If you need a moderately priced inkjet multifunction printer (MFP) aimed more at office use than home use—for a home office, as a personal inkjet in a micro office, or for the dual role of home and home-office printer—the HP Officejet 5740 e-All-in-One ($149.99) can be an excellent fit. It doesn't offer quite enough to replace the Brother MFC-J870DW as our Editors' Choice in the category, but it delivers a little more than the Brother printer in some ways, and comes in a close second overall.
The 5740 is one of two surprisingly similar HP models, and definitively the better value of the two. According to HP's website, it's essentially identical to the HP Envy 5660 e-All-in-One with some additions, most notably an automatic document feeder (ADF), NFC, an Ethernet port, and the ability to fax. It also turned out to be faster in our tests, despite HP giving it a slower rating. The HP 5660 is targeted more for home use, but the 5740 can handle home printing tasks just as well. And with its additional features, it can do a lot better job in a home office.
Basics
Basic MFP features for the 5740 include printing and faxing from, as well as scanning to, a computer and working as a standalone copier and fax machine. In addition, it can both scan to and print from memory cards and USB memory keys and let you preview the images before printing on the front-panel 2.65-inch touch-screen LCD.Connection choices include USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. If you connect the printer to a network that's connected to the Internet, you can take advantage of its ability to print through the cloud, as well as use HP's print apps, which let you print from an assortment of websites by giving commands through the touch screen. If the network has a Wi-Fi access point, you can also connect through the access point to print from iOS, Android, Windows, Google Chrome, Kindle, and Blackberry smartphones and tablets.
If you choose to connect to a single PC via USB cable, rather than to a network, you won't be able to use the print apps or print through the cloud. However, the printer's Wi-Fi Direct support will still let you connect and print from a mobile device.
The printer also supports NFC Touch-to-Print, which is a relatively new variation of NFC, and not widely available on smartphones or tablets, which obviously limits its usefulness. According to HP, the only mobile device the printer will work with at this writing is the HP ElitePad 900. The feature may become more useful over the lifetime of the printer however. NFC Touch-to-Print is part of the standard from the Mopria Alliance, a group that includes HP, Canon, Samsung, Epson, and Xerox, among others.
The 5740's 125-sheet input tray is suitable for light-duty printing only. However, the printer also offers a duplexer (for two-sided printing) and a photo tray for up to 15 sheets of 4-by-6-inch photo paper. For scanning, you can use the letter-size flatbed or the 25-sheet ADF, which can handle up to legal-size paper.
Recommended by Our Editors
Setup
The 5740 weighs only 16 pounds 14 ounces and measures 7.6 by 17.9 by 16.1 inches (HWD), making it easy to move into place. For my tests, I used an Ethernet connection and installed the software on a system running Windows Vista. Setup is typical for an inkjet MFP, except that—as with other HP inkjets I've recently reviewed—the written instructions tell you to go online and download the driver from HP's website, even though you can simply run the installation program from the included disc if you prefer.Count this as a minor annoyance. Checking for a newer version of a driver is something the installation program should take care of automatically. Making you do it manually adds an unnecessary step. And because HP doesn't give you any way to tell whether the version online is newer than the one on the disc, you have to spend time downloading the online version whether you need it or not.
Speed and Output Quality
On our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) the 5740 came in at 3.2 pages per minute (ppm). That makes it faster than the HP 5660, which managed only 2.2ppm, but slower than the Brother MFC-J870DW, at 4.7ppm. It's also slower than the less expensive Brother MFC-J470DW, which I clocked at 4.9ppm. Photo speed is reasonably fast, averaging 53 seconds for a 4-by-6.The 5740's output quality, like its speed, is acceptable, but not much more than that. Text quality is good enough for most business purposes, as long as you're not printing something that needs to look fully professional, like a resumé, and don't have an unusual need for small fonts.
Graphics and photos are both at the low end of average for inkjet MFPs. For graphics, that translates to being easily good enough for any internal business need. Depending on how critical an eye you have, you may or may not consider it good enough for PowerPoint or the like. Photo quality is at the low end of what you would expect from an inkjet MFP or drug store prints.
The Brother MFC-J870DW's fast speed keeps it firmly in place as our preferred pick in this category. That said, however, the HP Officejet 5740 e-All-in-One is a strong contender. It delivers a similar level of output quality and a slightly higher paper capacity than the Brother printer, and adds HP's print apps, which you may or may not find more useful than the Brother model's Web-related features. In any case, the 5740 is certainly a reasonable alternative, and it can be an attractive choice.