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Looking for an affordable printer for your newly launched home office or small business? This HP Officejet 3830 can be the one for you, let’s find out in details if it’s the one for you.
Printers aren’t super expensive but if you buy a wrong one, you are setting yourself for huge wastage of time on back and forth communication with the seller.
it is better to do a little research before jumping into conclusions.
HP Officejet 3830 is the most popular consumer All-in-One inkjet printers. Also, this is the budget all-in-one inkjet printer making it even popular.
This one is probably the cheapest All-in-one printer you can get your hands on.
It has Wireless connectivity that allows you to print from any connected portable devices, computer or laptop which is just great. Moreover, it also copies, scans and faxes making it more efficient in the home office use.
- The main functions of this HP color...
- The power of your printer in the palm of...
- Ink delivered to your home: Get your...
- Print laser-quality documents and...
- Optional quiet mode helps keep noise to...
- Very Inexpensive
- Amazing Quality Graphics
- High Ink Costs
- No Two-Sided Printing
It was first seen in the market in the year 2015 and since then it has been regularly improved further every year.
The HP Officejet 3830 is compact in design and is just 8.5 inches by 17.2 inches and weighs only 12.4 pounds. It is almost same in size when compared to other petite business-oriented inkjets.
Weight should’t be a huge issue if you aren’t a frequent mover. However, i have seen some people complaining about printer weight when they move.
Because these companies charge you per pound basis and it can add up and end up costing you a lot of money to move it. In this case, it isn’t that heavy so you are all good even if you move frequently.
You already know I am not a big fan of all-in-one printers, but if you really need to copy, scan, and print at the same time. This is a great option.
The HP Officejet 3830 has the maximum monthly duty cycle of 1000 pages, which is way less than other Officejet printers, but a point to remember is that this a is budget variant of Officejet and is peanuts in price when compared to other Officejet printers.
If you want to save upfront cost on a printer, you must sacrifice some features. It goes without saying.
Before going into more details, let’s read my verdict about this model.
Verdict
Overall, I must say the HP Officejet 3830 is one of the best budgets and feature-rich printers in the market that comes at very affordable prices with its specific downsides.
It is feature-rich because of its all-in-one functions i.e, printing, scanning, faxing, and copying capabilities from one machine itself and have a bunch of other advanced features that all modern Wi-Fi enabled printers comes with.
The print output surprised me and the text is crisp and the graphics and photos turn out to be amazing. Combining all these, the two downsides of this printer isn’t much limiting or issue to buy this printer.
After doing some deep research, the upsides pretty much overweighs the downsides.
If you are concerned about speed you shouldn’t buy this model. For heavy use, I’d recommend HP officejet pro 8710
If you are looking for a heavy-duty printer and want to use it in office location or public places, I won’t recommend this model. It is better designed for home use.
This printer lacks the duplex feature i.e, two-sided printing including the slower printing speed and the high ink costs. However, apart from this, the printer is just amazing.
In short, the HP Officejet 3830 printer provides professional quality results and never-ending connectivity options like Wi-Fi and ethernet for the ease of their users.
1. Functions
The HP Officejet 3830 is an All-in-One inkjet printer which surprisingly performed well considering the price range of the printer. Although it doesn’t perform the similar characters rendered by a high-quality laser printer, it does a great job compared to its other inkjet siblings.
The Officejet 3830 has the scanning, faxing and printing features in one machine making it more efficient for the home office or small workgroup.
No wonder, HP 3830 is a great choice if you print infrequently or else the ink costs will build up eventually and it won’t be worth if you’re a heavy user.
If you are a frequent user and don’t want to spend a lot of money on ink. There are few models I reviewed last year with incredibly cheap ink cost.
The HP Officejet 3830 prints at a resolution of 1200×1200. The text printed with the HP Officejet 3830 is fairly on the good side. Text looked quite crisp and bold.
There was just a slight waviness at the middle of the characters but not necessarily can be seen easily and is only visible upon very close inspection.
The graphics and photos printed with this HP Officejet 3830 are definitely impressive and it delivers and makes the best use of being an Inkjet printer. The printer graphics were crisp and the colours were vibrant.
Also, the photos printed on standard paper with of fairly precise colour spectrum and amazing clarity.
This model is designed for pretty much all tech skills level users. However, it isn’t heavy duty so you are supposed to use it moderately.
It is easier to setup. There is no included USB cable, you will have to purchase it separately. This printer is also able to print from an SSD or USB device directly, so you can buy that too.
Coming to scan feature, the printer did the task pretty well. The optical scan resolution of the document scanned was 1200×1200 and it scanned the document neat enough and faster too.
However, the scan speed varied with different documents. The output for the scanned documents can be either black and white or colour.
The Officejet 3830 can be used to do the faxing as well. It has over 99-speed dials and up to 99-page memory which is impressive.
