HP Smart Tank 5105 All-in-One Printer review

Worth When Reviewed

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The primary inkjet printers that used refillable ink tanks as a substitute of disposable cartridges appeared in 2015. Epson’s EcoTank aped the print supply methods many individuals had used to keep away from the ridiculously excessive price and waste of cartridge printing.

Epson nonetheless makes many printers that use cartridges, as does HP, as a result of these printers may be offered cheaper.

Good Tank is HP’s reply to EcoTank, and the 5015 is an all-in-one printer that mounts a flatbed scanner over an inkjet chassis to facilitate copying, scanning and printing. It could possibly take A4 and authorized paper or sizes smaller than these, and feed as much as 100 sheets, relying on the thickness, from the enter tray.

Connection to the printer generally is a bodily cable, but it surely additionally has wi-fi choices, together with help for a Wi-Fi community, Wi-Fi Direct or Bluetooth. When you do wish to use USB, you’ll want to purchase a cable since HP doesn’t embody one with the printer.

What is within the field together with the printer are 4 ink bottles to fill the inner tanks, two print heads for B&W and color, and a wealth of printed directions, together with setup guides, regulatory flyers and guarantee information.

As soon as operational, the proprietor can count on a printer designed for a typical month-to-month web page cycle of between 400 and 800 pages (roughly as much as 40 per working day). ISO print pace of 5 ppm in color and 12 ppm in mono. It’s meant both for dwelling use or a small enterprise workforce of as much as three folks.

The true attraction of the Good Tank 5105 is the low price of printing. Primarily based on the ink supplied within the field, and the month-to-month cycle, the ink that comes with it must be good for at the very least eight months after buy and probably for much longer.

The guarantee is a single 12 months or 30,000 pages, whichever comes first, though you may rise up to 2 years prolonged guarantee upon registration. Something you change, such because the printheads, has a selected guarantee hooked up.

Design & Construct

When you’ve not dealt with a contemporary inkjet printer, they’re usually flimsy. The development right here is generally plastic, with metallic being reserved for stiffening the print carriage and offering a fundamental skeleton on which the plastic panels may be hung.

At just a bit over 5kg empty, the 5105 is mild and straightforward to hold, not that you just’ll be transferring it round a lot.

Mark Pickavance

Presumably, as a manufacturing price saving,  HP didn’t give this printer a show – similar to Epson’s EcoTank ET-18100. Due to this fact setup have to be completed both utilizing the HP Good cellular app or by connecting it immediately by way of a pc, utilizing a USB cable you could already personal.

For these unfamiliar with tank printers, they’re successfully the identical as a cartridge printer, however as a substitute of the ink being saved inside a cartridge, it’s in a reservoir after which fed to print heads utilizing rubber tubing.

The place HP went barely away from the Epson mannequin for these gadgets is that as a substitute of the print head being an integral a part of the printer. The designers right here used an inkjet design by which every cartridge is its personal printhead, and two of those, for color and B&W, are supplied to be put in when the printer is first configured.

This design, subsequently, makes the printheads consumables, and so they price £13.99 every to interchange.

How usually the printheads want altering isn’t apparent from the documentation, but when the pinnacle does get clogged, these may be person eliminated, cleaned or changed. Usually, we’d be irritated by the extra expense, however on this context, making them simply replaceable is a great selection. It additionally would possibly present a simple method to empty the ink tanks totally, ought to somebody want to swap the printer to creating sublimation output (which you would possibly do should you needed to print t-shirts, for instance).

There isn’t anything outstanding concerning the 5105. It’s a typical HP design the place each fraction of a cent has been accounted for to make it worthwhile for the corporate, unsurprisingly.

Specs & Options

The print engine within the 5105 isn’t considerably completely different from the print know-how HP has been promoting with cartridge designs for some years.

This one has a single rear-loading paper system that may settle for as much as 100 sheets relying on the thickness of the paper. Paper dealing with is likely one of the options of this printer that we didn’t look after.

Mark Pickavance

The angled ramp that the paper sits on solely has one moveable paper information on the left aspect that forces the paper towards a hard and fast edge on the suitable. This association works effectively sufficient with skinny A4 inventory, but when the rollers don’t grip smaller photograph paper cleanly, it might probably simply get broken on the mounted aspect of the trail.

We had this occur a number of occasions with A5 and 10×15 cm paper, making the broken prints unusable.

Equally, the output space is a really slim and skinny plastic extension that’s solely 10cm extensive. Due to the paper feeding, it is just the suitable, and the output restrict of 30 pages could also be because of any extra being liable to interrupt this fragile-looking ramp.

Given the paper dealing with and its fragility, it appears curious that HP appeared completely satisfied to incorporate some less-obvious options

Some ‘ink tank’ printers don’t have ink-level sensors, however the 5015 does, and it additionally has sensible energy administration that may sleep the printer when not in energetic use.

The management cluster has a tiny LCD for controlling the copier perform, though all of the controls listed here are duplicated on the HP smartphone utility. You may scan from a pc or telephone, however with no location for the scanned photographs to go on the naked printer, the scanner is just useable in a duplicate mode on a stand-alone configuration.

