Results are still hidden for non-insiders 27 days later, not sure if that’s on purpose but mentioning because other ones are usually posted sooner.
Hey @SkippyMcSkips,
Thanks for your comment. We have a bit of a backlog at the moment as we juggle new incoming products for robot vacuums as well as updating reviews on older test benches to our new benchmark suite. Rest assured we haven’t forgotten about this review and it will be coming as soon as we can get to it!
What is the Cost Per Print for the HP Pro 9730e based on? Is it based on the ink subscription service? Purchasing individual or multi-pack cartridges as needed? Or something else? Apparently it makes a big difference.
The cost of 936/936xl ink cartridges is ABSURDLY expensive. And I cant find any reliable comparisons of the ink subscription service (which by the sounds of it is much cheaper, but then you are held hostage, i.e. HP “…blocks you from using 3rd party cartridges which are usually cheaper”.) vs purchasing cartridges as needed. I would think this would be valuable information to include in your review/ratings.
Otherwise, I love your site!! Thank you,
Hey @DaveHudy,
Thanks for your comment, and we’re glad you enjoy using our website! Our Cost-Per-Print is calculated by dividing the US MSRP of first party ink cartridges (as available from the manufacturer’s website) by the expected yield of those cartridges as tested by us. The quotient is what you see in the review as the cost-per-print, expressed by dollars per page. That said, ink costs definitely shift all the time, and you’re right that XL cartridges tend to be more expensive upfront.
As for the value of the ink subscription service, we have no plans to include it in our reviews at present. This is because every manufacturer has different pricing schemes and tiers, and each tier provides a different value depending on your print load, what you print (documents vs photos), and whether you use all your pages in a month or get your monthly allowances rolled over into the next month, etc. By providing straight-forward figures on the cost-per-print as a data point, users can evaluate whether it is more cost-effective for them to select an ink subscription service.
Hope this helps to clarify, and again, thanks for reaching out!
Thank you for your comment and for bringing this to our attention. You are right that the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4301fdw/4301fdn has superior color accuracy than the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw. The main difference in the Photo usage scoring between these two printers is our Photo Printing Sizes test results, where the MFP 3301fdw scores a 9.5 while the MFP 4301fdw scores a 0. However, this difference reflects an inconsistency in testing on our part.
While the 4301 is technically compatible with glossy paper, when we reviewed the 4301, we couldn’t find compatible paper. As a result, we decided that the high cost and limited availability of specialized glossy paper for laser printers posed a barrier for users to print photos on photo paper and scored it accordingly. Despite this also being the case for the 3301, we instead used the manufacturer’s specifications as our data point for that review and scored it much more favorably. Thanks to your comment, we will be updating our review of the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw shortly to make it consistent with our review of the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4301fdw/4301fdn and ensure we are consistent in our approach moving forward.
As a final bit of guidance, we don’t recommend laser printers for photo printing, regardless of their paper compatibility, due to the high cost, limited availability of specialized paper, and generally inferior photo print quality. That said, if you also need to print photos on your color laser printer, then between the 3301 and 4301, the 4301 does produce better results.
Thanks again and hope this helps to explain! If you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.
One correction if I may: I have an HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 which I use for my home office.
You mention that “ It can automatically print double-sided sheets up to legal size, but, unfortunately, it can’t duplex-print Tabloid size.”
This is untrue, at least for my model, it actually can automatically print double-sided A3 (I live in Europe).
Best,
ET
Hello @VelcroFan23,
Thank you for your message and feedback. Unfortunately, we can’t test this case ourselves as our unit requires new ink and printheads as it has been sitting unused for a long period. Since this model is no longer in production, we must allocate our resources to newer models. That being said, after doing some additional research and talking with the testing team, we found some forum threads online where HP’s support staff also claims this printer can perform duplex printing for Tabloid (A3) size sheets. We will be updating the review to note your comment.
Thanks again for reaching out and telling us about your experience with this printer!
I am curious what the maximum dpi is for the ADF scanner vs the flatbed. My current HP only allows 300 max dpi in the ADF and I’d like to upgrade to something that is higher.
Hello @Akapterian,
Thanks for your comment! The ADF’s has a maximum resolution of 600 DPI, while the flatbed’s is 1200 DPI. Hope this helps!
