The HP ENVY 6455e is a mediocre family laptop. Its high-resolution flatbed and ADF can be used to digitise a variety of media such as receipts and tax returns, and it prints good-looking photos. However, darker areas have a bluish tone, colour accuracy is poor, and the colour gamut is limited, preventing the printer from perfectly reproducing your most treasured photos. Unfortunately, it only prints a small number of pages before the cartridges run out, and its cost-per-print is high, implying that it is difficult to maintain and has high running costs.
The Envy 6455e is exactly the same size and girth as last year’s model, measuring 6.8 by 17 by 14.2 inches (HWD) and weighing a trim 13.6 pounds, and it’s a little smaller than some of its direct competitors, including Canon’s Pixma TR7020, Brother’s MFC-J805DW, and Epson’s Expression Premium XP-6000 Small-in-One.
[content-egg-block template=offers_logo hide=price]What distinguishes an all-in-one (AIO) printer is, of course, the presence of a scanner, preferably one augmented by an automatic document feeder (ADF) for copying or scanning multiple pages without having to place them one at a time on the glass. The 6455e’s 35-page ADF is larger than that of many low-end multifunction printers; the Epson XP-6000 has none, and the Brother’s holds only 20 sheets, though the Pixma TR7020 matches the HP in that regard. All three of these ADFs are manual-duplexing, which means that after capturing a stack of page sides, you must flip the stack and place it back in the ADF to scan the other sides, which an auto-duplexing ADF eliminates.
The Envy 6455e, like a few other recent HP printers and AIOs, has a slick-looking, ultra-simple control panel. There is no graphical touch screen or display for previewing photos and other types of documents. Instead, most printer configuration options, as well as simple tasks like making copies or printing from a favourite cloud site, are accessed via HP’s Smart App software.
Paper handling is handled by a single 100-sheet tray, which can also hold up to 10 envelopes or 40 sheets of premium photo paper. The maximum monthly duty cycle for the Envy is 1,000 pages, with a recommended monthly volume of 100 to 400 prints. That isn’t much. The Epson, like the other machines mentioned here, holds 100 sheets plus 20 sheets of photo paper. The Pixma can hold up to 200 sheets, whereas the MFC-J805DW can only hold 150. The only other printer here with a published monthly volume rating of 5,000 pages and a suggested 1,500 is the Brother.