HP Officejet J4680
Manufacturer: HP Part number: CB783A#ABA
- More product information:
- Editors' review
- User reviews
- Specifications
- Accessories
- Manufacturer info
- Bottom Line:
- The HP Officejet J4680 offers more features at a cheaper price than most of its competitors, and small offices and home professionals will appreciate its print quality as well. Unfortunately, its negatives far outweigh the positives: your office productivity will take a major hit because of sluggish output speeds and faulty paper handling. For a better rounded all-in-one printer, we recommend picking up the Lexmark x7675 Pro or investing an extra $90 in the HP Officejet J6480.
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CNET editors' review
HP Officejet J4680 price range: $89.99 - $99.98
- Reviewed by: Justin Yu
- Edited by: Rich Brown
- Reviewed on: 04/21/2009
The good: Inexpensive; auto-document feeder; Wi-Fi connectivity; driver settings provide helpful shortcuts; small footprint.
The bad: Painfully slow output speed; awkward page handling; lacks page status monitor and media card reader; low output page count; ships with shallow ink cartridges.
The bottom line: The HP Officejet J4680 offers more features at a cheaper price than most of its competitors, and small offices and home professionals will appreciate its print quality as well. Unfortunately, its negatives far outweigh the positives: your office productivity will take a major hit because of sluggish output speeds and faulty paper handling. For a better rounded all-in-one printer, we recommend picking up the Lexmark x7675 Pro or investing an extra $90 in the HP Officejet J6480.
The $130 HP Officejet J4680 is an all-in-one, which means it can also fax, copy, and scan in addition to print beautifully rendered documents and pictures. We rarely see sub-$150 printers with the extra features you get in the J4680: 802.11g Wi-Fi connectivity, convert-to-text, and a 20-sheet auto document feeder. Unfortunately, the printer suffers from painfully slow print speeds across all documents including simple black text and photos, in addition to mechanical hiccups that limit its efficiency. If you can somehow get past these limitations, you'll be satisfied with the J4680's features and output quality, but you can spend an extra $90 and get the HP Officejet J6480 that's faster and offers the same features without sacrificing any hardware.
Design
The Officejet J4680 looks similar to the J6480 and the rest of the printers in HP's current lineup. The majority of the chassis is a dark slate grey with muted shades of white and silver coating the sides and the control panel. Standing in at 17 inches long by 15.81 inches wide by 8.53 inches deep and weighing a manageable 13 pounds, the printer itself takes up very little space. The main reason why its footprint is so small is because the output tray is removable, but the catch is that the output tray doubles as the input tray, meaning that all the outbound prints rest almost directly on top of the blank paper, with only a two small plastic tabs separating the two "trays." In addition, the input tray can only hold 100 sheets of plain white paper (the Officejet J6480 can hold 250 sheets by comparison), but you can get another 20 sheets into the ADF on top of the printer. Another gripe we have with the paper handling is that the adjustable arms that shrink to support 4x6 inch photo paper sit all the way inside the mouth of the printer, which could pose a loading problem.
The control panel takes up a majority of the front side of the J4680, comprised of a numerical keypad for inputting fax numbers, a small two line LCD, a directional pad, a Wi-Fi toggle key, and a variety of access buttons including power, cancel, back, and OK. Also, a pass-through light blinks green or red to indicate the status of the printer. Navigating the menus on the LCD is a little tricky because of the horizontal layout of the screen, but accessing the different functions (fax, copy, scan, print) becomes intuitive after a few hours of playing around with the buttons. We also like the helpful instructions that pop up on the LCD if you hover over an item for a while, but HP once again trips up and doesn't include a media card reader or even a USB port, so you can forget about direct printing from a digital camera.
Features
The top of the printer lifts open to reveal the 1200dpi flatbed scanner, measuring 8.5 inches by 11.7 inches to fit a variety of media sizes, but you'll run into trouble if the document you're scanning is too thick or uneven to sit flush on the scanner--we wish HP had built hinges onto the door. Scanning destination options include scanning directly to a file, a Word document, an e-mail, or a PDF file. Again, since there's no reader, transferring directly to a memory card is impossible. The copy function is straightforward as well--you can fit the copy to a single page or enlarge/decrease the size, alter the quality of the reprint to save ink, and make the copy lighter or darker in contrast to the original image. You can make up to 100 copies at once, although you'll obviously need to refill the paper tray somewhere in the middle of the job.