The month-to-month obligation cycle of the 5105 is 3,000 A4 pages, or roughly 150 pages a day, however the advisable month-to-month use is simply 400-800 pages, or between 20 and 40 pages day by day.

On this foundation, even when printing is comparatively low cost, the 5015 isn’t a substitute for a high-volume laser printer or a mono tank printer constructed for pace and sturdiness.

The scanner is a single-sheet flatbed mechanism meant for infrequent copying and scanning, but it surely wouldn’t present the foundations for a doc imaging answer.

Consumer Expertise

Earlier than we discuss print efficiency, let’s discuss ink.

An equal Epson EcoTank printer to the HP 5105 is the EcoTank ET-1810, which comes with 4 65ml bottles of ink, totalling 260ml. The HP 5105 comes with a single 135ml black bottle and three 50ml mini bottles, which is 15ml extra ink general however contains much less color ink.

For these questioning, it isn’t doable to buy 50ml color ink bottles from HP, as the usual dimension is 70ml. These little50ml bottles are very like the partially crammed ‘starter’ ink cartridges that HP loves a lot. Epson, then again, tends to incorporate standard-capacity ink with its EcoTank printers.

As priming the system takes some ink that should stay within the system, these 50ml bottles might consequence within the colored ink not going so far as you would possibly anticipate.

Mark Pickavance

Fortunately the tanks are seen and provides a superb indication if you’re utilizing one specific color greater than the others and when it is perhaps acceptable to refill. All of the Epson EcoTank designs we’ve seen to date additionally depend on the proprietor to enter an ink degree for the printer to trace, however HP has sensors that detect ink ranges and warn the person in the event that they’re getting too low.

That’s a essential characteristic as a result of ought to air be drawn into the tubes that feed the printhead, it’d trigger blockages. Or, in a worst-case state of affairs, trigger the ink to dry within the tubes or head. On this respect, sustaining good ink ranges is crucial for all tank printers.

The place this design is much less outstanding is the preliminary configuration, the place the method of getting it working is kind of convoluted. Nevertheless, HP does present first rate documentation that can assist you get by means of it.

After eradicating all of the annoying blue tape and connecting the printer to energy, you may load the inks. HP doesn’t use any type of keyed connector like Epson, relying as a substitute on the shopper to place the suitable colors within the appropriate tanks. That course of is comparatively painless, merely working throughout the tanks plugging every bottle in and watching the ink glug into the reservoir under.

Some ink is required to prime the system, and we have been curious to see precisely how a lot ink can be used up. From the black 135ml bottle, it took greater than half, and we totally emptied the 50ml color bottles into the respective tanks. Due to this fact, a superb rule of thumb is that every color tank and the strains to the printhead symbolize about 70ml of capability, which is identical dimension because the substitute color bottles, which is smart.

As soon as the ink is loaded, the printhead carriage strikes to the centre to have the printheads put in, which is one thing of a fiddly train. With that process full, the printer will print an alignment sheet that you just then scan to get the settings again within the printer. That is clearly a well-tested answer, and so long as you comply with the supplied directions, it must be achievable by most customers.

And eventually, you should use the HP Good app in your telephone to attach the printer to an area Wi-Fi community the place you may print from any laptop on that community, no matter whether or not it’s a telephone, pill, laptop computer, PC or Mac.

Efficiency

The very first thing to say concerning the HP 5105 is that this isn’t a high-speed printer.

The quoted speeds are 12 pages per minute for black-and-white pages and simply 5 ppm for color, which begs the rapid query of why the color output is so gradual compared with the black.

The reply is that the place the whole print head allotted to black will get 704 nozzles, the three colors are compelled to share a head with simply 588 nozzles in complete, or 196 nozzles for every color. That is undoubtedly the results of repurposed cartridge printing know-how. With extra nozzles allotted to the color aspect of this equation, it may need been quicker at color printing.

Additionally it is price noting that these quoted speeds are for ISO print requirements and that relying on the precise content material you print, the precise speeds skilled may be quicker or slower. For monochrome printing, the primary web page is meant to reach as quick as 14 seconds, and a color print might begin in as little as 21 seconds.

Draft printing can scale back print time if you’re completely satisfied to just accept the lower-quality output that mode entails.

HP Growth Firm

In our testing of the ISO commonplace web page with 5% protection, the primary print appeared on schedule at 14 seconds, after which subsequent prints of the identical content material arrived each 12 seconds, utilizing commonplace high quality.

Printing a 15 x 10 cm (6x4in) photograph in commonplace high quality over Wi-Fi took solely six seconds for the printer to spring into motion, and the print took an extra 72 seconds to finish. A full borderless A4 picture at commonplace high quality took round a minute to initialise after which 3 minutes and 44 seconds to print. Utilizing high-quality mode might lengthen the time for an A4 print effectively past six minutes.

If you wish to use this printer for images, it is perhaps finest to ship a job to the printer after which go and make a espresso. However for text-only output in black, attaining 5 pages a minute from this printer with out resorting to draft mode is completely doable.

