HP OfficeJet Pro 7720: a good A3-compatible 4-in-1 printer for professionals

Presentation

New to the HP OfficeJet Pro catalog, the 7720 is installed in the deserted niche of multifunction inkjet printers designed for productivity and capable of outputting A3 documents. Officially sold for € 199, but more often sold for around € 170, it stands out as an interesting choice given its ability and its not so common positioning.

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Ergonomics

On the ergonomics front, there is little missing from this OfficeJet Pro 7720 to make a big splash. Demanding, we still sanction some "small" oversights, including the USB port and the card reader, the absence of physical buttons for the fax (very practical in professional environment), the heaviness of certain menus (go through money - menus to choose to copy in color or in black, for example), the dead end made on a second paper supply tray, or even the limits of a scanner blocked at A4.

It is however thanks to this last point that the product manages to maintain acceptable dimensions with regard to the supported formats and the services offered (58.5 x 44.5 x 30.6 cm for 15.5 kg). It is indeed necessary to put somewhere the closed paper tray with a capacity of 250 ordinary sheets, the automatic document feeder with a capacity of 35 pages, the large access hatch for the cartridges and the large color touch screen and 6.75 cm swivel.

Well designed as a whole, the OfficeJet Pro 7720 is pleasant to handle on a daily basis and poses as a quality printer, both by the materials used for its manufacture and by its many features. It is one of the best finished "pro" oriented products sold by HP.

Like almost all modern printers, the HP OfficeJet Pro 7720 has a Wi-Fi module that is easy to configure, is Wi-Fi Direct compatible to facilitate printing from a mobile terminal and can be controlled from a dedicated application: HP Print. Ideal for remotely checking ink levels or for printing a document stored on a Cloud service.

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Consumption

Whether in terms of energy consumption or noise pollution, the OfficeJet Pro 7720 is not a very good student. In standby, it has the decency to consume only 1.3 W, but as soon as we launch a print, our power meter detects much higher consumption levels: 24 W during the printing of a photo in A4 format, and even a peak of 27 W during the same exercise in A3. That's a lot for an inkjet, even though we know that A3 models tend to consume more than their A4 counterparts.

The printer is also noisy: 42.2 dB in photo printing and around 51 dB during the cadential printing of a document of several pages. It obviously offers a rather effective "silent" mode, but it significantly penalizes the printing speed.

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Cost per page

Good surprise, the OfficeJet Pro 7720 displays a cost per page much lower than the 10 euro cent benchmarks in inkjet. It works on the basis of four cartridges from the HP 953 range, which obviously exist in XL versions. It is the latter, more economical, that we use to calculate the cost per page. This cost is 1.8 euro cents (€ 0.018) in black and white, and 6.7 euro cents (€ 0.067) in color. We are obviously far from the 0.6 euro cent of an Epson EcoTank ET-4750, but it is even better than the 7.4 euro cent of an OfficeJet Pro 8720 which, in A4, offers little almost the same benefits.

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Scanner and copies

The scanner for the OfficeJet Pro 7720 is a small rocket. It only takes 5 seconds to scan an A4 document at 100 dpi and 6 s for a 10 x 15 cm photo at 300 pp. This is found on the side of the copier which, without reaching the execution speed of an OfficeJet Pro 8720, still manages to ensure the copying of a color document in 16 s, and that of the same document in black and white in 13 s. And, above all, the quality of these copies is good. Although some details are smoothed in passing and the colors stand out a bit more bland, these copies remain perfectly usable.

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Photo

Given the place that this printer occupies in the HP product range, we suspected that it would not excel in photos, even though it uses inkjet technology. However, even if this is not her primary area of expertise, she can help out to take a picture on photo paper (and up to A3, which is not trivial). The advantage is that it is rather quick in these operations, taking 48 s to print a 10 x 15 cm photo without borders and 1 min 40 to shoot an A4 photo. That is, within a few seconds, the figures obtained by timing the HP Envy Photo 7830.

The colorimetric drift measured with the probe is penalizing: the average delta E is established at 7.5 and there is a particularly poorly rendered green and cyan. This remains, however, here too, roughly the level of what the Envy Photo offers. On the other hand, by looking at the pictures closely with the naked eye, with a magnifying glass or on a high-resolution scan, we perceive a fairly marked noise and a rather pronounced smoothing.

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Office

In inkjet, the OfficeJet Pro 8720 is one of the printers that has impressed us the most in recent years, offering speeds of 37.5 and 30 pages / minute (ppm) in black and white and colors in the laboratory. . Few laser printers display such scores! And this OfficeJet Pro 7720 must rub against it directly. With 26.1 and 20 ppm (as well as 6 ppm in automatic duplexing), the 7720 is slightly down, but still ensures very good flow rates, higher than those announced by HP, which allow it to earn its five stars in office automation.

Of course, if we praise the qualities of this model for its productivity component, it is also because the result obtained at printing is at the level of our expectations. The texts come out particularly precisely, whether on a white or colored background. The solid colors are homogeneous. Gradients are correctly respected. A very good impression, confirmed by our analyzes of sights with a magnifying glass.

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Conclusion

As often with printers, the devil hides in the details (which are ultimately not). Professional by nature, the HP OfficeJet Pro 7720 does a lot at a rather competitive price and is quite economical to use. Too bad it does not take a second paper tray, does not have better shortcuts for its basic functions and it is too noisy. In its genre, it could otherwise have claimed the five stars.

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