We're pleased that HP is starting to include wireless access on almost all of their newer printers, and the J4680 is no different, although it separates itself from others on the market with the capability to turn it on and off using a button on the front panel. Setting up the 802.11g print server to connect to a computer is incredibly easy--using the network preferences utility on the driver, it's simply a matter of waiting for the printer to sniff out your network and entering your password--the printer will do the rest of the pairing automatically. The whole process, from start to wireless printing, took less than 10 minutes of tangle-free installation.
Another way that HP keeps size and cost down is by incorporating the two-ink cartridge bay into the middle section of the printer, as opposed to adding a completely separate drawer just for ink. Unfortunately, the printer pulls all of its color ink from a single cartridge--you don't get the cost-savings that individually replaceable inks provide. The driver keeps a rough estimate of the remaining ink left in each cartridge and displays it within the HP Solution Center included with the driver. In our testing experience, we found that the HP-901 model of black ink was barely large enough to accommodate our test prints, and we suspect that HP is guilty of bundling a "starter-pack" cartridge size in the box, since our tests don't demand a large amount of black ink. We're also surprised to see that the color cartridge remained almost full at the end of our sampling, despite printing a large amount of color photos.
As stated on the HP Web store, black cartridges cost $15 to replace and will yield approximately 200 pages, and tricolor cartridges costs $29 for 360 pages. You can also purchase an XL black cartridge for $32 that should last about 700; unfortunately, no XL tricolor cartridge is offered at the time of this review. By our cost-per-page calculations, you're looking at 7.5 cents for a page of standard black ink and 4.6 cents per color page, which is higher than the typical home office printer. To put it in context, we recently reviewed another HP printer, the HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-One that came out to 2.4 cents per page of color and 4.3 cents per page of black--the J4680 will run you double to replace each. We won't go as far to suggest that HP is trying to pull a bait-and-switch tactic with the low price tag, but potential buyers should know that the more they print, the higher the ultimate cost of this printer.
Performance
We wish we could tell you that the output speed chart you see below for HP Officejet J4680 is a big mistake, that we messed up and will retest, but the fact of the matter is that the benchmarks are as painfully accurate as they are painfully slow. HP advertises the approximate page per minute speed is 28 pages per minute of black and 22 pages per minute of color, but none of the documents that we tested came even close to those numbers. The other printers on the comparison bench blew the J4680 out of the water, especially when printing photos--the J4680 didn't even break one 4x6 photo per minute, while the Epson Artisan 800 topped out at 2.82 pages in a minute. At this level, it's difficult to imagine an office that could afford to keep a printer this slow in-house.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Color Scanning | |
Photo Speed (1 sheet) | |
Color Graphics Speed | |
Presentation Speed | |
Color Text Speed |
The print quality is definitely the Officejet J6480's saving grace, especially considering the sluggish output speeds. The black text prints came out a rich, bold black with clear readability all the way down to 2-point text. Color text and graphics on standard 20-pound white paper look equally pleasing: equal saturation, sharp detail in fine lines, and accurate color representations especially in facial tones. Although some of the 4x6 photos could use a little warmth, most of the graphics we printed required no tweaking to produce a realistic feeling. In addition, the graphics preferences located on the driver can assist you in slight adjustments to saturation and hue, as well as eliminate red eye.
Service and support
The HP Officejet J4680 is backed by a limited one-year warranty. Troubleshooting is available by phone 24 hours a day and seven days a week; e-mails are typically answered within an hour, as well. The printer is also protected by HP's Total Care program that makes it easy to extend the limited warranty, report a problem, schedule a next-day exchange, and access an HP "SmartFriend" that can answer questions not covered by the manual or Web site.
Find out more about how we test printers.
User reviews
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Sofware and hardware make this unusable
by crazystic on July 21, 2009
Pros: Printing worked
Cons: Scanning didn't
Summary: I bought this printer for home for very low volume printing and scanning of basic office documents. As such, I didn't have any concerns about speed or how much ...
Summary: I bought this printer for home for very low volume printing and scanning of basic office documents. As such, I didn't have any concerns about speed or how much ink this printer would use. My only concern was that I could accomplish these two basic tasks.
The problems started right away -- took me several hours to get the software installed, and I'm a systems consultant for a software company, and I'm used to installing far more complicated software than this.
