HP Envy Photo 7855 All-In-One Printer [2023 Edition Review]

HP Envy Photo 7855 All-In-One printer is a part of HP’s Envy line of photo printers, which replaced the super-popular Photosmart series in 2010. The Envy series has delivered some good machines for the past few years but also had a few missteps. 7855 model is one of the most popular photo printers of the past five years. But is it worth the praise it gets? That’s what we are here to find out.

HP Envy 7855: Overview

HP Envy Photo 7855 Wireless Color Inkjet All-in-One printer offers a decent assortment of features. The multifunction printer can print, copy, scan, and fax. It can scan prints from a USB thumb drive or SD card. Of the three recently introduced HP inkjet all-in-ones, the 7855 is the highest-end model, and it is the only one with a USB port. Envy Photo 7855 features a dedicated photo paper tray, an automatic document feeder (ADF), and a duplexer.

Envy 7855 lets you instantly print photos from Mac and iOS devices via AirPrint. You can easily print from any Apple device connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Many also consider it one of the best printers for Mac but note that the latest version of macOS does not support faxing from all-in-one printers. The printer also supports HP’s ePrint, which allows you to e-mail files as attachments to a unique address assigned to the printer by HP. Envy 7855 will print out the e-mail and files.

HP Envy 7855: Design

The Envy 7855 comes in matte black with glossy-black highlights and looks clean and uncluttered. This printer is on the bulky side; it measures 7.6x17.9x19.8 inches with its output tray extended. A 3.5-inch color touch screen sits in the tilt-up front panel that’s angled upward. The control panel has a smooth plastic face, and it has no physical buttons except for the power button. For stand-alone use, you have to rely on the touch screen.

Above the main input sits the photo-paper tray. You must slide the photo-paper tray out of the way to load paper into the standard drawer. The drawer sits beneath an output tray and can hold the paper up to 5’’x7’’. The Automatic Document Feeder sits at the top of the chassis. The ADF can hold 35 pages at a time, which is handy for making multipage copies. Lift the lid to reveal the scanner glass. You can lift the top 90 degrees as the lid hinges provide no resistance. The printer supports duplex printing, but it doesn’t support duplex scanning.

HP Envy 7855: Performance

Most photo-centric inkjet printers aren’t generally known for their speed, but Envy 7855 did relatively during our results. The Envy 7855 took 33 seconds to print five-page documents at 9.1 ppm. In contrast, it took 4 and 15 seconds to print out a color PDF document of text and color graphics at 1,4 ppm. The Envy 7855 comes with auto-duplexing capabilities. The printer can print two-sided text documents at 3.7 ppm. But when making single-sided prints of color PDF, the speed of Envy 7855 was comparatively slow, printing at 1.2 ppm.

When it comes to printing photos, its speed can be considered average. For printing letter-size test photos onto glossy paper, the printer took 3 minutes and 1 second. We found that print speeds were faster using an Android phone instead of a laptop during tests. The HP Envy 7855 can print the same documents in half the time, whereas it took 2 minutes and 9 seconds to print the letter-size photo.

Envy 7855 took roughly 15.7 seconds to make copies of a one-page text document, and the Automatic Document Feeder made single-side text copies at a rapid 7.2 ppm. When you add the duplexer to the equation, it substantially affects the printer’s performance. However, the scanning speed for text documents was slower than average. The printer took 14.5 seconds to make a 300 DPI grey-scale PDF.

HP Envy 7855: Print Quality

The output quality of HP Envy 7855 falls under a grey area. The letterforms of the text document printed at high resolution had sharp edges and were sufficiently dark. The document should do the trick for any business use except for desktop publishing applications with very small fonts. Graphics on plain paper turned out well. However, some dark areas, specifically flat areas, showed some banding. These graphics should be good enough for schoolwork or general business use.

Photo quality is where Envy 7855 excels. Photo prints on glossy paper looked well-saturated, fine details were sharp, and colors appeared accurate. Although some prints crossed the line into oversaturation, almost to the point of garishness, it’s good enough to be considered one of the best photo printers out there.

Envy 7855 churned out attractive copies of documents. However, while text retained most of the sharpness in the original, grey-scale copies of graphics lost some of the subtleties in midtone transitions. Scans of photos retained much detail in shadow areas and had a very natural color. However, the text could have been more attractive as the edges of the letterforms were not as sharp as in the original document and looked a little lumpy.