If you’re looking for an all-in-one printer to use with just your own PC and perhaps nearby mobile devices, you probably won’t find the $139.99 HP Envy 6055e All-in-One appealing compared to, say, the $79.99 Editors’ Choice-winning Brother MFC-J491DW. But if you want to print from any PC, or from virtually anywhere out of the office using a mobile device, the 6055e offers one of the slickest mobile printing solutions available. For those who need remote printing, that makes it worth a look.
Print From Anywhere
The one feature that makes the Envy 6055e stand out is that it lets you print from anywhere you can get an internet connection. Once you install the HP Smart app, which is available for Windows and macOS as well as Android and iOS handhelds, and make a one-time connection through your local network, you can send documents to the printer over the internet as easily as from a computer sharing a desk with it. (When you are close by, you can also connect using Wi-Fi Direct.)
The 6055e’s capabilities are otherwise best described as minimal for the price. It’s limited to letter-size paper for printing, for instance, while the cheaper Brother MFC-J491DW’s support for legal-size paper makes it a better fit for many home and micro offices. The Envy’s single 100-sheet paper tray is also smaller than most of its competitors’. The Canon Pixma TR7020 and Pixma TS6420 both offer double that capacity, and the only slightly more expensive Epson WorkForce Pro WF-3820 holds 250 sheets. On the plus side, the HP includes an auto duplexer for two-sided printing.
The printer’s paper-handling limitations extend to scanning as well. In contrast to all the competitors just mentioned, the Envy 6055e lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning multipage documents. You must scan pages (again, no larger than letter-size) one at a time on its flatbed.
HP rates the device’s maximum duty cycle at 1,000 sheets printed per month, but unless you want to add paper every day or two, the recommended maximum of 400 pages monthly is more realistic. With only one tray, you’ll need to change media every time you want to switch paper types.
Even for a home or micro office, these shortcomings make the Envy 6055e suitable for light-duty printing only, and even lighter-duty scanning, copying, or faxing. Note too that while scanning and copying are handled by the printer locally, faxing requires the mobile fax feature in the HP Smart app, which sends faxes though the cloud. There’s no option for receiving faxes, though HP says it’s looking into adding that feature in the future. Until it does, you can easily find online fax services that handle incoming faxes and forward them as emails for as little as $1 per month, far less than the cost of a dedicated fax line.
Installation Frustration
The 6055e is small and light enough, at 5.2 by 17 by 12.2 inches (HWD) and 11.5 pounds, to make it easy to move into place. But that’s the only part of setting it up that proved easy in my tests. It didn’t come close to delivering on HP’s claim that installation would take only 10 minutes.
The key shortcoming is a lack of information. HP’s design goal is to make setup so easy and automated that you don’t need detailed installation instructions. But if your setup isn’t exactly what HP assumes it will be, finding what went wrong and how to fix it is a challenge. The supplied setup guide merely tells you to download and install HP Smart to your PC or mobile device and follow the instructions in the software.
Among the many details neither the guide nor the software itself mentions is that HP assumes you’ll connect the printer to your PC and the internet via Wi-Fi. If you plan to use a USB cable for printing and try to install the AIO with the cable connected, it won’t work. Nor will it suggest any troubleshooting steps that might help solve the problem.
Even if you don’t connect a USB cable, the installation may not go smoothly. If you’ve turned off SSID broadcast as a mild security measure, for example, you’re probably used to manually entering an SSID to establish a connection. The Envy’s Windows installation routine doesn’t offer that option, which means you have to turn on SSID broadcast in your router or access point, establish the connection, and then turn it off again.
It doesn’t help that the 6055e has no LCD readout for reporting status. Instead, it uses a status light that runs along the front edge and shows any of five colors in various states such as blinking, solid, centered, or moving across the bar. I counted 19 status messages in the user guide available online. Unfortunately, the reference and support guide that comes with the printer shows only five, giving you no way to decode the other status signals.
Another issue is that HP gives you choices to make during setup that aren’t explained well and that overlap enough to be confusing. Briefly, you can choose to sign up for HP’s Instant Ink subscription plan, which offers several choices of pages per month and can bring your print costs down to as little as 4 to 7 cents per page, depending which tier you choose and how much you print. You can also choose to take advantage of the company’s HP Plus (sometimes spelled HP+) support, which gives you six months of free ink if you also sign up for Instant Ink. But don’t confuse HP Plus with the ink subscription plan. Signing up for it also extends the warranty from one year to two and adds important features, including the abovementioned ability to print from anywhere, that you won’t have otherwise.
The good news is that HP says it’s aware of these and other problems with setup and is working on addressing them. And, of course, setup is a one-time hassle. Once done, it’s in the rear view mirror. But you’re well advised to download the user guide so you can decode the status lights.
Slow But Tolerable Speed and Print Quality
After setting up the Envy 6055e using Wi-Fi on our standard printer testbed, I had the option of printing via Wi-Fi or USB. For our performance tests, I chose USB to ensure more consistent results. The printer came close to its rated 10ppm (pages per minute) for black printing, averaging 9.4ppm when printing our 12-page Word file. Its performance plunged in our business applications suite, managing only 3.2ppm despite being rated at 7ppm rating for color.
For context, that makes the Envy a bit slower than the Brother MFC-J491DW or Canon Pixma TR7020 and TS6420, each of which managed 11 to 12ppm for monochrome and about 4.5ppm for color. It was also far slower than the Epson WF-3820’s 18.9 ppm for black and 12.6ppm for color. As for duplex printing, the HP delivered our 12-page Word document at 6.1 images per minute (with one image on each side of the page). For photos, it churned out our 4-by-6 prints in an average of 1 minute and 46 seconds apiece using HP’s Everyday Glossy Photo Paper, which is also on the slow side.
Output quality is acceptable for most home or casual business use, but not at the level you’d want if you need documents to look fully professional. Text showed slightly ragged edges under a loupe. To the naked eye, sizes as small as 6 points were easily readable with most fonts, but edges were less than crisp even at 10 points. Graphics held fine lines nicely. However, I saw banding in some fills, colors were generally not as vibrant as they should be, and some darker colors were a little dull.
Photos on HP’s recommended paper were at the low end of drugstore quality, suffering from a slightly overexposed look that made shadow details easy to see but reduced the sense of three-dimensionality in some photos. In our smudging tests, putting a few drops of water on a page printed at least 24 hours earlier and rubbing lightly, black text smudged easily, color graphics smudged slightly, and photos resisted smudging but dried to show water stains.
Not for Local Printing Only
If you need to print from literally anywhere using PCs, mobile devices, or both, the HP Envy 6055e is a home or home-office option worth considering. If you want an all-in-one strictly for the more traditional role of local printing from your desktop using Wi-Fi and potentially Wi-Fi Direct, the aforementioned Brother MFC-J491DW, Canon Pixma TR7020 and TS6420, and Epson WF-3820 are all better choices, thanks to their faster speed and better paper handling. Among those, the Editors’ Choice award-winning Brother offers the most bang for your buck, while the Epson offers the best performance for heavier-duty printing. Any of them could be the right match for your needs.