Once the software was installed, and I was finally able to get the thing to work over the wireless connection, I was very pleased to see the option for scanning to pdf, which suited me perfectly.
However, the scanning function has both software and hardware issues. Firstly, pretty much every time my laptop goes to sleep, the connection to the printer drops, and i have to reboot both printer and laptop to get them to see each other again. The scanning options are set up from the computer, and these also disappear pretty much every day and have to be put back.
As if this wasn't bad enough, the basic scanning functions are completely unreliable. The HP software allows you to turn over the page and scan the other side, but this only works about 1 out of every 10 attempts -- mostly the software pops up an error saying that the printer is no longer connected as soon as you start to scan page 2. If by some miracle you manage to scan more than one page, there seems to be about a 50% chance that the device reports a paper jam, or simply fails to feed in the page, resulting in the scan job being cancelled.
The result of all of this is that having spent about 6 hours trying to scan a 6 page document (yes, thats colour scanning speed of 1 page per hour!!) and failing, this printer is going back to the shop.
If you care about anything other than basic printing, don't buy this printer.1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Very good for students
by ClaraG68 on March 7, 2009
Pros: It does everything you need for student life. Good value for money, with replacement ink reasonably cheap, compared to some. Wireless network easy to set up and works like a dream. Printing quality is superb in black and white text documents.
Cons: Slow printing speed - don't print out lecture notes just before you are due for class, because you'll be marked absent! Diagrams and charts look great in black and white, but text on a colour background looks a bit less sharp.
Summary: I would recommend this product purely for its multi functional capabilities AND its wireless function. It does everything but make tea, without having to be in the same room - ...
Summary: I would recommend this product purely for its multi functional capabilities AND its wireless function. It does everything but make tea, without having to be in the same room - a major plus if you are flat sharing. Its a very recent purchase for me so have yet to explore it deeply, for example, fiddling about with the settings and sizing. Its also only the second printer I have bought - my last one was a Canon and lasted 3 years, so perhaps I'm a bit of a newbie with multi functionals! Very easy to set up so long as you follow the instructions and go slowly - trying to install quickly makes it crash! A great all rounder.
Actually, having used it a few times, its quite rubbish. The paper jams constantly, and you have to stand by it while it prints to ensure that nothing bad happens! As I said before, printing is incredibly slow - even more so when you have to stand an watch and wait. Removing the paper jam is very fiddly, and today I somehow came away with not only torn paper, but a couple of screws as well! I'm taking mine back and going with another product.
Updated on Mar 9, 20091 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Very Good Printer, Great Wireless Feature
by thundertracks on January 4, 2009
Pros: Wireless Printing from our laptops without having to power on Desktop computer. Ease of setup.
Cons: Don't really have any issues with it.
Summary: Printer works great, wireless feature is really convenient, speed is good, Setup was extremely easy, time from out of the box and wirelessly printing was under an hour. Purchase price ...
Summary: Printer works great, wireless feature is really convenient, speed is good, Setup was extremely easy, time from out of the box and wirelessly printing was under an hour. Purchase price at CircuitCity was great. Purchased the HP 4680 and an extra black cartridge for only $108.00. Printer on sale for $99.99, and I had a $15.00 off coupon.
1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
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JUNK! Two of them quit within 13 months.
by speugnet on November 13, 2009
Pros: None that I found.
Cons: Very high cost of ink. 1st printer defective out of the box. Replacement quit 1 month after warantee expired. On-line trouble shooting web page frustrating. The on-line HP technician was slow & didn't know the product.
Summary: High cost of ink, Paper tray is flimsey, LCD screen too small and difficult to read, Buttons are confusing and NOT labeled well, On-line help is frustrating, I'd NEVER ...
Summary: High cost of ink, Paper tray is flimsey, LCD screen too small and difficult to read, Buttons are confusing and NOT labeled well, On-line help is frustrating, I'd NEVER buy another HP product!
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Great printer for home use.
by deeorbra on November 11, 2009
Pros: It is wireless, it has a feeder for documents, a scanner, a copier, and a fax if you need one.
Cons: It is slower than my HP 1315 all-in-one, but it wasn't wireless and the scanner quit (after five years :)), so for the money, I can deal with it. It is also larger.
Summary: My HP 1315 lacked a feeder (or a fax, but I don't use this feature), so getting these, plus wireless is a bonus for me. I don't have ...
