The HP Envy 4520 All-in-One Printer ($99.99) is designed for home use. You can see this in the lack of office-centric features, like an automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning. It's also apparent when you consider the way this inexpensive inkjet multifunction printer (MFP) handles various kinds of output, with relatively high quality for photos and graphics, but subpar quality for text in our tests.

One drawback for the 4520 ( at Amazon) is that it's not hard to find other MFPs that cost the same or less that can match it in the areas it handles well and convincingly beat it in other ways. In particular, the Brother MFC-J470DW ($179.00 at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice moderately priced inkjet MFP, ties the 4520 for photo and graphics quality and for photo speed, offers better text quality, and was more than three times as fast on our tests for business applications. The Brother model also offers some office-centric features that the 4520 lacks, notably an ADF and fax capability. Although both offer Wi-Fi, only the 4520 includes Wi-Fi Direct.

Basics

Basic MFP features for the 4520 are limited to printing, copying, and scanning. Paper handling is also limited, with a 100-sheet input tray and a built-in duplexer as a welcome extra. That's sufficient for most home use, but to switch between plain paper and photo paper, you have to swap out the paper in the tray every time. For scanning and copying, the flatbed can hold up to letter-size paper.

The printer doesn't offer Ethernet, but if you connect to your network via Wi-Fi, and assuming your network is connected to the Internet, you can use the 2.2-inch front-panel touch screen to print from an assortment of websites using HP's print apps, with crossword puzzles, Disney coloring book pages, and a 7-day menu planner being among the most popular, according to HP.

Mobile printing with a network connection includes printing through the cloud. In addition, you can print through a Wi-Fi access point on your network from iOS, Android, Windows, Google Chrome, Amazon Kindle, and Blackberry smartphones and tablets. If you connect to a single PC via USB cable instead, you won't be able to print through the cloud or use the Web apps, but you can still connect directly with Wi-Fi Direct to print from a mobile device, and you can print an assortment of templates stored in the printer itself. Choices include graph paper, music paper, and—ironically for an MFP that lacks a fax capability—fax cover sheets.

Setup

The 4520 measures 5 by 17.5 by 14.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 11 pounds 15 ounces, making it small enough to easily find room for and light enough for one person to move into place. For my tests, I connected it to a Windows Vista system via USB cable.

Physical setup is standard for an inkjet MFP. Installing the software is a little different than with most printers, but HP says it expects to make this approach standard for its new inkjets. The Start Here instructions tell you to go to the HP website where "HP will guide you through...your printer setup." However, as with the HP Envy 5540 All-in-One Printer ( at Amazon) ($, stars), the webpage is a general-installation page, rather than one that's specific for the printer, and when I tried searching for the 4520, the site couldn't find it. HP says this was only because the printer was not available when I tested it, and the website should have it by the time you read this. For my tests, I took the alternate route of installing from the distribution disc that comes with the printer.

Speed and Quality

The 4520's speed for business applications is disappointing at best. I clocked it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at a notably slow 1.4 pages per minute (ppm). The Brother MFC-J470DW, in contrast, came in at 4.9ppm. Even the Epson Expression Home XP-420 Small-in-One ($289.99 at Amazon) , whose speed I described as no more than acceptable for the price in my review, managed 2.6ppm.

The good news is that the 4520 does better relative to the competition for photos, averaging 1 minute 1 second for a 4 by 6. That's essentially tied with the Brother MFC-J470DW and more than a minute faster than the Epson XP-420

Output quality is a mixed bag. Text quality is a step below the range that includes most inkjet MFPs, making it notably subpar. As long as you rarely use fonts smaller than 8 points, however, it shouldn't be a problem.

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Graphics and photo quality are both much better relative to the competition. The graphics output falls at the low end of par, putting it at bottom of a tight range that includes the vast majority of inkjet MFPs. It's easily good enough for most casual home use, and most people would consider it good enough for PowerPoint presentations and the like. Photos are a match for typical drugstore prints, which makes them a match for most inkjet MFPs as well.

About HP Instant Ink

One last consideration that demands mention is running cost. As with the HP 5540, the 4520 can take advantage of HP's Instant Ink program, which works a little like a cell-phone plan. It lets you print some number of pages per month for a fixed fee, charges extra for additional pages, and limits the number of pages you can roll over if you don't use them.

If you sign up for one of the Instant Ink plans—at $2.99 to $9.99 per month—rather than buy cartridges as needed, HP claims that you can cut your running cost in half. However, that assumes that you print exactly the number of pages you pay for. Sign up for the $2.99 plan and print the 50 pages you're entitled to, and you've spent about 6 cents per page. Print two pages, and you've spent $1.50 per page.

You have the option to go off a plan and back on, or switch plans, at any time—if you're taking a vacation for example. But if you forget to opt out when you don't expect to print much, you'll still be paying the full plan price.

Complicating matters further, and making running cost comparisons to other printers almost impossible, is that pages under the Instant Ink program are different from pages that companies quote as cartridge yields. When HP, or any other company, says that a given cartridge will print, say, 100 pages, it's basing the yield on a specific image defined in an ISO/IEC specification. But when HP says that you can print 50 pages per month on the Instant Ink program, it's talking about literally 50 pages. Printing a single period on the page counts as a page. So does covering it edge to edge in ink, with two-sided pages counting as two. All this makes it hard to compare running costs with the Instant Ink plan to running costs without it. Keep that in mind, and consider the cost carefully before you sign on.

One of HP's selling points for Instant Ink is that the printer monitors ink levels and automatically orders more ink before you run out, so the new cartridges arrive before you need them. But if your printing needs fluctuate, so you go some time without printing and then print a lot over a day or two, you can easily run out of ink in one heavy-duty print day and still wind up out of ink.

One additional issue is that HP tries hard to get you sign up for Instant Ink both when you install the printer and every time you change ink cartridges, giving your reminders on the printer's front-panel LCD. If you don't sign up for one of the Instant Ink plans, the reminders on the LCD can become a repeating annoyance, although an admittedly minor one.

Conclusion

If you need a printer for your home office, as well as more general home use, or you simply want one with better text quality and faster print speed for business applications than the HP Envy 4520 All-in-One Printer delivers, consider the Brother MFC-J470DW. If you don't need office-centric features like an ADF, however, aren't concerned with text quality or print speed for documents, and can make good use of connecting using Wi-Fi Direct, or you find HP's Instant Ink program attractive for its promise of a relatively predictable running cost per month, the 4520 is a reasonable pick, though not a compelling one.

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Further Reading

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• 3D Printing Helps Recreate Voice of 3,000-Year-Old Mummy