HP PageWide Pro 447dw review: The best inkjet MFP for small offices

HP’s PageWide Pro 477dw is a multifunction peripheral (MFP) for a small office or workgroup. While its looks and specification suggest it’s a laser device, it’s actually an inkjet with a trick up its sleeve. In regular inkjet printing, the paper must be stepped through to allow the print heads time to traverse the page. Here, there’s a full-width print head, meaning that the paper doesn’t need to stop moving, thus making print times a lot quicker, with HP claiming up to 55 pages per minute (ppm) in black or colour.

Although it’s broadly laser-sized, the 477dw is almost attractive, particularly when it comes to the dark, right-hand panel that swoops over to form its 300-page output tray. Underneath there’s a covered shelf that’s ideal for storing a spare ream of paper, while at the top there’s a huge colour touchscreen and a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF).

This can capture both sides of an original document in a single pass, speeding up double-sided scanning, copying and faxing. You can load a ream of paper in the main tray and feed another 50 sheets from the multipurpose tray on the left, provided you’ve left enough room to get it open, of course.

^ The Printer Assist software brings the main admin and maintenance options together

Send a print job and there’s a bit of whirring before a bat-cave-like flap motors open, and pages start flying out at an improbable rate. I timed just seven seconds between starting our mono text test and the first page plopping into the output tray. The entire 25 pages completed in 43 seconds, a rate of 34.9ppm. Timed over 100 pages of text at the fastest ‘General Office’ setting, I measured 44.8ppm. While that’s a way short of HP’s claim, it’s faster than anything this side of a well-specified workgroup mono laser printer.

Photocopies were similarly quick, with a single A4 copy needing just 11 seconds in black or colour. A 10-page ADF copy was despatched in 34 seconds in black, or 44 seconds in colour. Timed over a wired Ethernet connection, the 477dw proved a remarkably quick scanner: it completed each of our 150, 300 and 600 dots per inch (dpi) tests in eight seconds or less, and only needed 27 seconds to capture a 6×4″ photo at 1,200dpi.

Normally when you buy an inkjet, there’s a trade off between speed and quality, but at its default ‘Professional’ setting, the 477dw delivers excellent prints. That said, I’d recommend you budget for high-quality papers, as colours were a little drab and there was a small degree of bleed through on our thin, cheap test stock.

HP has admittedly tweaked its TWAIN scan interface recently, adding an effective auto-exposure that helped produce good quality results, but I was still unhappy to see artefacts in 600 and 1,200dpi scans, as this suggests they have been sharpened. There’s no option to disable this, either.^ HP has improved its TWAIN scan interface lately, but I’m still not a fan

Still, the 477dw delivers high speed and great quality, and it also has low running costs, starting with a peak power consumption of just 58 watts. You can buy a 10,000-page black cartridge and 7,000-page colour cartridges, using which a page of text and graphics will work out at around 5p. With higher speeds, lower costs and comparable quality to laser rivals, the 477dw beats them at their own game. It’s a Best Buy.

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