HP Envy Photo 7855 All in One Photo Printer with Wireless Printing, Instant Ink Ready, Works with Alexa (K7R96A)

I am NOT a fan of HP products...particularly the printers! Having said that, I LOVE this printer. So, about three months ago, suddenly I needed a printer. I was out of ink for my old Canon printer, which I loved, but, it was so old, I had to order ink from Canon as i couldn't find it in the stores anymore. So, I went to a local office supply and wound up buying a HP Envy printer after a glowing endorsement by the computer/printer department manager. Good, ok? Well, new computer equipment requires SETUP, right. I am a senior citizen and tech savy to a point AND my daughter lives with me SOOOO someone in the house should be able to set this thing up, correct? Wrong! Neither one of us could get it set up to order the ink automatically and the HP Tech support was just as arcane. I couldn't use the printer. I eventually returned it and ordered the missing ink from Canon.Scroll forward, say a month. I am facing ordering ink from Canon yet again. And, I am thinking that I really don't want to keep this up. Don't get me wrong, I liked my Canon printer and ordering ink from then=m was not a problem. The initial promise of the printer ordering the ink for me was just too alluring. It would keep me from having to constantly monitor my ink on hand and order more when I was low. (Let me say here that my longterm problem with HP printers was, although the print quality was adequate, with only two ink cartridges, it seemed like I was always buying ink and the cartridges were expensive! Although my old Canon used 6 ink cartridges, the print quality was excellent, even on pictures. Believe it or not, I think the Canon ink was cheaper than HP the cartridges.)So, I really did like the HP Envy printer and I figured that the pricing on the auto order was going to be cheaper than buying the cartridges in the store ($75 apiece!) So, I wanted another printer but, this time, I will no longer us said office supple EVER AGAIN but I want a new printer. Well, Best Buy didn't carry this exact model so I thought, Amazon! I ordered one. It came in their usual fantastic delivery time. This time, I guess the stars aligned or something and we were able to get it set up and it is setting beside my computer at this moment. I LOVE IT!

I've had this printer for less than a month and ...so far so good! My configuration is: computer hardwired to the router; printer connected to router by Wi-Fi. Initial set up was easy. I used the printer WI-Fi wizard to connect printer to Wi-Fi. Initially the printer periodically lost the Wi-Fi connection and I used the Wi-Fi wizard to reestablish connection and it always seemed to loose the WI-FY connection when trying to download a software update. I manually entered the Wy-Fi password when reestablishing the connection and ran the HP "Print and Scan Doctor" that fixed a few problems. Not sure which of these fixed my Wy-Fi issues..but since then the Wi-Fi connection has been stable and the printer software update downloaded and installed successfully. The only of the issue I had was initially not being able to "scan to computer" The printer error message was that the computer needed additional software. However, that was not the case. I learned that you need to enable that scan function by clicking on the HP ENVY Printer assistant icon on your desktop, select "Scan" and then select "manage scan to computer" to activate this function.

TL;DR: Overall this is a solid printer. It's easy to set up, the print quality is good (nothing special, though), and the features it has available are plentiful and fairly user friendly. My only gripes are the photo paper tray gliding too freely, no rear paper guide, slow print speed and the low page prints yield of the tri-color cartridge.-----I've been using HP Photosmart printers at home for a fairly long time. So, when my C6280 gave out after 10 years I didn't really have any issues going with another HP. The big things that I needed was a printer that was connected to the home network so I could print from all the family devices since the C6280 was a shared printer, an auto document feeder for large scans/copies and had a dedicated photo paper tray to support small scale photo printing without having to reconfigure the main try. This printer does all of this and way more.This printer gets a big thumbs up for connectivity.My experience setting it up was really easy. Plugged it into the wall, went to the website from my phone and it was up and running in about 10-15 minutes. Connected all my other devices just as easily in about 3-5 minutes each. The only device I had an issue with was an older Lumia 2520 on Windows RT. This device could not run the installer from the website, which was no surprise to me, due to the ARM based OS. However, I got the printer to talk to the Lumia by installing a generic HP Photosmart PCL3 Class driver which was found on the device already. There are some really neat connected and cloud features that his printer has that I'm pretty excited to try out in the coming weeks.Print quality is pretty good for an at home printer. Some of the photos I've printed left a little to be desired in quality. Some of the darker photos looked a little magenta saturated, and some of the lighter ones looked a little washed out. But, I work in a print shop with equipment magnitudes more expensive, so I figure I'm probably being a little picky.The scans/copies I've made so far look pretty good, and getting them from what ever device you want is really easy using the HP app. I really like being able to plop a stack of papers into the ADF (like I can at work) and letting them go. Haven't had a jam yet.Input trays are located just under the output tray. There's a tray dedicated for photo paper (4x5, 4x6, and 5x7) just above the main tray for paper and envelopes up to legal size (8.5"x14"). Easy to get to and load. Loading papers larger than A4 requires you to drop down the front of the paper tray, which is done by releasing a lever. The first of two complaints here is that there is no rear guide for either tray. Paper just sits loosely in the tray. I've had the printer tell my a few times that paper wasn't loaded because the paper had shifted when I reset the tray. Especially in the photo paper tray. Which leads me to complaint number two, I sometimes have to go fishing for the photo paper tray. It glides easily, but so freely that it sometimes doesn't come out with the main tray. It's a minor annoyance.Print speed was about the same as the C6280 that I am replacing. To be honest, that's a little disappointing considering the difference in age of the two printers. It's by no means "too slow", but not really fast either. The big difference here for me was that the cure time of the ink on this machine was much better. Glossy photos are dry when they come off the machine. The C6280 had a tendency to leave some wet ink on glossy photos with heavy coverage.This printer even has fax capability. A bonus for sure, but one I probably will never use.Finally, I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of the tri-color cartridge since you have to replace it once you run out of one of the three colors HP managed to magically cram in that tiny cartridge since the yield seems fairly small (~165 sheets color for the regular, and ~415 for the XL). I'm finding that dedicated CMYK cartridges in smaller printers with the features this one has is becoming harder to find out side of more expensive printers like the Epson Ecotanks. HP, I'd love to see an ENVY Photo/Photosmart printer with separate color cartridges if it meant getting more prints per cartridge and good quality. But, considering how much we actually print in our house, it shouldn't be a huge deal for us. Time will tell.