Table of Contents
Previously on WorkeryChamp, we reviewed the HP Officejet Pro 8710 and here we got hands on to another improved sibling from the HP’s Pro 8700 printer family.
There are hundreds of HP models, you might be wondering why you should consider buying office jet pro8720? What makes it different?
This model is great for heavy usage. If you are considering buying this printer, keep reading. I am going to share my honest opinion about this model and help you make better buying decision.
It is designed to print 30,000 pages a month and for the usage of up to 5 members.
It weighs around 18.5 kg making it easier to move and more compact. This helps in moving the printer easily without any hassles. Even though, it is much heavier as compared to other printers in this range. Keep on reading this review, we’ll figure out why.
It comes built-in with mobile printing capabilities such as HP ePrint, Apple Air Print, and Wireless Direct Printing. Too many connectivity options can be overkill sometimes but this is a pretty expensive printer and there are no complaints about connectivity at all.
The printer is black and white in color and has good and premium looks. Moreover, it is an energy star certified printer and just consumes of about 35 watts of electricity at maximum. To break it down, it consumes only about 6.7 watts on standby.
This is pretty good if you want to save some extra bucks on electricity.
My Review of officejet pro 8720
It comes with Flatbed and ADF scanner type and it is an efficient printer in the market. It also has a front panel scan, copy, and fax option apart from a software scan as well.
This Officejet 8720 helps you speed through print jobs, using the super-fast two-sided printing.
The printer design is revolutionary and therefore delivers laser-like paper handling and superfast print speed.
- Main functions of this HP color inkjet...
- Mobile printing: print from anywhere...
- HP Print Forward Design: advanced paper...
- Spend up to 50% less per page compared...
- This all-in-one printer offers full...
- Excellent interface
- Good Graphics Quality
- Multiple Connectivity Options
- Affordable Ink
- High-speed printing for an inkjet
- Poor Text Quality
- Not compact
- It is pretty heavy
- A bit noisy
1. Functions
“All-in-one Printer”
The Officejet Pro 8720 is a practical and fast inkjet printer for your home office or small business. The function and reliability of this printer lie in its wireless copy, scan and fax.
You probably already know, I am not a big fan of all-one-printers but this one is a beast of it’s kind. it is designed to do printing, scanning, and photocopying at the same time without compromising on quality and speed.
It is a multifunctional inkjet printer, therefore, making it more reliable for your home office.
Some users have reported that the quality of PDF scans isn’t up to the mark. This is the issue with almost all printers with more than 1 functionality. You have which feature you want the most and make your decision based on that specific feature.
The printer has the functionality of sending scanned documents to email or print directly from your smartphone via NFC.
The double-sided printing is a most loved option for many, since it may save you paper in the long run.
You save money on the papers and also you won’t be reloading paper often since the Officejet Pro 8720 has a large 500-sheet main tray and an extra 250-sheet tray. If you want to save money on ink, check my printers with cheap ink article, it is a pretty good baseline for saving some serious money in the long term.
This is the reason I like a printer with a high capacity of paper sheets. if you are a heavy user, you don’t have to refill papers over and over again. 500 sheets in main tray is huge capacity.
Back in the days, I was using a printer in the passport office with just 100 sheet capacity, it was annoying to fill papers when you have 20 people waiting in line.
The printer capability is to print 30,000 pages per month for up to five users, making it a good choice for a high-volume workplace.
It isn’t just for office use, if you work at home and require a heavy-duty printing job, this one is great option for you. It seems a bit expensive but it is well worth the money.
Overall, the printer provides 3 combined functions Fax, Scan and Copy, however, fax capability has been removed from newer models although HP has seen fit to provide one for businesses that rely on this functionality.
For faxing, the printer takes around 4 seconds to process the document and send it at the best resolution of 200dpi which makes it easily readable for both sender and receiver.
The scanner on this printer is quite impressive on the other hand and takes up to A4 documents.
The scan resolution for the scanner has a maximum of 1200dpi. The scanned documents can be saved in a variety of formats, including cloud and email.
Also, the copier can resize the documents from 25% to 400% however anything bigger than A4 size will be lost.
Lastly, the print function is not as surprising but does the job effectively.
This printer is not a professional photo-quality printer but if you’re into printing color graphs and infographics, HP Officejet Pro 8720 is all you need.
Coming to the text printing, this printer is not very well as expected, however, it doesn’t print it terribly but the quality is low with noticeable inconsistencies in the printed text quality.
By low quality here refers to edges of the text were not clean or sharp enough but perfectly readable but hey, it prints the graphics very well.
Some users have reported that it can be a bit noisy and heat up pretty quickly. But this can be managed by having this printer in open space and my be use an air conditioner if you are in a hot place. If that is the case, you need AC anyways.
2. Printing Speed
“21 Pages Per Minute”
The HP Officejet Pro 8720 is a fast printer and we like the speed of this printer for both black and color.
The Officejet Pro 8720 can print black and white documents at 21.4 pages per minute (ppm). On the other hand with the test for color documents, the results were impressively fast too.
Printing speed is very very important thing to consider if you are using it in your office or any other commercial area because the number of costumers you can handle is pretty much dependent on how fast your printer prints.
Do your own math, how much costumers you get on average and how this speed can help you achieve that goal, in general.
The intensive and heavy graphics printing test, this printer printed around 8.6 pages per minute (ppm) which is considered great and the speed is above average.
Coming to the photocopy, the quality was very high and the 10-page single side copy taking just around 1 minute while single copies taking about 14 seconds.
