HP OfficeJet Pro 9720e

Is the HP OfficeJet Pro 9720e worth buying?

Yes, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9720e is worth buying at £189.99 for a small office that needs wide-format colour pages and would rather have ink arrive by subscription, with 3 months of Instant Ink included once HP+ is activated. It takes A3 sheets through a 250-sheet input tray and prints black at 22 ppm, which is quick enough that a 50-page run clears the tray in a little over two minutes. Two hundred and seven owners rate it 3.8 so far, the largest feedback pool of any wide-format machine we rank.

The strength is the pair of speeds: 22 ppm in black and 18 ppm in colour. A mixed document set barely slows when the colour pages arrive, and that consistency is what keeps a deadline comfortable. The weakness is that same rating, 3.8 from 207 owners, the lowest in our A3 ranking. The buyers who like it like the throughput and the ink plan, so weigh the score against how much of your week is spent printing rather than copying.

What does 22 pages per minute really mean on this printer?

Twenty-two ppm is the black figure, and at £189.99 it works out at £8.64 for every page per minute of mono speed. Colour runs at 18 ppm, so the same sum on colour comes to £10.55 per page per minute. Put plainly, a 50-page A3 report is done in about two and a quarter minutes, and 50 colour pages take just under three.

Those speeds hold up in a real run because the paper path is generous: a 250-sheet main tray and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder mean you load once and walk away. Copying keeps pace with printing at 22 ppm black, and the maximum copy run is 100 pages. Print resolution is 600 x 600, and P3 support reaches a wider colour range than sRGB, which is what makes charts and proofs come out close to what you saw on screen.

What comes in the box and how does it fit on a desk?

The box contains the printer, four HP 937 setup cartridges in black, cyan, magenta and yellow, a power cord, a setup poster, a reference guide, a regulatory flyer and an ink caution flyer. Nothing else is needed to get the first page out. Automatic double-sided printing is built in, so a long document comes off the tray already duplexed without you feeding the stack back through.

It weighs 15.5 kg, so it is a two-hand lift and then a permanent spot rather than a machine you shuffle between shelves. One 250-sheet tray carries the paper, which keeps the body compact but means A3 and A4 stock are swapped rather than stacked side by side. Connections cover Ethernet through a single port, USB 2.0, Bluetooth and dual-band Wi-Fi that reconnects by itself after a drop, and the control panel is a touch display with drivers for three systems.

Where does the HP OfficeJet Pro 9720e fall down?

The scanner is sheetfed, so everything goes through the 35-sheet feeder and there is no glass platen to lay a book or a card on. Bound reports, passports, receipts and anything creased or fragile cannot be copied here, and a single awkward page has to be dealt with somewhere else. Copies also stop at 100 per run, which splits a big batch into several jobs.

Dynamic security is the other thing to settle before you order. The printer runs only on cartridges carrying a new or reused HP chip, and periodic firmware updates keep that rule enforced, so cheap third-party ink that worked in the past can simply stop. It is also a 15.5 kg machine with a single tray, so the desk has to be able to take the weight and you have to accept a swap whenever the paper size changes.

How does it compare with the Brother MFC-J5340DW and the Epson WorkForce WF-7840?

The Brother MFC-J5340DW costs £185.90, which is £4.09 less, and prints A3 at 28 ppm in black and colour, plus it brings 550 pages of ink in the box. Six pages a minute ahead in mono, and the colour gap is wider still at 28 against 18. Go for the Brother when raw throughput is the deciding factor; stay with the HP OfficeJet Pro 9720e for the 3 months of Instant Ink and the P3 colour range.

The Epson WorkForce WF-7840 costs £231.90, £41.91 more, and prints at 32 ppm while scanning, copying and faxing A3+ originals through a 50-sheet feeder and two paper trays. That is the upgrade when wide paper has to be digitised and not merely printed. If A3 only ever arrives as a file you created yourself, the HP keeps £41.91 in your pocket and still prints colour at 18 ppm.