Recently bought the Canon Laser MF656CDW to replace a 8 year old inkjet. Then we realized my wife’s Circuit paper does not work well in laser printers so we need to switch back to ink.
Got this MFC-J4335DW and so far so good. The normal print mode prints excel tables with lines that are not straight. Funny.
Is that the banding issue listed above?
When we print in BEST mode everything looks stellar. Been pruning in best mode for the last few days and we like the results.
Hi @Ebaer56,
Thanks for your comment. Glad to hear you are happy with your Brother MFC-J4335DW! The banding issue we mention above is specifically related to photo printing. Banding occurs when the color transitions in an image are not smooth and create visible stripes, steps, or “bands” of color (I generally dislike a definition that uses the term being defined as part of the definition, but in this case it’s a descriptive term so it should be helpful).
I’m curious why this printer isn’t recommended more?
Specifically, it rates higher in almost every category (and at least equal in others) compared to the Brother HL-L2460DW. Yet the Brother is included on 15 different recommendation lists versus none for this Canon.
The only significant difference I can see is cost: the Canon is ~$170 while the Brother is ~$120. Maybe that cost bumped it out of consideration?
Hello @devynosborne,
To answer the recommendation side of your questions (rather than the dimensions - great catch, by the way!), there are a few reasons the Canon doesn’t make our recommendations. Starting with performance, while the Canon has a slight edge in our scoring, the black and white document print quality is worse than the Brother (I’ll come back to this in a moment), it prints a bit slower (though still a respectable 28 pages per minute), and our prints kept coming out crooked with the Canon. While the crookedness may have been an issue with our unit, it’s still a consideration.
Now, for the scoring of the black-and-white document quality: the Brother has the same score as the Canon because its out-of-the-box performance isn’t great. However, you can produce much better-looking documents with a couple of tweaks. We outline this process in the Brother’s full review, and we don’t consider these changes to be so onerous as to be unmanageable for most users. We mention this as a caveat in almost every recommendation article as well.
Finally, as you mention, the cost. We recommend a variant of the Brother HL-L2460DW as our budget pick. At its MSRP, this takes the Canon out of the running. However, the Canon is available for around $100 on sale. Unfortunately, even at that price point, we still feel the Brother offers better value overall.
I hope this explains our thought process, and again, thank you for reaching out!
Edited 5 months ago: Formatting was obscuring reply.
Hey everyone,
A quick heads up that this product will remain in early access throughout the holiday season as our office is closed. We’ll be back at the start of January so you can expect the review to be published around that time.
In Belgium both models ET-8550 and L8180 are available.
It seems to me that the ET-8550 is more performant than L8180. E.g.:
ET-8550: Scanning Maximum Hardware Resolution 1200 x 4800 dpi
L8180: Scanning Optical Resolution 1200 X 2400 dpi
Is it a comparison of the same product?
The L8180 is sold for 912;50€, the ET-8550 for 704,00€.
Hello ThHoornaert,
Thanks for your comment. While the spec sheets for these printers are inconsistent across Epson’s regional websites, they are in fact the same printer. They share the same manual (available through Epson’s website: https://download.epson-europe.com/pub/download/6395/epson639592eu.pdf); page 273 lists the scan resolution of 1200 x 4800 dpi. Hope this helps!
The ET-2400 / Pixma G3270 comparison and conclusions feel very odd to me, especially looking at the photo results. The ET-2400 has clearly skewed the picture extremely dark to the point where you are losing highlights in many places, and the effect is almost cartoonish on the darker skinned faces; it’s almost cell shaded, the shadows are so pronounced. Maybe there is a way to calibrate the prints better to reduce this effect, but I would definitely not be pleased with those results out of the box from the ET-2400.
Hi eSonofAnder,
Thanks for your comment! There are a few different things going on here that impact the color quality and printed photo quality of these two printers. The Canon’s color gamut isn’t particularly wide, and it struggles to reproduce and saturate dark shades of many colors. As a result, photos tend towards a brighter overall appearance. By contrast, the Epson has a fairly wide color gamut, and does a much better job reproducing darker shades. But as you pointed out, it does skew heavily towards black. Still, this produces more detailed photos overall, even if it isn’t everyone’s preferred aesthetic for photo printing.
