can be a hassle, but it was a quick and easy task with this printer. The printer was on my wired network within minutes of loading the software from the CD (that software includes an optical character recognition program for scanning). It took nearly a minute for a high color graphics page to scan to a PDF, but the result was excellent. As with other all-in-ones in this price range, I wish the duplexer were built in rather than an option, but still the function was easy to use.

The printer's LCD screen is black-and-white and quite small, so it's not possible to review or retouch photos on the printer itself, though there's software included to help out. I liked the very compact nature of the fax number pad.

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