Take the HP Envy Pro 6455 reviewed here in June 2020, drop the “Pro,” and add an “e,” and you have the HP Envy 6455e, an entry-level all-in-one printer priced at $179.99. As we saw with the larger and more robust HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e (one of PCMag’s Best of the Year for 2021), that lowercase letter at the end of the model number means the 6455e comes with a free six-month subscription to HP’s Instant Ink cartridge-replacement program. Like its predecessor, the Envy 6455e prints well, if slowly, and is inexpensive to buy and use, making it a sensible solution for families and home offices with relatively low print and copy needs—say, 100 to 200 pages per month.
Moderate Volume, High Value
At 6.8 by 17 by 14.2 inches (HWD) and weighing a trim 13.6 pounds, the Envy 6455e is exactly the same size and girth as last year’s model and a little smaller than some of its direct competitors such as Canon’s Pixma TR7020, Brother’s MFC-J805DW, and Epson’s Expression Premium XP-6000 Small-in-One.
What makes a printer an all-in-one (AIO) is, of course, outfitting it with a scanner, preferably one augmented by an automatic document feeder (ADF) for copying or scanning multiple pages without having to place them on the glass one at a time. The 6455e’s 35-page ADF has a higher capacity than those of many low-end multifunction printers—the Epson XP-6000 has none, and the Brother’s holds only 20 sheets, though the Pixma TR7020 matches the HP with a 35-page ADF.
All three of these ADFs are manual-duplexing—after capturing a stack of page sides, you must flip the stack and place it back in the ADF to scan the other sides, a chore an auto-duplexing ADF lets you avoid.
Like a few other recent HP printers and AIOs, the Envy 6455e has a snazzy-looking, ultra-simple control panel (shown above). You don’t get a graphical touch screen or a display for previewing photos and other document types. Instead, most configuration options for both the printer itself and for simple tasks such as making copies or printing from a favorite cloud site are accessed through HP’s Smart App software. (We’ll look at Smart App and using the 6455e in general in the next section.)
Paper handling consists of a single 100-sheet tray that you can also load with up to 10 envelopes or 40 sheets of premium photo paper. The Envy’s maximum monthly duty cycle is 1,000 pages, with a suggested monthly volume of up to 100 prints. That’s not much.
Of the other machines mentioned here, the Epson also holds 100 sheets, plus 20 sheets of photo paper. The Pixma holds up to 200 sheets, while the MFC-J805DW holds 150. The Brother is the only other printer here with a published monthly volume rating—a maximum 5,000 pages and a suggested 1,500.
Connecting via HP Smart App
As I said a moment ago, the 6455e is designed to be operated and, especially, configured from your phone. HP Smart App runs on Windows and macOS, as well as iOS and Android.
As for the Envy’s connectivity options, you can connect to a single computer via USB 2.0 or go wireless with 802.11ac Wi-Fi or Bluetooth 4.2. The last, of course, allows handheld devices to link to the printer without either it or them being connected to a local area network (LAN). The printer has no slots for reading documents or photos from a USB thumb drive or flash card.
In addition to Smart App, your smartphone or tablet can also connect via Wi-Fi using Apple AirPrint, Mopria, or Chrome OS.
Finally, like other HP (and Canon and Epson) inkjets, the Envy 6455e supports smart home voice activation via Amazon Alexa and Google Home Assistant, allowing you to print or perform certain other tasks without leaving your couch (or your garage, backyard, kitchen table, or whatever).
Testing the Envy 6455e: Life in the Slow Lane
While the Envy Pro 6455’s print speed was rated at 10 monochrome pages per minute (ppm), the Envy 6455e is rated at a slower 7ppm. I ran our benchmarks over a USB cable from our Intel Core i5-based Windows 10 Pro testbed. First, I clocked the 6455e as it printed our 12-page Microsoft Word text document. Over several runs, it averaged 6.9ppm, just shy of its rating and 5.2ppm slower than its predecessor. The Brother MFC-J805DW managed 10.1ppm and the Epson XP-6000 13.3ppm.