The total same job in the color took 90 seconds, which is still considered a quick scan.
For your ease, we made a table with the printing speed test of this printer.
Yes, it’s not perfect but still generally a very good choice for Multi-Functional Printer. It also makes it more likely to be chosen by the people due to the reasonable ink costs discussed later in the post.
Apart from the printing speed, the scan performance we did was a bit less surprising since a 300 DPI (dots-per-inch) A4 size scan took nine seconds, and similarly for a scan of 600 dpi photo and we got a wait time of over 45 seconds.
The HP Officejet Pro 8720 also failed to scan at 1,200 dots-per-inch till we completed a preview of the document or photo first.
In an office environment, this printer isn’t that quiet but it does exactly what it should do, there are some complaints about some weird noises this printer makes but you can get used to it pretty easy it is not a big deal.
If you are not a fan of huge sounds then it might be not so good for you. It also requires a sturdy large table to keep it since it vibrates while doing its job making it loud enough too.
It is quite large in size compared to the rest of the printer in this segment.
Overall, the printing speed is amazing for this printer. It makes it a solid all-rounder printer and it can be your great small business or office printer.
3. Connectivity
“Wired/Wireless”
The Officejet Pro 8720 being all-in-one printer supports every connectivity options, which are Wireless, Ethernet, USB and NFC (Near Field Communication).
Talking about connectivity, the HP doesn’t ship the device with the printer USB cable to connect to your Laptop or PC through the given port.
Apart from that, it does support printing directly from a USB device but only limited to photos and not the PDFs or documents.
You don’t need to be signed into the company network to print – just connect straight to the USB, printer’s wifi network or connect NFC printing from your mobile device.
How To Connect
Step 1: Unboxing
Unbox the printer and remove the printer out of the box and all tape, stickers, and packaging material. Make sure to lift the scanner lid and remove the protective packaging as well.
Step 2: Connect The Printer To Electricity
Plugin the printer to the wall socket, and then turn on the printer. After it successfully turns on, then set your preferences. Connect your printer to your wireless network.
Step 3: Load Paper
Carefully remove the empty tray out of the printer, remove the packaging material if any and load the papers with the short edge to the front and print side downward. Now put the tray back into the printer.
Step 4: Install Ink Cartridges
There is a set of 4 individual cartridges which goes inside the printer. They come along with your printer, so unpack them and get ready to install them in your printer.
Open the ink cartridge access door, After opening, wait until the cartridge holder stops moving and comes to the rest. Now carefully, peel off the wrapping from the cartridge and then place them in the cartridge holder.
The printer starts an initialization process. It is normal for the printer to make noises during this process. After the process completes, the printer prints an alignment page.
Step 5: Software Installation
You can easily download the printer HP Software. To do that, you can either use the installation disc that came with the printer or download it easily from the internet online.
After downloading, install the software and your PC or Laptop should immediately identify and connect to the printer through your wireless network. The software is intuitive and clean.
That’s all. You can now be able to print your first document right away from your PC or a mobile device.
Moreover, the printer comes with HP Printer Assistant software gives you insights on the ink level reading for each cartridge, as well as easier access to some of the printer’s advanced features such print-quality, print-type and right-left binding.
You can also control these settings via the printer’s control panel, but more advanced settings can be found in the software itself and are much easier to handle on a computer rather than on the printer’s small touch screen which is just 4.3”.
4. Display
We have discussed its functions and connectivity above and all these modes and settings can be easily accessed through the 4.3” Colour Graphic Display (CGD) touchscreen fitted on the front panel.
The display is sharp enough with good resolution and the text on it can be viewed without any issues so far. The colour is crisp.
- Type: Colour Graphic Display (CGD) touchscreen
- Display size: 109.22 mm (4.3 inches) diagonal
- Colour or black and white: Color
The display is larger when compared to the rest of the printers in the segment. It makes it easier for the majority of the people to operate the printer.
5. Ink Cost – Rough Estimation:
The Officejet Pro 8720 comes with four individual cartridges of each colour and black. It uses the HP 952 and 952XL cartridge model.
The standard cartridge can print a lesser amount of pages compared to the XL version of the cartridge.
Depending on the demand of pages your home office prints, you can get the cartridge accordingly.
However, for your ease, we compiled how many pages each cartridge prints for you.
As you can see in the above table, you are now familiar with the pages the standard and XL cartridge can print for you.
Digging deeper into the cost, the standard black cartridge costs you 3.39 Cents/Page while the standard colour cartridge costs you 3.4 Cents/Page.
Coming to the XL Black Cartridge, it costs you 2.3 Cents/Page and the XL Colour Cartridge costs you 2.2 Cents/Page.
As you can see, the XL Cartridge is more valuable. However, depending on your requirement you can pick either one of them. If you don’t use printer much often then you don’t have to go with the XL Cartridge since the ink can go dry if not used for a longer duration.
6. Final verdict
Overall, the Officejet Pro 8720 is an amazing printer however, there is little downside to it as well. It cut shorts on secure print jobs and a bypass feed for special media and offers limited printing options from USB.
However, with plenty of other features, good-quality printing and photocopying, and excellent print speeds, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8720 is a solid all-rounder.
It is more than enough to meet the specified demands in your home office or small business. The main job this printer does well is handling the graphic intensive print outs and does a fair job with the colours.
This printer is inkjet and gives you great business documents and at-home printing, your essays, reports, and graphs come out pretty impressive and clear making it look professional documents.