I spoke with our printer testing team as well, and they think that the printers ink may also have a role to play here. The Epson only uses dye ink while the Canon uses dye ink for colors, and pigment for black. This is important, since pigment ink sits on top of glossy paper (which we use for our photo testing), while dye ink seeps into the paper, resulting in a richer and more saturated appearance. If you’re interested, you can see something similar going on with two professional photo printers we’ve tested. The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 uses pigment ink and struggles to reproduce really bright saturated hues on glossy paper, whereas the Canon PIXMA PRO-200 uses dye ink and overcomes this limitation.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment and give us your feedback!
Thank you for your comment and for pointing this out. While we can’t include every difference between products in our comparisons, fax functionality is definitely a good one to note in this case. We’ve updated the comparison to reflect this. Thanks again and have a good day.
Do you know how does it perform in light ed modellinig task? Con it run autocad well?
Hello,
Thanks for your question! While we don’t test for these specific applications, the ASUS Vivobook 16 M1605 isn’t a workstation laptop. While the Ryzen 7 CPUs are fairly capable, its integrated graphics are far too slow for demanding workloads, and many workstation applications (including AutoCAD 2024) recommend having more RAM than the 8 or 16GB this laptop comes with (depending on the variant you buy). Hope this helps!
Hey @SkippyMcSkips,
Thanks for your comment. We have a bit of a backlog at the moment as we juggle new incoming products for robot vacuums as well as updating reviews on older test benches to our new benchmark suite. Rest assured we haven’t forgotten about this review and it will be coming as soon as we can get to it!
Hey @DaveHudy,
Thanks for your comment, and we’re glad you enjoy using our website! Our Cost-Per-Print is calculated by dividing the US MSRP of first party ink cartridges (as available from the manufacturer’s website) by the expected yield of those cartridges as tested by us. The quotient is what you see in the review as the cost-per-print, expressed by dollars per page. That said, ink costs definitely shift all the time, and you’re right that XL cartridges tend to be more expensive upfront.
As for the value of the ink subscription service, we have no plans to include it in our reviews at present. This is because every manufacturer has different pricing schemes and tiers, and each tier provides a different value depending on your print load, what you print (documents vs photos), and whether you use all your pages in a month or get your monthly allowances rolled over into the next month, etc. By providing straight-forward figures on the cost-per-print as a data point, users can evaluate whether it is more cost-effective for them to select an ink subscription service.
Hope this helps to clarify, and again, thanks for reaching out!
Hi @erikblaser,
Thank you for your comment and for bringing this to our attention. You are right that the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4301fdw/4301fdn has superior color accuracy than the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw. The main difference in the Photo usage scoring between these two printers is our Photo Printing Sizes test results, where the MFP 3301fdw scores a 9.5 while the MFP 4301fdw scores a 0. However, this difference reflects an inconsistency in testing on our part.
While the 4301 is technically compatible with glossy paper, when we reviewed the 4301, we couldn’t find compatible paper. As a result, we decided that the high cost and limited availability of specialized glossy paper for laser printers posed a barrier for users to print photos on photo paper and scored it accordingly. Despite this also being the case for the 3301, we instead used the manufacturer’s specifications as our data point for that review and scored it much more favorably. Thanks to your comment, we will be updating our review of the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw shortly to make it consistent with our review of the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4301fdw/4301fdn and ensure we are consistent in our approach moving forward.
As a final bit of guidance, we don’t recommend laser printers for photo printing, regardless of their paper compatibility, due to the high cost, limited availability of specialized paper, and generally inferior photo print quality. That said, if you also need to print photos on your color laser printer, then between the 3301 and 4301, the 4301 does produce better results.
Thanks again and hope this helps to explain! If you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Hello @VelcroFan23,
Thank you for your message and feedback. Unfortunately, we can’t test this case ourselves as our unit requires new ink and printheads as it has been sitting unused for a long period. Since this model is no longer in production, we must allocate our resources to newer models. That being said, after doing some additional research and talking with the testing team, we found some forum threads online where HP’s support staff also claims this printer can perform duplex printing for Tabloid (A3) size sheets. We will be updating the review to note your comment.
Thanks again for reaching out and telling us about your experience with this printer!
Hello @Akapterian, Thanks for your comment! The ADF’s has a maximum resolution of 600 DPI, while the flatbed’s is 1200 DPI. Hope this helps!
