HP's Envy Pro 6452 All-in-One ($109.99) is an entry-level multifunction inkjet printer aimed at families and micro offices. Where most all-in-ones (AIOs) of its kind lose points for their high operating costs, in this case, subscribing to HP's Instant Ink service makes using this printer a relative bargain. This Envy sells for about $30 less than our current low-end Editors' Choice, the Brother MFC-J491DW; however, that printer's running costs are sky-high versus the 6452 paired with Instant Ink. This little Envy's low price and running costs make it solid for home offices, family rooms, and dorms. It's good for 200 to 300 pages a month—just enough to edge it into our slot for favorite starter AIO for homes and home offices.
An Enviable Footprint and Feature Set
Like the Envy Pro 6455 All-in-One reviewed in June, the 6452 prints well and packs a fine feature set for the price, though, predictably for its class, it's slow. You can find the former at store.hp.com, and the latter is available at Walmart.
In most ways, the Envy Pro 6452 (which can print, scan, copy, and fax) is comparable to the 6455. They both measure 6.8 by 17 by 14.2 inches (HWD) and weigh 13.6 pounds, about average in both footprint and heft for a beginner AIO. Both are part of a recent release in the new Envy Pro 6000 series (today's 6452, June's 6455, and a less robust Envy Pro 6055 to be reviewed here shortly).
While there are some slight differences among them, it's primarily the 64xx models' 35-page automatic document feeders that make them more flexible and a greater value. This is, for the record, a manual-duplexing ADF, rather than the auto-duplexing type that scans and copies two-sided multipage documents without user intervention.
Similar Products
Brother MFC-J491DW
Epson Expression Premium XP-7100 Small-in-One Printer
Brother MFC-J995DW INKvestment Tank All-in-One Printer
Canon Pixma TS6320 Wireless All-in-One
HP Envy Pro 6455 All-in-One
The 6452 has an interesting control panel, as shown in the image below...
You do get some feedback—for instance, when the printer is in various modes, such as copying, scanning, or printing—from status LEDs that light up the top of the input and output trays. (Purple, for example, is Setup mode.) But you'll mostly depend on your smartphone to control this printer.
Setup entails scanning a bar code with your handheld device's camera. Once that's done, all functions, including printing and copying, are executed from either your phone or tablet or a desktop or laptop PC with HP Smart App installed, which we'll look at in a bit.
Another common feature on family and home-based printers these days is smart home voice activation. Most HP, Canon, and Epson inkjet printers and AIOs are now operable via spoken commands. The Envy Pro 6452 supports Amazon Alexa and Google Home Assistant. However, HP's voice activation support no longer includes simple IFTTT (If This Then That) scripting, which would let you create voice commands for specific services such as Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri.
Paper handling consists of a single 80-sheet tray that can alternately hold up to 10 envelopes or 40 sheets of premium photo paper. The printer's maximum monthly duty cycle is 1,000 pages, with a suggested monthly volume of up to 100 prints.
Of the machines mentioned here so far, an 80-sheet capacity is the smallest, with the Envy 6455 and Brother MFC-J491DW coming next at 100 sheets. The 6455 has the same duty cycle as the 6452, while the Brother maxes out at 2,500 prints a month with a recommended volume of 1,000.
The Envy Pro's Connectivity, and HP's Smart App
Standard connectivity consists of Wi-Fi, USB, and Bluetooth 5.0. No matter which wireless or wired connection you connect to the hardware on, in most instances you communicate with the Envy Pro 6452 via HP Smart App. It's a cross-platform app that operates similarly on all computing devices—such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones—but also supports other useful options, such as scanning to or printing from cloud sites.
First, though, there are the standard connectivity interfaces, which include, as mentioned, USB and Wi-Fi, plus Wi-Fi Direct. The last is also controlled via Smart App, as is the ability to use your handheld's camera for scanning documents directly to the AIO or to a local drive or your favorite cloud site. On some other HP machines, Smart App also handles the optical character recognition (OCR) routines that allow you to scan text documents and then convert them to searchable PDF, Microsoft Word, or some other format that allows you to edit scanned text directly. But that feature isn't available with Envy AIOs.
The HP Smart App printer driver runs on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Depending on the HP printer you use, its functionality goes well beyond simply communicating between computing devices and printers, though. Smart App's Smart Tasks is a collection of customizable workflow presets that automate repetitive tasks, such as scanning to your favorite cloud site, scanning to email or local folders on a networked PC or server, and printing remotely. The Envy Pro also supports Apple AirPrint, Mopria, and HP ePrint (for printing emails and attachments).
