The HP Deskjet 3630 has now been discontinued and has been replaced by the HP Deskjet 2630 which costs £29.99 at John and comes with a two year warranty and a 3 month trial for Instant Ink. It comes with wireless connectivity and an HP instant ink subscription for up to 16 months, great if you plan on printing a lot. Here's the HP Deskjet 3630 Review:
Advantages of HP Deskjet 3630
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| HP Deskjet 3630 Printer |
1. Settings and specifications
You don't get luxuries like touchscreens or automatic two-sided printing at this price, and the plastic feels very thin, especially the output tray. But you can forgive the look and feel, because HP gives you a ton of features for forty pounds.
The Deskjet can print, copy, and scan, and in addition to the ubiquitous USB connection, it supports HP ePrint, Wi-Fi networking, and Wi-Fi Direct. That last option means you can print wirelessly from devices including smartphones and tablets even if you don't have a wireless router.
One thing you don't get is a lot of ink: the 3630 ships with a starter cartridge, so you'll have to replace it after about 100 pages.
The lack of a touchscreen means you'll have to configure Wi-Fi via HP's own app (on the supplied or free disc from 123.hp.com), which is pretty simple: it's just a matter of telling the app which network the printer should use. This application is available for Mac as well as Windows, and it downloads the necessary drivers and utility software once the connection has been established.
There is a 60-sheet input tray and a 25-sheet output tray with support for normal paper (up to 90gsm), HP cards and HP photo paper (300gsm); if you print on photo paper the prints are borderless, and on A4 the margins are as small as 3mm.
Print quality is up to 1200 x 1200, with 4800 x 1200 effective if you are printing on certain HP photo papers and your source is 1200dpi. The scanner is 1200dpi, and the copier gives 600 x 300 dpi.
The Deskjet 3630 is clearly designed for people or businesses with simple printing needs: the recommended volume is 250 sheets per month.
2. Operational performance and costs
As you'd expect from a low-cost printer, the Deskjet isn't the fastest inkjet around. The official ISO speeds are 8.5ppm in black and 6ppm, although draft mode speeds up to 20ppm in black. You can expect the first page in 14 seconds.
There's a Silent Mode which makes the printer slower and a bit quieter, but we didn't find the normal mode to be particularly noisy.
The Deskjet 3630 uses the HP 302 black and HP 302 tri-color cartridges, which cost £11.99 and £13.99, respectively. The black cartridge produces 190 pages and 165 colors, so you pay 6.3p per page for black and 8.5p per page for color. As with other tri-color cartridges, you must replace all of the cartridges when one of the colors runs out.
Operating costs are pretty poor with standard cartridges, but the printer also supports HP XL cartridges, which are £19.99 for black and £22.00 for color. The XL cartridge delivers 480 pages of black and 330 colors, which deliver 4.2p per page and 6.7p, respectively. It's still quite expensive for black but not bad for color.
There is another option, and it is called Instant Ink. HP Instant Ink is a subscription service based on usage, and costs £1.99 per month for up to 50 pages, £3.49 for 100 pages and £7.99 for 300 pages. HP reckons that you'll save between $78 and £516 per year on ink costs compared to buying standard cartridges as and when you need them.
Will it? Instant Ink does bring the cost per page down to under 4p on the cheapest plan and 2.6p on the £7.99 plan, but of course you only save money if you use the whole page allowance.
You can scroll unused pages the same way you would scroll unused cell phone minutes, with limitations: you can roll 50 pages on the cheapest plan, going up to 100 and 300 on the more expensive plan. If you believe you are going to use pocket money then it is definitely better value than buying cartridges every time they run out.
Conclusion
The Deskjet 3630 is an excellent printer for a very low price. It's quiet enough, fast enough, offers decent print quality, connects to phones and tablets and has a pretty good scanner and copier.
Operating costs are high if you buy cartridges at the store, but if you use Instant Ink, the cost per page decreases, especially for color printing. It's not pretty, the paper handling is basic and it might explode if you scream "boo!" it is, but it's an attractive option for buyers on a budget who don't need to print very often.
Thus information about the HP Deskjet 3630 Review, hopefully this information can be useful and help friends who want to buy an HP Deskjet 3630 printer for smooth multitasking needs.