Summary: My HP 1315 lacked a feeder (or a fax, but I don't use this feature), so getting these, plus wireless is a bonus for me. I don't have to hook up the wires. I can now print from anywhere in my house. I also got a goof deal on it, so I am SOLD!
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It really doesn't work
by bonesaz on November 5, 2009
Pros: it's pretty
Cons: pretty useless that is.
total waste of time. it can't find wireless (read the forums)
it can't scan with the lid open.
it can't copy with the lid open
so good luck copying a page of your book or your son's yearbookSummary: anytime I've tried to get something out of this POS it's cost me a night of pain. get something that works instead of this.
Summary: anytime I've tried to get something out of this POS it's cost me a night of pain. get something that works instead of this.
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BEWARE BUYING THIS PRINTER
by rgreenlee on October 26, 2009
Pros: Great features, great quality, great printer if it works.
Cons: Can take a long time to setup and can suffer from a phantom paper jam you can't clear even by turning power off/on or calling tech support etc.
Summary: My client went through six of these printers over several months trying to get one to stay working. They all ran into the phantom paper jam which could not be ...
Summary: My client went through six of these printers over several months trying to get one to stay working. They all ran into the phantom paper jam which could not be reset even with calls to tech support in which they'd have him power on/off and finally push buttons to reload the ROM etc. but nothing worked to clear the phantom jam. One after another they were all replaced only to not last very long. Finally, very reluctantly, he gave up and bought an Epson.
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cheap to buy, expensive to maintain
by dmman on October 12, 2009
Pros: nothing stands out. feature work like they should.
Cons: hard to set up wireless connection. SMALL INK CARTRIDGES- approx. 150 pages per cart. for me. CAN'T USE REFILL CARTRIDGES
Summary: This is from HP support :"Low ink warnings will always display with refilled print cartridges. The HP product does not know that the print cartridge has been refilled so the ...
Summary: This is from HP support :"Low ink warnings will always display with refilled print cartridges. The HP product does not know that the print cartridge has been refilled so the ink drop counters never get reset. The ink counters cannot be reset manually. This is one of the problems encountered when refilling print cartridges."
So why can other printers use refilled cartridges? In my opinion HP chooses to do it this way to FORCE YOU TO BUY THEIR EXPENSIVE CARTRIDGES.
Apparently the printer chip only keeps track of 2 print cartridges so if you want to spend money and buy 3 cartridges you can get around this. When you install the third one, it will remove the first one from memory, so when the 3rd one is empty the 1st one will be seen as new. I haven't tried this to verify if it works. I'd rather smash my printer with a hammer.
I will never buy another HP product again.
If someone is using refilled cartridges, please post to let me know that it may just be my machine. Thanks -
Ink Usage not optimal
by Kelsie5 on September 29, 2009
Pros: Overall, this has been an OK printer. Loading paper and the ink cartridges is easy and the other operations are pretty user-friendly.
Cons: The ink cartridge does not print 200 pages/cartridge as stated by the manufacturer. The paper handling is problematic. The paper jams easily and sometimes will pull in a page that it has already printed.
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Acceptable printer, ***** to use.
by prohobbyist on September 21, 2009
Pros: Prints fast, good scanner, lots of features.
Cons: Wifi is extremely hard to set up, signals take forever to reach printer.
Summary: After spending literally two days setting it up, I finally got the wifi feature working (the reason I bought this over other printers) and immediately it broke and said "printer ...
Summary: After spending literally two days setting it up, I finally got the wifi feature working (the reason I bought this over other printers) and immediately it broke and said "printer disconnected". I had to reinstall the software, and it still gives me trouble frequently, especially when I want to scan. I have to plug in the USB to scan. Also it gives me a drop down list of three printers for every document I want to print, and each is labelled the same. But if you pick the wrong one, it won't work. If you pick the right one there is a painful 15-30 second wait after you send the file before the printer blinks and begins to print.
Once you get it set up it is an alright printer - the quality is good on the highest settings and it spits out pages really fast.
Final thought - the software that comes with it is required, but if you just go through the easy install process it will fill your computer with tons of bloat-ware, which takes forever to remove. It also litters your desktop with icons for stuff you will never use.
Specifications
- Manufacturer: HP
- Part number: CB783A#ABA
- Description: Get professional results with this affordable, easy-to-use HP All-in-One. Watch productivity increase with print, scan, copy and fax capabilities in one device. Print high-quality color documents for less than lasers using HP Officejet inks.
