HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 Printer Review

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740's build quality is excellent. Its body feels solid and sturdy and you can remove its power cord if necessary. You can easily remove paper jams from the rear compartment or the automatic document feeder. There's even a light in the cartridge panel for better visibility if you're working in a dark room. However, if you're printing off a lot of pages, the printer tends to shake a lot, which can cause the table it's on top of to rattle. Also, it needs to be on if you want to access the ink cartridges, and its scanner lid isn't able to extend to support larger items like books or magazines.

The HP 7740 is a pretty big and bulky printer. It takes up a lot of room no matter where you put it, and it's also very heavy.

The HP OfficeJet 7740 has typical maintenance tasks you can expect from an inkjet. If you experience decreased print quality, you can run the built-in printhead cleaning and printhead alignment tasks to help restore it to its original state. That said, we put our unit into storage where it went unused for a little more than a year and a half, and after putting it through some more tests, we found that the black printhead clogged. We weren't able to properly print even after running all the maintenance tasks and needed to purchase a new unit as a result. If you have the same unit and are experiencing rapidly deteriorating print quality, let us know in the comments below!

The printer's display also shows detailed videos explaining how to perform other maintenance tasks, like replacing the cartridges and clearing paper jams. The printer has two paper trays with a total capacity of 500 sheets, so you don't need to spend time fiddling with paper refills often. However, the output tray only holds 75 sheets, so you'll need to get your print jobs instead of leaving them there when they're done. Likewise, the printer yields many pages, so you don't need to frequently replace its cartridges. It's easy to access them, though, but the printer needs to be turned on. In the case of paper jams, all the sheet rollers are easily accessible through a panel in the back, and you can completely remove the input trays in case paper gets jammed in the back, near the input.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 has a good display screen. Similar to the HP OfficeJet Pro 9025, it has a responsive touchscreen that provides audible touch feedback. Four touch buttons surround the screen, and you can vertically tilt the display panel for better visibility. It's a little small though, which can be a bit more challenging to use for those with big fingers.

The HP 7740 printer has a great cartridge system, yielding lots of pages before you need to replace the cartridges. If you tend to print a lot, it's compatible with high-yield HP 952 XL CMYK cartridges, as well as the extra-high-yield HP 956 XL cartridge, which is only available in black.

The HP Pro 7740 has outstanding scanning features. You can easily save old family photos with the flatbed scanner, and you can also scan several documents at a time using the automatic document feeder (ADF). Additionally, its ADF can automatically duplex scan in a single pass, so it breezes through double-sided documents; however, it has a max resolution of 300 DPI. While its flatbed scanner is large enough to scan 11" x 17" documents, the ADF scanner can only scan a maximum of 8.5" x 14" for single- and double-sided documents. Note that while the manufacturer specs say that the maximum size for double sided documents is 8.27" x 11.69", we confirm that it can actually automatically scan double-sided legal-sized pages.

The HP 7740 has a default scan resolution of 300 DPI using both its flatbed scanner and automatic document feeder. It's more than enough for documents for work or school; however, if you want to capture very fine details, it's best to use the flatbed, which can go up to 1200 DPI.

• User Guide
• Power cord
• HP 952 ink cartridges:
• 1x black
• 1x magenta
• 1x cyan
• 1x yellow

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740's cost-per-print is amazingly low. Printing black-only and color documents is very affordable. Photos also have an exceptionally low cost-per-print. Unlike other HP OfficeJet Pro printers, this model isn't currently compatible for use with the HP Instant Ink subscription service.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 has decent printing speeds. It takes a little long to start printing after sitting idle for a while, and it's a bit slow to print black text documents, but it can still get out a long essay or report in a minute or two. It's also slow to print color documents like PowerPoint slides. However, it's very quick to print out a typical 4" x 6" photo. It can automatically print double-sided sheets up to legal size, but, unfortunately, it can't duplex print tabloid size. If you need a model that supports duplex printing for tabloid-size sheets and also prints black-only text documents much faster, consider the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7310.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 wide-format all-in-one printer has two adjustable front input trays that support most common paper formats. Tray 1 (top) supports paper from 3" x 5" to 11.7" x 17" size sheets, whereas Tray 2 (bottom) supports 8.5" x 11" to 11.7" x 17" size sheets.

The HP 7740 has a mediocre color gamut. The printer produces a dark zig-zag pattern rather than a bright, vibrant one, meaning it has trouble producing vibrant hues and tries to compensate by printing darker shades instead. The transition from white to color is too low in the blues, greens, and yellows, meaning it has trouble producing very light tints in those hues. Similarly, the transition from black to color goes too far up, so the printer can't properly produce very dark colors. Finally, colors transition smoothly into each other aside from the yellows, which are very poor quality. This issue is only present in smaller prints, though, so the printer produces better-quality transitions in larger formats; the same color gamut photo printed on 8.5" x 11" paper has significantly better-looking yellows.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 has decent color accuracy. It can print most colors fairly accurately, although it struggles most with blues and cyans. It's fine for casual photo prints, but if you're a professional seeking pinpoint color accuracy, it's better to look elsewhere.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 printer has a USB input at its front right, so you can print files directly from a USB flash drive.

The HP 7740 is compatible with the HP Smart mobile app. You can use it to print, scan, and copy directly from your mobile device. Additionally, you can even order ink and paper, as well as run maintenance tasks. However, Microsoft Office, TXT, and HTML formats are printable only on the iOS app.

The HP Office Jet Pro 7740 is fully compatible with all major desktop operating systems. You need to manually install drivers to print and scan on Windows, and you can also use the HP Smart desktop app to use all the printer's features. On macOS and Chrome OS, you don't need to manually install any drivers or software to print or scan; however, you can use the HP Smart app on Chrome OS, which has the same capabilities as the mobile app.