HP Officejet J4680 Printer Review

The HP Officejet J4680 is one of the new Hp "all in one" printers. This model can fax, copy, scan and print all for a decently low price. However, whether or not this new HP Printer can perform these functions isn't in question. What is in question, is how well the HP Officejet J4680 performs them.

Upon initial testing, print speeds are lacking. I mention this upfront for your convenience. If this is something that's important to you the HP Officejet J4680 might not be your cup of tea. They're not painfully slow, but the lag is considerable when compared with other printers around the same price range.

Print quality looks great. Plain text documents look wonderful, with crisp clean edges and the perfect amount of color saturation. Color saturation is a key feature for me. If the printer under-saturates, you'll have to be concerned with a very light document which makes it hard to read. If the printer over-saturates, you're looking at spending well over the recommended or required money in ink cartridges. The HP Officejet J4680 strikes a perfect balance between these two that so many printers just don't seem to have.

Printed pictures look flawless, and frankly I'm surprised to see this kind of quality from an inkjet printer. Inkjet printers are known for their lackluster portrayals of original digital photos, but I"m happy to say the the HP Officejet J4680 excels in this category. The same benefits apply here that we've seen with the plain text documents. Saturation is wonderful. The pictures are crisp, clear and simply great looking. Printing speed on photos and colored images suffers and lags just like when printing plain text documents.

One of the few points that makes this printer a bit less than spectacular is the printing cartridge that the printer uses. Unlike most Canon or Brother Printers, HP is still determined to keep their tri-color cartridges in demand instead of using individual cartridges for each color. This is upsetting because by requiring this printer to use a tri-color cartridge, you're requiring the user to spend more money in ink cartridges as one color runs out and the others don't. Even if you still have Cyan and Yellow but Red runs out, you're left having to buy a new cartridge. This is extremely taxing on whoever purchases this machine and I would suggest that if HP wants to sell more printers in general, they need to switch to separate color cartridges.

In summary, the HP Officejet isn't the best printer I've ever come across in all areas, but shines in particular ones. Print speed is boggy, but quality it unsurpassed. All in all, you're going to have to judge what is more important to you - print speed or print quality. In a perfect world, we'd have a printer that could do both...but I'd also be a millionaire. The HP Officejet J4680 will either be a great buy or a bad buy depending on whether you have great demand for color photos, plainly text printing, speed, or quality.