Testing the Envy Pro 6452: No Hurry Here
A downside to entry-level home inkjets is that most, the Envy Pro 6452 included, are slow. HP rates this machine at 10 monochrome pages per minute (ppm) and 7ppm for color pages. Six seconds per page (or just under 10 seconds for a color print) may not sound slow, but trust me, when you're waiting for a several-page print job to finish, it is. (See how we test printers.)
To assess its speed (or lack thereof), I tested the Envy 6452 over USB from our standard Intel Core i5 testbed running Windows 10 Pro. It printed our 12-page Microsoft Word text document at an average speed of 11.2ppm, slightly faster than its 10ppm rating and tied with the Envy 6455. That was 2ppm slower than Brother's MFC-J491DW.
Next, I printed several full-color Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint business documents containing charts, graphs, and other business graphics and embedded photos. I combined those results with the Word document test to calculate a comprehensive score for printing our full suite of test materials. Here, the Envy 6452 managed a fairly sluggish 3.3ppm. To be fair, however, the two HP printers and the Brother are not really designed for printing the big, complex business documents that make up this portion of our tests.
They are, however, designed to print photos. The Envy churned out our colorful and highly detailed 4-by-6-inch test snapshots at an average time of 36 seconds apiece. That's a typical printing pace for its market segment.
Output Quality: Nothing to Complain About
Like the Envy Pro 6455 and other members of the family we've reviewed, the Envy Pro 6452 prints good-looking text and respectable graphics and photos—about what you'd expect from an entry-level inkjet AIO. The text I printed came out sharp and highly legible at most point sizes, down to about 6 points. The Excel charts and graphs, PowerPoint handouts, and Acrobat documents also looked good, except that dark gradients and fills weren't immaculate. I saw some streaking, but overall graphics output was A-OK.
As for photos in general, while HP has done an excellent job at tweaking its four-ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) machines to churn out good-looking photos (they come out even better if you use the company's premium photo papers), the competition in the consumer-grade printer market is stiff. Several entry-level, photo-optimized AIOs, including the Epson Expression Premium XP-7100 and the Canon Pixma TS6320, deploy five (sometimes six) inks. These additional colors provide a wider color gamut (range) and greater detail, producing more vibrant and accurately colored images.
This is not to say that the Envy's photos aren't better than acceptable, but they're not the best available in this class. A nice touch, though, is that this AIO prints borderless documents and photos up to 8.5 by 11 inches. Bordered photos, or images with a quarter-inch or so of white margin around them, seldom look as professionally finished as borderless prints.
Printing Costs: Instant Ink to the Rescue
Until recently, a downside to entry-level inkjet AIOs is that they cost a fortune to use on a per-page basis. If you choose the conventional method of purchasing ink cartridges as needed when they empty (or get close to it), printing monochrome pages on the Envy 6452 will cost you a whopping 10.3 cents each and color pages an even steeper 22.3 cents.
That's painfully high, even if it matches the 6455 model. The Brother MFC-J491DW's cost per page is 6.8 cents for monochrome and 16.8 cents for color. Brother also offers the MFC-J995DW INKvestment Tank All-in-One, which delivers black pages for just under a penny apiece and color pages for about 4.5 cents.
This brings us to HP's Instant Ink subscription program, where the Envy Pro 6452 itself keeps track of how many pages you print and orders cartridges from HP when it's time to buy new ones. Designed for low-volume users who print around 50 to 300 pages monthly, the program offers three service levels, with the 300-page plan (at $9.99 monthly) working out to a cost of 3.5 cents per page. The huge advantage here, though, is that that 3.5-cent cost applies to any page you print, be it a monochrome text page with very little ink coverage, or an 8.5-by-11-inch photo with 100 percent ink coverage.
And, to make Instant Ink even more attractive, HP at this writing was giving you the first two months of your subscription, or 600 pages, for free. Hence, if for the first year you max out your 300-page plan each month, your running costs will reduce to 2.8 cents per page.
Print Pics? You're in an Enviable Position
In the grand scheme of things, the Envy Pro 6452 isn't that impressive a machine. Its capacity and volume levels are bare minimum; it's slow; and you really shouldn't print more than a few hundred pages on it each month. But if a few hundred quality prints and copies are all you need, this Envy is ideal, and its ability to tap into HP’s Instant Ink ecosystem will save you time and money, especially if you'll use it to print lots of ink-drinking photos. That's enough to elevate the 6452 to our Editors' Choice for an entry-level home-office and family printer.
The HP Envy Pro 6452 All-in-One prints well and—if you sign up for HP's Instant Ink subscription program—inexpensively, making it a good value for families and home offices.
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