There are lots of entry level multifunction printers on the market, even from HP, but if you need to print a lot of documents, have a medium size office or just need the flexibility of configure and forget, the larger enterprise scale printers from HP can be a huge win. Like the big, capable HP PageWide Pro MFP-477dn/dw.
Seems like we’ve given up talking about the paperless office years ago. I remember it was something we were all ostensibly trying to attain, but in fact there are plenty of times where an actual piece of paper — or stack of paper — is necessary, whether it’s a handout for a client presentation or a coloring page for your little one. With the evolution of technology many printers are now also multifunction, where they can print, scan, copy and fax. Why? Because it turns out that the core technology of scanning and rendering information and putting it on paper is the heart of a lot of what we do with paper nowadays.
The workplace has evolved too, and there are now a lot more small, agile teams of 5-10 people working in a satellite office than there are massive buildings with hundreds or thousands of employees. You can stumble along with a small office / home office (so called “SOHO”) printer designed for someone’s den or basement, but jumping up to a printer that’s designed for the enterprise, even if it’s a small enterprise, is a real luxury, and well worth the additional investment.
Enter the new HP PageWide Pro multifunction printer the MFP-477. Featuring the ability to print in color or black & white, it also can copy in color or black & white, scan and fax. To be honest, we didn’t try the fax feature, because, well, it’s been years since we had to use a fax machine for anything at all. Fortunately it’s just another feature of the MFP-477 so it’s easily ignored while the other capabilities come to the fore.
And this is a big printer. It’s a lot bigger than a breadbox, as you can see in this photo:
Behind the scenes, not only are there lots of capabilities, but the entire PageWide series represents an evolutionary step forward for HP’s printing technology too, offering a device that’s faster, uses less energy and lets you be more productive and more efficiently with less overall cost of ownership. And it delivers. This is one fast printer, whether you’re using it wired, wirelessly, through HP’s slick eprint system or even via Google’s Cloud Print, and the speed is constant whether it’s color or black & white.
One way that HP accomplishes this is by having a print head that’s wide enough that it doesn’t have to move to be able to print the entire width of the paper at once. This simplifies design and makes the printer quite speedy. As the company says in its technology white paper [PDF link]: “By moving only the paper under a page-wide, stationary printhead, HP PageWide technology overcomes the trade-offs between quality and speed in traditional inkjet printers. The benefits are speed and quality together with lower costs and higher energy efficiency.”
That’s all well and good, but what about the hands-on experience?
First off, the ink cartridges are big. Really big:
The benefit is that you don’t have to keep changing the ink cartridge, a huge boon if you have a lot of color printing in your office. Nothing like printing that big job just to find that the printer ran out of cyan and you’ve just wasted all the other inks by not knowing that! In fact, these cartridges are rated for 7000 pages of output. If you print 10-20 pages/day, that’s a few years before you have to worry about replacements.
HP has also had many years to figure out all the underlying technologies too, sometimes with rather amusing results. When I first pulled out the paper cartridge it took a few minutes to figure out what moved and what was stationary. It looks like a Transformer waiting to spring into action, frankly:
Fortunately I did figure it out and get through the installation process. Get everything hooked up, get the printer on your LAN or wireless network, and first power up invokes an almost 30min self test and calibration. Quite impressive, actually, as it went through who knows what mysterious tasks.
Finally, it was ready to go and the control screen offered up all the features you could hope for from a multifunction color printer:
Lots of useful functions, as you can see, including the intriguing “Scan to USB” (helpful for espionage work, no doubt) and the “Copy ID Card” feature, which I still haven’t quite figured out yet. Having a touchscreen makes it really easy to work with the PageWide Pro MFP-477 too. To copy, it’s one touch to choose “Copy Document” and a second touch to choose “Start Color” or “Start B&W”. That’s it. Super easy!
Where the printer becomes really interesting is as you hook it into the modern printing and document management ecosystem in an office. Print via the cloud? Google Cloud Print works just fine. Print via an email from colleagues around the world? Easily done with the HP Mobile Print “eprint” system. Copying one sided to two sided documents, or even printing your latest novel and want to have it automatically come out 2 sided? Easily done in both cases.
And then there’s scanning. Turns out that having a high quality scanner is really useful in offices, not so much for scanning documents as being able to scan other things like sketches, design drawings and even photographs. Set it up properly and you can scan directly to email directly from the MFP-477 without a computer involved, for example. As a parent, it’s also great to be able to scan artwork, coloring pages, and even report cards to share with family and archive for the future. Much more convenient than stacks of curled, yellowing paper.
HP’s done a remarkable job evolving inkjet technology, producing a printer that’s output is indistinguishable from a laser printer. It’s fast, it’s inexpensive to run, and it’s chockablock with features, functions and capabilities. If it just wrote those tedious client reports and created graphs from the latest spreadsheets, it’d be perfect. For now, it’s just one heck of a fun and valuable addition to any home office or larger enterprise, whether you have 2 people sharing a back room or a dozen professionals poised to introduce the Next Big Thing.
Disclosure: HP supplied us with the PageWide Pro MFP-477 for the purposes of this writeup. I also used to work at the former parent company Hewlett-Packard, years and years ago. Not sure I need to disclose that, however!