Hi @Ebaer56,
Thanks for your comment. Glad to hear you are happy with your Brother MFC-J4335DW! The banding issue we mention above is specifically related to photo printing. Banding occurs when the color transitions in an image are not smooth and create visible stripes, steps, or “bands” of color (I generally dislike a definition that uses the term being defined as part of the definition, but in this case it’s a descriptive term so it should be helpful).
For misaligned text or tables, the User Manual suggests printing in Best mode (like you are already doing) or to adjust the alignment. Here’s the link if you want to give it a whirl: https://support.brother.com/g/s/id/htmldoc/mfc/cv_mfc4335dw/use/html/GUID-204EEA6A-8F34-47FA-BA3C-95928F66ACA5_1.html?c=us&lang=en&prod=mfcj4535dw_us_eu&broug=in
Thanks again for reaching out and hope this printer continues to treat you well!
Hello @devynosborne, To answer the recommendation side of your questions (rather than the dimensions - great catch, by the way!), there are a few reasons the Canon doesn’t make our recommendations. Starting with performance, while the Canon has a slight edge in our scoring, the black and white document print quality is worse than the Brother (I’ll come back to this in a moment), it prints a bit slower (though still a respectable 28 pages per minute), and our prints kept coming out crooked with the Canon. While the crookedness may have been an issue with our unit, it’s still a consideration.
Now, for the scoring of the black-and-white document quality: the Brother has the same score as the Canon because its out-of-the-box performance isn’t great. However, you can produce much better-looking documents with a couple of tweaks. We outline this process in the Brother’s full review, and we don’t consider these changes to be so onerous as to be unmanageable for most users. We mention this as a caveat in almost every recommendation article as well.
Finally, as you mention, the cost. We recommend a variant of the Brother HL-L2460DW as our budget pick. At its MSRP, this takes the Canon out of the running. However, the Canon is available for around $100 on sale. Unfortunately, even at that price point, we still feel the Brother offers better value overall.
I hope this explains our thought process, and again, thank you for reaching out!
Hey everyone, A quick heads up that this product will remain in early access throughout the holiday season as our office is closed. We’ll be back at the start of January so you can expect the review to be published around that time.
Hello ThHoornaert,
Thanks for your comment. While the spec sheets for these printers are inconsistent across Epson’s regional websites, they are in fact the same printer. They share the same manual (available through Epson’s website: https://download.epson-europe.com/pub/download/6395/epson639592eu.pdf); page 273 lists the scan resolution of 1200 x 4800 dpi. Hope this helps!
Hi eSonofAnder,
Thanks for your comment! There are a few different things going on here that impact the color quality and printed photo quality of these two printers. The Canon’s color gamut isn’t particularly wide, and it struggles to reproduce and saturate dark shades of many colors. As a result, photos tend towards a brighter overall appearance. By contrast, the Epson has a fairly wide color gamut, and does a much better job reproducing darker shades. But as you pointed out, it does skew heavily towards black. Still, this produces more detailed photos overall, even if it isn’t everyone’s preferred aesthetic for photo printing.
I spoke with our printer testing team as well, and they think that the printers ink may also have a role to play here. The Epson only uses dye ink while the Canon uses dye ink for colors, and pigment for black. This is important, since pigment ink sits on top of glossy paper (which we use for our photo testing), while dye ink seeps into the paper, resulting in a richer and more saturated appearance. If you’re interested, you can see something similar going on with two professional photo printers we’ve tested. The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 uses pigment ink and struggles to reproduce really bright saturated hues on glossy paper, whereas the Canon PIXMA PRO-200 uses dye ink and overcomes this limitation.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment and give us your feedback!
Hello there UncleBen,
Thank you for your comment and for pointing this out. While we can’t include every difference between products in our comparisons, fax functionality is definitely a good one to note in this case. We’ve updated the comparison to reflect this. Thanks again and have a good day.
Hello, Thanks for your question! While we don’t test for these specific applications, the ASUS Vivobook 16 M1605 isn’t a workstation laptop. While the Ryzen 7 CPUs are fairly capable, its integrated graphics are far too slow for demanding workloads, and many workstation applications (including AutoCAD 2024) recommend having more RAM than the 8 or 16GB this laptop comes with (depending on the variant you buy). Hope this helps!
Hi BlackManta8,
Thank you for your feedback. We appreciate you letting us know about this omission, and we will update the review to reflect the RGB keyboard option.