A step forward for HP's Envy printer line, the Photo 7855 All-in-One Printer ($199) has a wide range of connectivity features for a photo-centric all-in-one printer. Its speed and photo quality are both improved over the HP Envy 7640 e-All-in-One Printer. The HP Envy 7855 is a good choice for home users who wants to save money on photo printing and are willing to sign on to HP's subscription-based Instant Ink program to do so.

Style and Substance

A handsome printer, the The Envy 7855 is matte black with glossy-black highlights. It measures 7.6 by 17.9 by 19.8 inches (HWD) with trays extended, and weighs 17 pounds. A 3.5-inch color touch screen is set in the tilt-up front panel. Paper capacity is 125 sheets, plus a 15-sheet photo tray. It has an auto-duplexer for two-sided printing. The 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) allows you to scan, copy, or fax multipage documents up to legal size. Unlike many similarly priced inkjet all-in-ones, the 7855 can't automatically scan two-sided documents, although many photo-centric all-in-ones--including the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma TS8020 Wireless Inkjet All-in-One Printer--don't have an ADF at all.

The Envy 7855 can print, copy, fax, and scan, and it can print from or scan to a USB thumb drive or SD memory card. The printer supports HP's ePrint, which lets you e-mail files as attachments to a unique address that HP assigns to the printer, and the Envy will print out the e-mail and files, even if you're on the far side of the world.

Connectivity includes USB, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Ethernet, and the printer can also make a direct peer-to-peer connection with a compatible mobile device by either HP Wireless Direct or via Bluetooth. (You can set up the 7855 for wireless printing over a Bluetooth connection with the HP Smart app installed on your iOS or Android mobile device.) We ran our speed tests over an Ethernet connection with drivers installed on a PC running Windows 10 Professional.

The 7855 is the highest-end model of three recently introduced HP inkjet all-in-ones. The HP Envy Photo 7100 lists at $149, while the HP Envy Photo 6200 all-in-one lists at $129. The 7855 is the only one of the three to have a port for a USB thumb drive, Ethernet connectivity, an ADF, the ability to fax, and to support printing on legal-size paper.

Print Speed and Ink Options

In the text (Word) portion of our our business applications suite, we clocked the Envy 7855 at 12.7 pages per minute (ppm), which is reasonably close to its 15ppm rated speed for printing in black. It printed our full suite, which includes the Word document as well as more graphics-intensive files, at a 4.6ppm rate. We can't directly compare it with the previous-generation HP Envy 7640 ( at Amazon) , which we tested using our old protocol. Knowing that photocentric inkjets aren't generally known for their speed, however, the 7855 turned in a respectable performance. The Canon Pixma TS9020 Wireless Inkjet All-in-One Printer and the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma TS8020 turned in comparable scores, 12.9ppm on Word and a 4.2ppm overall score for the TS9020, and 11.4ppm on the Word part of our test and 4.4ppm overall for the TS8020. The Epson Expression Premium XP-640 Small-in-One Printer was slower, at 9.1ppm on the Word document and 3.2ppm for the entire suite.

The printer uses just two ink cartridges, one black and one multi-color (the other three standard ink colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow). Running costs based on HP's prices and yields for its high-capacity cartridges are 6 cents per monochrome page and 16 cents per color page, but that only holds if you were to buy the cartridges individually. Customers can reap considerable savings by enrolling in the HP Instant Ink Program. As a point of comparison, the Canon Pixma TS8020's running costs are considerably lower, at 4.1 cents for black pages and 12.7 cents for color pages. The Expression Photo XP-860's costs are also lower, 4 cents per monochrome page and 15.5 cents per color page. With Instant Ink, HP users can considerably undercut those color costs.

See How We Test Printers

The Instant Ink Program is a three-tiered plan that offers up to 50 pages per month for $2.99 a month, up to 100 pages per month for $4.99, and up to 300 pages per month for $9.99—and those rates hold even if you were to exclusively print in color. The printer detects when you're running low on ink and automatically orders more. Unused pages are rolled over, and additional pages can be had for 15 pages per dollar in the basic plan, 20 pages per dollar in the mid-level plan, and 25 pages per dollar in the 300-page plan. For the $9.99 Frequent Printing Plan, the cost per page (monochrome or color) is 3.3 cents. For the lowest-end plan, the costs rise to 6 cents per page, which is still a considerable savings for color printing over its cost for buying the ink without an Instant Ink subscription as well as over the color costs of the other printers mentioned here.

Best for Photos

Output quality was a mixed bag, with average text, graphics a tad below par, and slightly above-average photos. Text should be fine for any business use except for ones like desktop publishing applications that use very small fonts.

Graphics should be good enough for schoolwork or general business use, although I'd draw the line at formal reports or handouts going to people you need to impress. Many illustrations showed banding, a regular pattern of faint striations. Backgrounds weren't as dark as we'd like to see them.

Photo quality was a touch above par. Colors were well saturated, vivid, and punchy—although in a couple of prints they crossed the line into oversaturation, almost to the point of garishness. The 7855 did very well in preserving the black and avoiding a tint in our monochrome test photo. In a couple of prints, it could have done better in differentiating between subtle changes in shading. Most of our test prints were of a quality we'd expect from drugstore prints. The good black printing is in line with what HP told us is a new ink formulation generating better photo quality than usual for a printer with only two ink cartridges, though it fell short of the print quality that we saw in the recent Canon TS series like the Canon Pixma TS8020.

Understated and Improved

There was a time in which HP's Envy all-in-one printers, which were introduced in 2010, were all about style—at the expense of features and performance. The 7855 is still stylish, though in a tasteful, understated way. Its speed, feature set, and photo quality have improved since we last tested an Envy printer (the 7640). Its overall output quality falls short of the Canon TS9020 as well as the Editors' Choice Canon TS8020. It does have two features the two Canons lack, an ADF and fax capabilities, but the 7855 has barely half the paper capacity of those two models. Ultimately, as a photo all-in-one primarily for home use, its usefulness rests most heavily on its output quality, and there it falls short. The TS8020 retains our Editors' Choice crown, but the HP Envy Photo 7855 All-in-One Printer gains kudos as a step forward for the Envy line. If you need to scan multipage documents as well as print good photos, the 7855 is worth a close look.

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