The HP Envy 100 D410 All-in-One Printer/Scanner

Yeah, I’m reviewing a printer here. Go figure. We don’t usually cover printers at GBM, but then again, printers seem to have almost become the forgotten peripheral now that we’re all in the wonderful, wacky, world of mobile. So, why am I reviewing a printer? Read on to find out.

One of the great scandals of computer technology, in my opinion, is the whole printer and ink thing. Companies make printers, sell them like razors, and then make their profit on selling you Ink, Toner, and other consumables. I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve gone through more printers than I can count from the dot matrix days to the heyday of the laser printer, to the inkjet days. I can even remember a thermal printer or two if I think hard enough. The one constant throughout that evolution is that the cost of consumables was always way too high , and artificially so by most accounts. The fact that most printers ship with “starter” consumables is also quite silly.

Well, anyway, the Konica Minolta Color Laserjet that I used to use at the office finally ran out of enough toner. I had purchased one full set to replace the starter set awhile back (which tells you how little I actually print out documents). When I went to look at getting new cartridges the cost was higher for those cartridges than the cost of most good new printers. You’d think somewhere in printer company bean counting land someone would have figured out that if they make the cost of consumables so high that folks are recycling printers instead of buying consumables, that the math doesn’t add up.

So, I started looking around. I also have an older all-in-one hanging off my desktop that I used for scanning and while it still scanned, the printer function was shaky at best so I decided to recycle both. Now, of course this happened when I needed both printing and scanning functionality for a project. So, I looked around locally and online and decided to pick up the HP Envy 100 D410 All-in-One. (Affiliate link.) Through a coupon and a sale I managed to pick it up for around $150 at Best Buy.

I was not a big fan of all of the bells and whistles that HP announced when it started adding screens and functionality to printers. A printer is supposed to print. I don’t need too many fancy bells and whistles to do that. And, although this printer is AirPrint enabled, I saw that as just a bonus and not necessary, since I rarely feel a need to printer from my iPad2. The Envy 100 is a wireless printer that works over your network, that does mean less cable clutter. To be honest, it is the first wireless printer I’ve used.

Brother MFC9560cdw Color Laser All-in-One with Wireless Networking ...

If had to describe this multifunction device in one word it would be “incredible”. Since this is a fairly complicated device I will not be able to cover all uses of it but hope to give people some useful information regarding it. This is somewhat brief review on usage since I just received it but want to inform people of my initial impression.

Background: The box it comes in is fairly large and heavy. The location of the “handles” built into the box is designed for two people to pick it up and I would highly suggest having two people carry it. I managed to carry into the house myself but it was extremely awkward and difficult to do. Opening the box the printer is fairly well protected with formed styrofoam pieces. The weight of the machine by itself is almost 60 lbs. You will need fairly large areas to place this device. The actual desk space it takes up is 16″W x 19″D. The manual however recommends an additional 4 inches of air space on the left and right side and approximately 10″ at the back. The height of this device with the scanner lid fully open is 36″. I currently only have 26″ of clearance so the lid does not open all the way. Once you get the device out of the box you now you get to spend the next 10-15 min removing all the packing tape and material! There is at least 20 pieces of blue plastic tape and plastic orange pieces protecting the device during shipment that must be removed before turning on the device.

Drivers: For Mac OS X the drivers are installed automatically as soon as you “add” the printer from any Print dialog. The operating system will download the drivers over the internet and also be kept up-to-date via the normal built-in Mac OS X software update mechanism. I assume drivers are on the included DVD as well in case you don’t have internet access.

Initial Setup: I wanted to setup this device on a Wi-Fi network. It also supports USB and ethernet connections. One word of WARNING, the Wi-Fi on this printer only supports 802.11b/g. This means if you have your wireless access point set to only support 802.11n like I did you will never be able to get this device to access the Wi-Fi network. I had to switch my Airport Base Station back to supporting 802.11 b/g as opposed to just 802.11n. This results in a slower connection for all wireless devices since the base station switches to using the slowest wi-fi connection type that any of its clients are using. This would not be an issue for “dual-band” wireless access points such as the dual-band Airport Extreme base station.

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