It also has manual fax and receives with automatic busy redial up to five times. It faxes at a speed of 4 seconds per page. However, the resolution is quite low. The resolution it can fax in is given below in the table below.
2. Printing Speed
“3 Pages Per Minute”
Well, this is where the HP Officejet 3830 lacks, the printing speed. It is of course, better than other siblings in many features but completely poor in the printing speed itself.
This is the budget printer and you almost chose it if you print occasionally and infrequently. Therefore, it won’t feel too limiting.
If you print shorter documents then it will be fast enough however, if you do long one then there will be a wait. It uses the drop-on-demand thermal inkjet printing and the speed, therefore, varies according to the complexity of the documents.
We did a little test to make the table below with the speed it can print short and long documents.
These speeds are good when you don’t print a lot. If you don’t want to give up on speed and cost is not what you are looking while buying the printer then I suggest you go for its other siblings which we reviewed previously. The HP Officejet Pro 8720 can be a good choice if you want amazing overall performance including the good printing speeds.
Overall, the HP 3830 printer speed is not limiting to us considering the price and other features it provides.
3. Connectivity
At WorkeryChamp, we found setting up the HP Officejet 3830 very easy and it is indeed made for all users in mind either having tech skills or not.
It is quite easy to set up, just connecting it to the Wi-Fi and it prints for you. Apart from this, it offers surprising and convenient features present on modern, Wi-Fi enabled printers, i.e, mobile printing, ability to scan directly via cloud storage services, and cloud printing.
You can also buy an additional USB cable to connect it with wire to your laptop or PC. Since the USB and SSD ports are given, you have the ability to print documents directly from a USB device or an SSD.
It’s still a hassle for many to get their first prints quickly, however, to avoid that we have written basic steps to follow which will help you get your first prints quickly.
Remove the printer from its packaging and also remove all the packaging and stickers. You will have to remove the exterior’s door and lift trays to access all the packaging and remove it. Connect the printer with the power cord to the printer and the other to the wall socket.
Push the power button to turn on the printer. Set the preferences and settings for date, time and language.
Open the ink access door on the printer and wait till the cartridge holder comes to halt and stop moving. Now remove the protective wrapping from the cartridges and the holder if any then install them according to the directions. Close the ink access door.
Take out the papers from the bundle and load paper into the paper tray.
Now, wait till your printer automatically performs printer alignment. If it didn’t, use the touch screen to start alignment.
Lastly, install printer driver for your device. Install it on your computer and follow the onscreen instructions to set it up as well. You can also install HP Smart Printing App for your iOS or Android mobile device to print wirelessly.
Once you install the printer software, it will guide you through on how to access the wireless network and set it up for the rest of your device apart from mobile. If you want to use the printer for faxing, you will need to connect your printer to a landline with the included cable.
The HP Officejet 3830 out of the box have everything included with it, you don’t need to buy any additional expensive accessories to start using it. The HP Officejet 3830 is priced aggressively and can be listed proudly in the best All-in-One printers for home office or home use that too under $100.
4. Display
The display on the HP Officejet 3830 is impressive as well. It responds to our touch faster than we ever thought of and yet performs function faster and gives out liquid-smooth experience.
The display is surrounded by few buttons which perform specific actions upon pressing.
- Type: Monochrome Touch Screen Display
- Display size: 2.2 Inches (55.88 mm) diagonally
- Colour or black and white: Black & White
The printer has a smaller-size 2.2-inch display screen with a touchscreen interface. It provides all the necessary functions of the printer to be carried out with the ease of your touch. The touchscreen seems to respond more quickly compared to other printers display.
5. Ink Cost – Rough Estimation:
The HP Officejet 3830 uses the different cartridges model for the different regions. However, in Northern America and Asia Pacific (Excluding China, India, and Indonesia), the cartridge model is HP 63 for black and Tri-color.
Ink for this model can be incredibly high because printer price is too low.
The ink can cost high if you’re printing documents frequently. If you print frequently, the ink costs will quickly add up.
As a general rule of thumb, the cheaper your printer is, the higher you end up paying for ink cost over the years so if you are low to moderate users, this printer is great but if you are heavy user, you can end up paying huge amount of money in ink cost over the years.
In that case, I’d recommend getting a printer with cheap ink. It might cost you some extra money upfront, you but you save money in the long term on ink.
The printer can print around 190 pages out of the standard HP 63 black cartridge and around 165 pages for the standard tri-color cartridge. However, for the XL version of the black cartridge, the page yield is 480 pages and for tri-color of XL version, it is around 330 pages.
The cost of the printing per page is estimated in the table below.
As you can see, the ink is costly for the HP 3830 and without the HP Instant Ink program or subscription it is way more expensive. If you opt for HP Instant Ink, then it can be less expensive and you never run out of the ink. If you print infrequently, then this printer can be a good investment.