Other Printers Will Be Jealous of HP Envy's Sleek Design, Good Results

Whether you've got a small office and need a printer with a minimalist footprint, or you just like its futuristic sleek design, you're going to be intrigued by the HP Envy 110 e-All-in-One Inkjet Printer. It packs a whole lot of printer into a small space with as many bells and whistles as you could hope for. It's not terrifically fast (except in draft mode, where quality does not suffer all that much), nor is it made for any but the most casual user; but if that describes your basic printing needs, you may find that this printer is right for you.

At normal printing quality, the HP Envy 110 is nothing that other printers need be envious about. First pages took almost 30 seconds to come out (in normal printing mode), with a four-page Word document taking 1:12 to complete. That's at the low end of printing speeds for nearly any printer I've tested. A four-page colorful PDF took one minute and 40 seconds to print, with the first page taking 36 seconds. Again, nothing to be envious about.

However, the news in terms of print speed is not all bad. Make the switch to Draft mode and first pages are out in a respectable 10 seconds, with the same four-page Word document now taking only 22 seconds from start to finish. One thing to keep in mind is that this printer, normally fairly quiet, seems a lot louder in Draft mode than in Normal mode.

Switching to duplex mode of course adds to print time; pages stay out for a few moments so the ink can dry before page two is started. Keeping the printer in Draft mode meant that the Word document's four pages took 30 seconds to be printed duplex, and that is not bad at all.

Printing a 4x6 photo took 1:17, still near the low end of the speed scale, but not by much.

Of course, put any printer into Draft mode and you'll see remarkable gains in print speed. But many printers fall short in the quality department when they start printing quickly. Not so with the HP Envy 110. Black fonts were somewhat lighter and colors not as rich as in Normal mode, but they were still head and shoulders above the rank-and-file inkjet printers that shoot out draft pages that are nearly illegible because they're so light. In fact, pages looked so good at Draft mode that I wondered if ink was still being conserved--the main reason for using this mode of printing.

The quality of printed photos was surprisingly good in this all-in-one printer, which isn't always the case when a manufacturer aims to do everything and ends up doing everything sub par. Photos looked great, rich, and sharply detailed, with a good range of colors (somewhat surprising, since the printer uses only two cartridges). For some reason, though, the paper had a slight bow in it, a problem I've never seen before. It was, however, only slightly noticeable.

The HP Envy 110 is loaded with a good number of added features, including wireless and wired networking, built-in duplexing, and a good-sized color touchscreen that includes access to Web services such as Facebook and Snapfish. I was able to set up wireless quickly and without too much trouble; the only issue I faced was that I seemed to fat-finger the touchscreen a lot, particularly when entering my wireless network's password--the keyboard is compressed and I hit the wrong letter a few times. The touchscreen flips up but doesn't really seem to lock, so I found it moving away from me while trying to use it. I do like that the printer keeps its sleek shape by having no visible paper output tray. When you start printing, the tray automatically rotates into place and disappears again when you finish using it.

One complaint to HP is the amount of bloatware it tries to install when you set up the printer initially, from product alerts to the Bing toolbar. Be wary when you begin the set-up process, as it's made to seem as though you must install these additional features to make your printer work. You don't, and you probably don't want more software on your computer, nor do you want endless product alerts and updates. Nor, for that matter, do I want my printer to make decisions for me about whether I want to use Bing or not. Stick to printing and let me decide the rest, ok?

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.