HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 Review

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 ($249.99) is a hefty all-in-one inkjet that can handle printing, copying, and scanning documents up to 11 by 17 inches, and can fax letter-size documents as well. Similar in price, paper capacity, and maximum duty cycle to the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J5720DW ($1,299.99 at Amazon Canada) , the 7740 has good enough speed and output quality to replace that capable Brother printer as our current Editors' Choice.

Design and FeaturesThe 7740 ($1,299.99 at Amazon Canada) is large and heavy, measuring 15.1 by 23 by 18 inches (HWD) and weighing 42.9 pounds, so it's best kept on a table or bench of its own and moved by two people. Its standard paper capacity is 500 sheets of up to tabloid-size (11-by-17) paper, split between two 250-sheet trays. It has a maximum monthly duty cycle of 30,000 pages and a recommended monthly duty cycle of up to 1,500 sheets. It includes an auto-duplexer for two-sided printing.

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On top of the 7740 are a flatbed, which can scan paper up to legal size, and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that supports single-pass duplex scanning. The Brother MFC-J5720DW has a larger (50-sheet) ADF and a similar duplex scanner. It's easy to navigate by using the 7740's 2.6-inch color touch screen, which is surrounded by a touch-sensitive border. Below the display is a port for a USB thumb drive.

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The 7740 has a good selection of both wired and wireless printing choices. It includes USB for connecting to a computer and Ethernet for connecting to a wired LAN. (I tested it over an Ethernet connection, with its drivers installed on a computer running Windows 10 Professional.) It has built-in Wi-Fi, and supports HP wireless direct—HP's proprietary equivalent of Wi-Fi Direct. It is Apple AirPrint compatible, and supports printing from Google Cloud Print. It includes PCL drivers, but not PostScript.

Print SpeedI timed the 7740 in printing the text-only portion of our business applications suite at 23.6 pages per minute (ppm), among the fastest inkjets we've timed using our new test suite and regimen. It printed out our full test suite at a 9.7ppm clip.

Although we have no way of directly comparing these scores with those of printers tested with our old system, it's apparent that the 7740's speed scores are still very good in comparison. Both the new suite and the old, which we used to test the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J5720DW, have a four-page PowerPoint document and a four-page PDF document, although the documents are not the same. In each case, the 7740 printed out the documents in question in less than half the time it took the MFC-J5720 to print out documents of the same type and length.

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Output QualityOutput quality is a strong point for the 7740. In our testing, it showed above-average text for an inkjet, excellent graphics, and slightly above-par photos. Text should be good enough for any business use except those requiring tiny fonts, which isn't always the case with inkjets.

The one, admittedly minor, flaw in the graphics was some minor banding in a couple of backgrounds that most people would not be likely to even notice. The combination of text and graphics should be fine for PowerPoint handouts to distribute to clients or colleagues you are seeking to impress, formal reports, and basic marketing materials. Photo quality is a tad better than what I'd expect for drugstore prints.

Running CostsThe 7740 has running costs of 2.1 cents per monochrome page and 8.1 cents per color page based on HP's price and yield figures. These are good figures, though not exceptionally so. The Brother MFC-J5720DW has running costs of 1.7 and 7.6 cents per black and color page, respectively.

ConclusionThe HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 offers a potent combination of high speed, excellent output quality, generous paper capacity, a good range of connection choices, and most of all, the ability to print on paper up to tabloid size. If you print a lot, you might be able to save some money with the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J5720DW, as its running costs are slightly lower. But that printer doesn't come close to matching the output quality of the 7740, which succeeds the MFC-J5720DW as our Editors' Choice tabloid-size printer for up to medium duty in a home, small, or micro office.

4.0Editors' ChoiceSee It$999.89 at AmazonMSRP $249.99View More

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 all-in-one inkjet has a winning combination of low price, excellent output quality, and the ability to print, scan, and copy documents up to tabloid size (11 by 17).

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