General
- Fax Type Plain paper
- Printing Technology Ink-jet - Color
- Monthly Duty Cycle (max) 3000 impressions
- Width 17.1 in
- Depth 15.8 in
- Height 8.5 in
- Weight 13 lbs
- Localization English / United States
Memory
- Standard Memory 32 MB
- Max Supported Memory 32 MB
Copying
- Max Copying Speed up to 28 pages/min (mono) / up to 22 pages/min (color)
- Max Copying Resolution up to 600 x 1200 dpi (mono) / up to 4800 x 1200 dpi (color)
- Max Document Enlargement 400 %
- Max Document Reduction 25 %
- Maximum Copies 100
Printing
- Inkjet Technology HP Thermal Inkjet
- Max Printing Resolution up to 600 x 600 dpi (mono) / up to 4800 x 1200 dpi (color)
- Max Printing Speed up to 28 pages/min (mono) / up to 22 pages/min (color)
- Color 4-ink
- Printer Drivers / Emulations PCL 3
Scanning
- Optical Resolution 1200 x 2400 dpi
- Interpolated Resolution 19200 dpi
- Gray Scale Depth 8 bit
- Color Depth 48 bit
Fax Machine
- Max Transmission Speed 33.6 Kbps
- Fax Resolutions 300 x 300 dpi
Fax Machine Features
- Broadcast Transmission 48 stations
- Delayed Transmission Yes
- Remote Fax Retrieval (Polling) Yes
- Features Color faxing, Fax forwarding, Distinctive Ring Pattern Detection (DRPD)
Document & Media Handling
- Max Original Size Legal (8.5 in x 14 in)
- Original Type Sheets
- Max Copy Size Legal (8.5 in x 14 in)
- Supported Media Type Cards, Labels, Envelopes, Photo paper, Plain paper, Transparencies, Iron-on transfers
- Standard Media Capacity 100 sheets
- Output Trays Capacity 20 sheets
- Document & Media Handling Details Input tray - 100 sheets, Output tray - 20 sheets
- Speed Details Copying : up to 28 pages/min ( Letter A ) - B/W, Copying : up to 22 pages/min ( Letter A ) - Color, Printing : up to 28 pages/min ( Letter A ) - B/W draft, Printing : up to 22 pages/min ( Letter A ) - Color draft, Printing : up to 9 pages/min ( Letter A ) - B/W normal, Printing : up to 6.5 pages/min ( Letter A ) - Color normal, Printing : up to 2.5 pages/min ( Letter A ) - B/W best, Printing : up to 2.5 pages/min ( Letter A ) - Color best
Finishing Equipment
- Collator None
- Stacker None
- Stapler None
- Binder None
PC Connectivity
- PC Connection Availability Yes
- PC Connection Hi-Speed USB, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g
- Operating System Support MS Windows 2000, MS Windows Vista, Apple Mac OS X 10.5, Apple Mac OS X 10.3.9, Apple Mac OS X 10.4.x, MS Windows XP Home Edition, MS Windows XP Professional, MS Windows Vista (64-bit versions), MS Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Power
- Power AC 110/230 V ( 50/60 Hz )
- Power Consumption Operational 17 Watt
- Power Consumption Sleep 3 Watt
Miscellaneous
- Consumables Included 1 x Cartridge ( Yellow/cyan/magenta ), 1 x Cartridge ( Black )
- Microsoft Certifications Certified for Windows Vista
Environmental Standards
- EPA Energy Star Compliant Yes
Manufacturer Warranty
- Service & Support 1 year warranty
- Service & Support Details Limited warranty - 1 year
Environmental Parameters
- Min Operating Temperature 59 °F
- Max Operating Temperature 89.6 °F
- Humidity Range Operating 15 - 85%
Accessories
- HP 901 - print cartridge (33019325)4.99 - 21.42
- IRON ON T SHIRT TRANSFERS 10 SHT PK (357416)11.65 - 17.02
- HP 901XL - print cartridge (33019331)17.99 - 49.99
- HP Premium Plus Photo Paper - matte photo paper - 50 sheet(s) (30643498)23.82 - 36.52
- HP Tri-fold Brochure Paper - matte photo paper - 100 sheet(s) (30568555)18.69 - 28.93
Manufacturer info
- HP
- Manufacturer profile
- Browse HP products on Shopper.com
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- Website: http://www.hp.com
- Address:
3000 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304-1185