Worth

There are two costs to contemplate right here; price of buy and price of possession.

HP needs £209.98 for the printer within the UK, making it at the very least £60 greater than the Epson ET-1810 equal. It does include a bit of additional black ink, and the replaceable printhead know-how is beneficial, however these don’t justify the value distinction totally.

You too can purchase it from Amazon and John Lewis on the time of writing.

The associated fee throughout Euro varies from a peak of round €230 all the way down to as little as €195 in Germany, relying on the place you get it from, with the most affordable supply usually being Amazon. At the moment, HP hasn’t launched the 5015 within the USA but, though it may be purchased on import.

We’ve talked about that the 2 printhead replacements price £13.99 every, elements that might be wanted ought to the heads grow to be blocked.

The quoted web page yields are primarily based on ISO/IEC 24711. In that commonplace, 5 pre-defined pages that embody phrases and graphics in black and color are printed successively till the printer is empty. However these numbers don’t issue within the priming ink that should stay within the system to cease air from reaching the printhead, and it gained’t make any allowances for the precise mixture of inks any individual would possibly use.

Whereas the HP Good Tank 5105 isn’t particularly designed for photograph printing, it might probably print reasonable-quality photographs, however the unit price per print is proportionally increased. That mentioned, the value of bottled ink is a magnitude cheaper than the identical quantity of ink in a cartridge. It must be doable to print 10 x 15 cm images with 100% protection for lower than 5p a print, excluding the paper, utilizing the HP 5105.

As for opponents, aside from the beforehand talked about Epson ET-1810, the value could be very near the Amazon price of the Epson ET-2850, a design with an automatic duplex mode and a color display. That printer comes with 464ml of ink by default for about £10 extra. Or, Epson additionally has the cheaper ET-2810 with out a display for £50 much less however with related efficiency.

At nearer to £250, the Canon Pixma G4511 is £40 costlier however affords quicker printing, a 20-sheet ADF, affords Faxing, and a really excessive web page yield from the default ink included within the field.

General, the HP 5105 appears overpriced in contrast with the cheaper choices by Epson and Canon and a bit of too near the subsequent tank printer tier that gives many extra options and better print speeds.

Mark Pickavance

Verdict

Finally, we’re seeing HP come out to have interaction Epson, the place it’s having essentially the most success, and the HP 5105 is a sensible answer for any dwelling or small workplace buyer that wish to fear much less about the price of printing.

The most affordable black printing continues to be from a laser printer, however the price of color printing utilizing bottled inks is a considerably higher proposition than the frighteningly excessive value of cartridges. It’s additionally higher for the surroundings, even accepting that we feed these machines with pulped timber.

The print high quality is sweet, however there’s a slight mismatch between the black and color capabilities. Black printing is completed with sq. pixels at 1200 x 1200 dpi, and the color is deposited at 4 occasions the density however rectangular utilizing a 4800 x 1200 dpi structure. Due to this fact color printing is superior to black, however the elements of a color print that use black are at a decrease decision than those who don’t.

For common use and occasional photograph manufacturing, the 5015’s print high quality is sweet, but it surely isn’t on par with a devoted photograph printer that makes use of solely dyes and has greater than three main colors.

That mentioned, the print pace won’t be speedy, however the outcomes are acceptable for a lot of that print sometimes. Prints are sharp and well-defined even on copy paper, and photograph output is surprisingly vibrant. The one caveat to utilizing this for photograph printing, aside from the low pace, is that the black pigment has a distinctly completely different reflectivity on excessive gloss paper than the colored dyes. And, should you view the print from an angle, these variations are very obvious.

The place this product is a bit disappointing is within the construct high quality division. This building feels flimsy, and the outfeed help appears to be like particularly fragile.

What the HP 5105 is ok for is a limited-duty workplace printer. It’s low cost to run and straightforward to community, and whereas cheaper tank printers can be found from different manufacturers, this one must be easy and cheap to supply ink for when you’ve consumed the bottles that include it.

When you’re satisfied to purchase one, we strongly counsel registering the printer when you’ve received it to get the prolonged guarantee.

Specs

• Features: print, copy, scan
• Media: A4, B5, A6, DL, envelope, Authorized
• Connection: Bluetooth Low Vitality , Hello-Pace USB 2.0 (system), WiFi 802.11b/g/n, WiFi Direct
• Print head nozzles: 704 (black), 588 (tri-colour)
• System: 980 MHz SoC and 64 MB of built-in DDR1
• Inks: Black (pigment), cyan, magenta, yellow (all dyes)
• Web page Yield out of the field: 6000 pages black, ~6,000 pages cyan, magenta, yellow composite yield
• Quoted ISO print speeds: 12ppm B&W, 5 ppm color
• Borderless print: Sure
• Dimensions: 434.66 x 361.53 x 157.26 mm
• Weight: 5.03 kg
• Guarantee/help: 1 12 months or 30,000 pages restricted {hardware} guarantee, prolonged by two years should you register with HP