HP Smart Tank 7602

Stop buying ink cartridges like a chump. The Smart Tank 7602 comes with three years of ink and prints fast enough to make you actually enjoy hitting Ctrl+P again.

Print speeds are genuinely impressive for an inkjet tank printer. You're looking at 15 pages per minute in black and 9 in color, and in practice it feels snappy. The automatic duplex printing is a standout feature that just works, saving paper without slowing things to a crawl. The one surprise that's less pleasant is the scanning speed. It's not broken, but it's noticeably slower than the printing side of things, which creates a weird imbalance when you're trying to digitize a stack of documents. Wi-Fi setup can also be a bit fussy out of the gate, though once it's connected it stays connected.

In the supertank printer world, the Smart Tank 7602 goes head-to-head with Epson's EcoTank lineup and Canon's MegaTank printers. The Epson ET-4850 is the most direct competitor and trades blows on print quality, but HP's mess-free refill system is genuinely better designed. You just plug the bottle in and let it drain, no squeezing, no spills. Canon's offerings are solid but tend to cost more upfront. For pure document printing volume and ease of use, the HP holds its own and then some. If you need photo-quality prints, look elsewhere, but for everything else this is the one to beat.

At a price that bounces between $330 and $470 depending on the vendor, this printer is a no-brainer for anyone who prints regularly. The included ink alone is worth a couple hundred bucks compared to what you'd spend on cartridges over the same period. If you can snag it at the lower end of that range, you're basically stealing it. Even at the higher end, the total cost of ownership over three years makes traditional cartridge printers look like a bad joke.

The HP Smart Tank 7602 is the printer you buy when you're done being nickel-and-dimed by tiny ink cartridges. This thing ships with enough ink in the box to print 8,000 color pages or 6,000 black pages, which HP claims is about three years' worth for a typical family. The real headline here is the cost per page, which is so low it's almost funny compared to traditional cartridge printers. Setup is mostly painless, print quality is solid for documents and graphics, and it's built to sit in your home office and just work without constant maintenance nagging.

If you need a printer primarily for high-quality photo prints, this isn't it. The color accuracy and resolution are fine for documents and graphics, but photo prints look average at best. Grab a dedicated photo printer or a higher-end Canon MegaTank if glossy 8x10s are your main output. Also, if you almost never print and just want something for the occasional boarding pass, a cheap monochrome laser printer will cost less upfront and never have dried-out ink issues.

Buy it. The HP Smart Tank 7602 is the printer most home offices and small businesses should own. The ink situation alone makes it worth the price of admission, and the print speed and duplexing seal the deal. It's not perfect, scanning is a bit slow and the smart features are nothing to write home about, but those are minor gripes against a machine that will save you hundreds of dollars over its lifetime. This is the printer you set up once and forget about until the ink finally runs dry two years later.