HP ENVY 6165e  Printer Review

The HP ENVY 6165e is a disappointing choice for small office use. While it produces sharp enough documents, the print speed is slow, and the ink cartridges have really low page yields. If your office prints a lot, you'll deal with long wait times, very high ongoing costs, and constant maintenance. The 100-sheet input tray doesn't help either, since you'll be refilling it regularly with high-volume printing. The basic flatbed scanner produces excellent scans, but it's missing features like an automatic document feeder that many offices need.

If you want a printer you can set up and forget about, the HP ENVY 6165e is a bad choice. It's an inkjet, so the nozzles can clog over time. The cartridges are small and don't hold much ink, which drives up your cost-per-print if you print often. It crawls along at just eight pages per minute, and the low page yields mean you'll spend more on replacements and maintenance. That said, the cartridges include the printheads, so when clogging gets bad, you can fix it by swapping in a new cartridge. You can also buy high-yield cartridges, which last longer and help reduce the frequency of replacements.

The HP ENVY 6165e does an okay job with photo printing. You'll get good detail, and the printer captures small elements well. Bright colors come through nicely, but darker tones are a problem. The printer over-brightens everything, making images look punchy but washing out details where colors should contrast. Color accuracy isn't great either. For printing snapshots at home, it's perfectly fine, but don't expect professional-quality results. The real issue is how quickly you'll burn through ink. Page yields are low, so if you're printing photos regularly, you'll often need to swap cartridges and spend a lot on replacements. All the color ink is also in a single cartridge, so you'll need to swap it as soon as one of the colors runs out.

The HP ENVY 6165e delivers awful page yields. You'll get only about 140 black-and-white pages per cartridge, and even fewer in color, so you'll replace them often if you print regularly. You can buy high-yield cartridges, which help a bit and stretch your time between swaps. Even so, this isn't the printer to choose if you plan to print in large volumes.

The HP ENVY 6165e is slow. It maxes out at eight black-and-white pages or four color pages per minute for documents. At least it has automatic duplex printing, so you don't need to manually flip pages when printing double-sided.

The HP ENVY 6165e's document print quality is mediocre. The text comes out sharp with minimal artifacts, but everything looks a bit faint and grainy, which hurts overall clarity.

The HP ENVY 6165e's scanner produces excellent scans with clear details and neutral colors. That said, it's just a basic flatbed, so you won't get features like an automatic document feeder or duplex scanning.