Best Gadgets for the Home: Tech Awards 2022 Editor's Choice (Part 2)

Best Home Printer

Best Home Printer

These days, even for home printers, mere printing just isn’t enough.

For this year’s Home printer category, the printers chosen had to be able to meet the modern needs of a typical home user. We looked at All-In-One (AIO) printers able to print, copy, scan and allow app-based printing and other functionality. They would also have to be priced strategically at about S$400 to please homeowners without too much upfront cost. And while we would like to have ADF functionality, we're glad to give it up and relegate that to the SOHO printer category.

Since we only qualify models released in the last 12 months at the time of assessment and that printer brands don't refresh their models as often as they used to, we've managed to only qualify two brands in this segment. This year, they both happened to be ink-tank based printers that are becoming common as manufacturers are doing more to help reduce running costs.

For this category, new assessment areas include sizing up their footprint as space at home could be at a premium. Features and connectivity options were also important criteria. The useability of the app for home use was also key. These are in addition to the overall price of the printer, print speed, print quality, and cost of printing, which are all key ingredients of what people want out of a printer.

Nominees:

• Canon Pixma G670
• HP Smart Tank 720

And the winner is...

What we liked about the HP Smart Tank 720 was the speed, its Smart Tank technology, and the ease of setting it up. We had no problems connecting it to our test PC and the app itself had features for kids, families and adults.

We don't like the limited dual-line display that the HP Smart Tank 720 comes with. That's not to say it doesn’t do the job because it is functional and performs most tasks even though it isn’t a proper LCD screen. We’ve never seen the value of having just two lines of text and information scrolling across the display, especially in these days where managing things like network SSID, passwords, or even traversing options are a hassle. Sure, there are now apps to help alleviate these pain points, but sometimes, you just want to be sure things are right at the source.

As a smart tank printer, it uses HP ink bottles for printing. The bottles included with the printer can print 8,000 pages in black and 6,000 pages in colour. Replacement ink bottles cost S$14.80 for the high-yield black and each colour replacement. The high-yield black can print up to 6,000 pages, and the colour replacements can print 8,000 pages each.

It was the faster printer in our tests, and the quality of the prints didn’t disappoint as befitting an HP printer.

Our test results

The image quality was sharp and colours faithful with little bleeding or over-saturation, and the text was crisp and sharp.

In terms of print speed, the HP Smart Tank 720 was the fastest home printer. The Canon Pixma G670 was clearly slower in our tests, but that is because the Canon is more a home photo printer than a home AIO workhorse.

As for scanning, we only scanned a single test page as both printers lacked an ADF. The speed was what was expected for a single page where we needed to wait for the device to come out of sleep before starting. The scanned results were found to be crisp and clear.   

To sum up, the HP Smart Tank 720 churned out results as good as the Canon counterpart but bettered it in important areas like print speed and overall value. As we iterated earlier, while we didn't quite like its on-device display, the printer had dedicated button options for colour or black copies and to print multiple copies, though a proper sized touchscreen LCD makes work so much easier. Probably that's one reason why HP could keep the costs down, which worked to its favour in the end. It is the overall best in this comparison, had good value and thus our 2022 recommendation for a home printer.

*Note: Prices and ratings listed are accurate at the time of individual product evaluation.

For more information on how the nominees fared in detail and thus helping us pick our winner, check out the full reviews and articles listed in the References below.

References

• Canon Pixma G670 review coming soon
• HP Smart Tank 720 review coming soon