Next, I timed the HP as it churned through our collection of colorful and complex business test documents. They consist of Adobe Acrobat PDFs made up of intricate color graphics and typefaces of varying sizes and colors; Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and accompanying charts and graphs; and finally Microsoft PowerPoint handouts, also resplendent with charts and other types of colorful graphics. The 6455e finished the job at an unimpressive 2.6ppm, trailing the 3.8ppm of last year’s model. All of the other printers mentioned here were considerably faster.
I finished testing by clocking the Envy as it printed two colorful, detailed 4-by-6-inch snapshots. The 6455e produced the photos at an average of 48 seconds apiece, which is normal for this class of inkjet. The Brother AIO was the slowest in the test group, taking 1 minute and 4 seconds per snapshot.
As for output quality, HP has been in the printer biz for a long time, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen one of this Silicon Valley company’s products churn out anything other than good-looking content. The Envy 6455e is anything but an exception: Text was crisp, well-shaped, and highly legible, even at smaller sizes (around 6 to 8 points). Business graphics printed with just a few near-imperceptible instances of banding and other slight ink-distribution flaws, which I doubt you’d notice unless you were carefully examining your documents for problems.
Photos, too, were colored correctly, with good detail. For the most part, the Envy will do your family’s snapshots justice, though its two-cartridge (black and tricolor ink) design falls short of the richness you’d see from a photo-centric printer with five or six ink cartridges, such as the Canon Pixma TS8320 or the Epson Expression Premium XP-7100. If you plan on printing a lot of photos, a two-cartridge inkjet is a poor choice.
Print for Pennies with HP+
If you pulled the Envy 6455e off the shelf, took it home, loaded it with paper and ink, and then put it to work, you would—on a cost-per-page (CPP) basis, anyway—spend a fair amount of money before long. Buying the two ink cartridges (one large black and the other for cyan, magenta, and yellow) at retail would run you about 9.8 cents per black-and-white page and 20.2 cents per color page. That’s expensive!
Fortunately, the 6455e comes with HP+ (also known as HP Plus), which gives you a two-year warranty with registration, along with a free six months of HP’s Instant Ink service, essentially reducing your running costs to zero for the first half-year you own the printer. At the end of the six-month period, if you continue to use Instant Ink, you’ll have several plans to choose from, including one that lets you print up to 300 pages per month for $11.99 and another that delivers up to 700 pages for $24.99. (See our analysis of HP’s ink programs, as well as our ink-savings strategy guide.)
Those divide out to 4 cents and 3.6 cents per page, respectively—and that goes for any page, ranging from a double-spaced text document with just a small amount of black ink to a borderless, 8.5-by-11-inch photo with 100% ink coverage.
Of the other AIOs mentioned here, it’s tough to find one that prints color pages—any kind of color page—for 3.6 cents each. The Brother MFC-J805DW, one of that company’s INKvestment Tank models, prints black pages for just under a penny apiece and color pages for just under a nickel. Meanwhile, Epson’s XP-6000 churns out black pages for just under 5 cents and color pages for just over 18 cents. Generally, to match HP Instant Ink’s low operating costs, you’ll need to get a more expensive bulk-ink printer with ink tanks refilled from bottles instead of cartridges.
As You Like It, for Very Light Duty
With HP’s Envy 6455e, you and your family can copy or print a couple of hundred documents and/or photos for each of six months for just the purchase price of the printer. After that, your monthly Instant Ink fee will depend on the subscription plan you choose, from 99 cents for a paltry 15 pages per month to the abovementioned $24.99 for 700. (You can roll over unused pages for future use, storing up to 900 pages with the $11.99 plan and up to 2,100 with the $24.99 plan.)
The Instant Ink scheme helps reduce the inherent high cost of using a black-plus-tricolor inkjet printer, which makes you throw away a cartridge with some of two ink colors remaining as soon as the third color runs dry. And the 6455e delivers admirable if not quite photo-perfect print quality, albeit slowly. Thanks to Instant Ink, the Envy 6455e is a sensible solution for family rooms and home offices with very light print and copy needs.
