HP Officejet 3830 Review

Quick Summary

Easy mobile printing: Start printing and get connected quickly with easy setup from your smartphone, tablet, or PC. Connect your smartphone or tablet directly to your printer? And easily print without accessing a network. Manage printing tasks and scan on the go with the free HP all-in-one printer remote mobile app. Affordable at-home printing: Full of value? Print up to twice as many pages with Original HP high-yield ink cartridges.

HP Officejet 3830 – Design and Features

Designed for the home and student markets, this printer includes a 35-sheet document feeder under a slightly curved top. Part of this flips open to reveal the scanner feed tray, which also includes a standard flatbed under a hinged cover.

The paper-and-white screen on a small tilting control panel offers touch control. They are quite sensitive, although not as light and positive as smartphones. It also offers scrolling and tap response.

Paper is fed from a slide-out and fold-out tray at the back, which holds a rather meagre 60 sheets and ends in a fold-out front tray with a slide-out and slide-out extension. Having to enter your paper size and type every time you add paper is quite annoying, but at least you don’t waste it by printing images of the wrong size.

HP Officejet 3830 – Cartridges and Connections

There is another hinged cover behind the front panel. When this happens, the dual cartridge holders slide into the middle carriage to facilitate cartridge replacement. It’s still a little awkward to slide in and slide the cartridges into place, but there are no awkward retention clips to lock in place.

There is one USB port on the back of the Officejet 3830, but I would recommend choosing wireless instead, as it allows you to connect almost any device to the printer. No NFC connectivity, but HP’s Android and iOS printing apps are easy to use and offer a good range of print control. The software includes HP Photo Creations and Update as well as a driver.

HP Officejet 3830 – print speed

The HP Officejet 8380 is rated at 8.5 ppm monochrome and 6 ppm colour using ISO numbers. In our tests, the maximum monochrome print speed was 7.0 ppm in the 5-page test, up to 9.0 ppm for the 20-page version. Rarely do we see test results that exceed the manufacturer’s requirements, so this is impressive.

However, our 5-page colour printing was not as fast at just 2.4 ppm. A colour copy from the flatbed took 32 seconds, and a 5-page monochrome copy from the ADF was completed in 1 minute 49 seconds. The 15 x 10cm photos took 1 minute 50 seconds from a PC and 2 minutes 19 seconds from an Android smartphone. These speeds are fair for an all-in-one budget like this one.

HP Officejet 3830 – print quality and costs

The text font is slightly thicker than on printers outside of the HP range, although some people may prefer this. The machine has a good draft mode, which saves ink, although it does not have time to print. Colour graphics on plain paper are dense and vibrant, while photographs in photographs are smooth and fairly accurate – albeit darker than the originals – by default.

Using the cheapest prices I could find for XL cartridges, running costs are 4.6p for monochrome and 9.7p for colour. They’re not particularly low, even for a machine at this price point, but if you use ink regularly enough and are willing to buy it on a subscription, HP Instant Ink can reduce that to 2.7p per page.

If you are printing a large number of photos in a set of documents, this is especially useful as you pay as much for a page with one line of text as you do for a full-colour A4 photo.