I’ve had some issues setting up HP printers recently, but I could join the HP Smart Tank 5105 to my network with no problems, and it didn’t give me any trouble at all during testing. Reasonable speeds, except on complex colour jobs.Happily, HP is backing the Smart Tank 5105 up with a three-year warranty, although this requires registration. For this reason, it’s vital to know that a refillable printer will last long enough for you to recoup your initial investment through ink savings. One significant caveat is that it can take home users some time to reach these kinds of volumes – many home printers won’t hit 6000 pages over their lifetime. The economies add up over time: use up the supplied ink and you’ll find that keeping it in ink costs only around 0.7p per colour page. This HP printer comes with roughly 6,000 pages worth of ink, so printing that much wouldn’t cost you any more than you paid for the 5105 itself. A £60 printer would likely cost around 9p a colour page to print, so if you bought it and printed 6000 pages over its lifetime you’d pay nearer £600. But it’s important to look at the total cost of ownership. You’d usually expect to pay around £60-70 for a printer with this specification, not £200. Like other ink tank printers, the Smart Tank 5105 certainly isn’t cheap. I used the HP Smart app to join it to my network, after which I finished my tests using the full PC software, available by searching for HP’s Easy Start app. It then seemed to press on with some housekeeping, but this didn’t get in the way of finishing the setup. While other ink tank printers spend a good 5-10 minutes on ink priming, I was surprised that this one was happily delivering a calibration page within moments. I had to nudge the head carrier slightly to get it into the proper place – if it’s not, the surrounding plastic will prevent you inserting the cartridges. It’s a one-off job, and no more complex than inserting cartridges into a standard HP printer. While the Epson and Canon systems include shaped plastic to prevent you offering a bottle to the wrong tank, this one doesn’t – it’s critically important to double-check you’re filling a tank with the right colour. The bottles won’t leak, but they may need a small wiggle to encourage the ink to start draining. The first job is to disgorge their contents into the tanks at the front of the printer. The 5105 arrives empty, with four large bottles of ink. Pressing them repeatedly increases the number of copies to be made. There’s a simple mono display, paired with dedicated black and colour, and ID copy buttons. The on-device controls are reasonably basic, too. Its scanner doesn’t have an automatic document feeder, so it’s not ideal if you’ll regularly make multi-page scans or copies. It’s a simple MFP, with an exposed paper feed at the rear and no fancy paper handling features. The HP 5105 sits towards the bottom of the brand’s growing Smart Tank range. By contrast, HP snuck out its first refillable printers at the end of 2019, and this is the first chance we’ve had to review one. Epson’s EcoTank printers have been around for nearly a decade, with Canon’s first MegaTank range arriving about five years ago. HP is a comparative newcomer when it comes to refillable ink tank printing. If you don’t run a particularly busy home office, it could have everything you need. Still, there’s Wi-Fi, so it’s easy to connect and share on your home network. It also doesn’t have duplex (double-sided) printing or scanning, or a particularly sophisticated paper tray. It can print, scan and copy, but it can’t send or receive faxes. The HP Smart Tank 5105 is a relatively basic multifunction printer (MFP), with refillable ink tanks.
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