HP Smart Tank 7001 All-in-One Wireless Color Printer

First let’s begin with the cost of this device. I was a willing participant in this experiment. The device certainly is aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I will give HP credit there. However when you start looking at the value offered by this device you may want to start looking at different options. The price point for this printer, after taxes, exceeds $400. I was willing to pay amount that for a reliable and well designed, tank-based printer. Here are some of the things that caused me to return this for a refund:

1) The scanner: The entire scanner led light source continuously blinks 24 hours a day, once per second. I thought this was a broken printer. The HP agent on the phone also thought it was a failed printer. It turns out someone at HP thought it was a BRILLIANT idea to have the scanner blink in perpetuity in order for it to detect when the platen was lifted so it could illuminate 3 to 4 buttons. The platen has a tiny, white 1/4 inch block, attached to it that the scanner uses to determine if the platen is up or down. In my mind it is one of the dumbest design decisions I have encountered. I may use the scanner once every 3 months. I would have to watch that silly scanner blink millions of times for absolutely no reason. From my seated position, I can see the scanner blinking even with the platen down through a gap in the front, especially with the room lights turned off. It’s a waste of scanner LED longevity and energy. A properly designed device would use a hall effect switch, a physical switch or a dedicated sensor for this function. HP decided it was a great idea to save a few pennies on a dedicated sensor for one of their more expensive home based printers.

2) The paper tray: I really wanted a paper tray with my printer. I did not want to deal with rear feeding “ski-slope” type paper sources. The tray is there but is clunky at best. There is no rear guide for the paper to rest against. It seems like paper can slide back & forth. There is clearly a line delineating the 8.5×11 position but there is no adjustable guide or block to ensure the paper cannot move. The tray does have proper side-guides though. I thought the tray was missing components. IT IS NOT. This is their design.

3) The control panel: It is minimalistic at best. For me it was not a deal breaker. I can live without the big fancy color touch screens but in retrospect when I see a printer at the $150 price point range with full duplex ADF’s and color screens it makes we wonder where my $400+ went. Let’s face it folks. There is no “new” mind bending technology here. It is the same old ink-jet technology we have been using for years with large bottles for an ink source.

4) The support: It takes a while to set the printer up on the network. It has no ethernet jack and it certainly has no control panel to enter WiFi credentials and such. You must jump through hoops connecting it via USB, creating a printer, connecting to the printer and setting up WiFi credentials, deleting the original printer and adding the newly discovered WiFi device. Once it is setup the rest is easy squeezy. However when I called HP about the blinking scanner issue the first thing they have you do is completely initialize the printer, losing all the work you have done setting up the printer the first time. I told the rep I just took the device out of the box and it was blinking all the time. After I initialized it and the problem persisted, the rep wanted me to send the unit to them so they could ship me a refurbished unit. I don’t know about most but if my printer is less than a day old I don’t want a refurbished unit taking its place. To make matters worse the HP agent did not really know the equipment. They just follow a talk track. At this price point I do not want this level of service. I had to do my own research and testing to find out why the scanner blinks. HP sending a refurbished unit would only leave me with the exact same problem and no way to return it for a refund. No one at HP.com would acknowledge or deny what was occurring with the scanner. The scanner did work as expected when commanded though. After the scan job was complete it would resume the “blinky” routine.

So that this does not appear to be an attempted assassination of this printer, here are some of the things I did like:

1) The tank system was easy to fill
2) The print heads were replaceable…good for keeping the printer in top working condition over the years
3) The simplistic look and color scheme of the printer. It looked very modern and blended well with my surroundings.
4) The print quality seemed good for the short time I had it and it had good print speed.
5) The driver and PC interface. I did not use the phone based installer because it required me to set up some cloud account which I was never going to use. I downloaded the actual PC-based enterprise installer and deployed it this way. The driver is well designed and the internal web interface of the printer makes a number of options available that would otherwise be impossible to display on the tiny black and white LCD screen.

HP does everything in their power to trick/force the user to connect to the internet via a mobile app to use their printer. 1. I don’t need my phone or the internet to use a printer. They actually LOCK out basic features like printer photos with a border IF YOU DON’T USE THEIR HP SMART MOBILE APP. That’s s bunch of bull poop. WAKE UP CORP AMERICAN. Not everything needs to have a list of all my contacts, who I text and to notify facebook I printed off a recipe. JFC drop it with the big brother crap. I literally smashed the printer and trashed it BECAUSE it was far from plug and play. Why does HP need my Microsoft account to print? Why does it want access to my contact on my phone to print?

Overall, this is a high quality printer with the unique quality of using low cost bottled ink. Maybe a bit more expensive than most of us would like, but it does print very well, including pictures.

Best features…
1. Bottled ink – low cost and very easy to pour into printer tanks.
2. Relatively fast printing, but it does take about 10 seconds to get “ready to print”
3. Nice looking compact unit
4. Excellent print quality, including pictures when printed on photo paper
5. Feeds paper flawlessly
6. Wireless network setup was straightforward, with no dropped connections during the month I’ve had it
7. Excellent quality scans, but somewhat slow. Mine does not have a feeder for the scanner.
8. Two sided printing works as advertised, and can be turned off if you wish to print single side only
9. Print heads are replaceable – there are two (black and three color)

Not so good….
1. As I said before, it is a little pricey for a printer in it’s class, but ink cost savings should make up for it
2. Somewhat slow if you’re printing a single page – usually about 15-20 seconds.
3. Paper tray is made of flimsy plastic. Could be a future problem because you have to pull the tray out every time you want to change the paper. You must handle it carefully, or I think it might break/crack.

Also, on another review, the flashing of the scanner led strip light was mentioned as bothersome. The strip does indeed flash continuously, but I can’t see it at all with the lid closed – even in complete darkness. Either the other reviewer’s unit was defective in some way, or HP has fixed the problem.

Remember typewriters, carburetors, “cable TV”, waterbeds, and AOL? The old fashioned cartridge style inkjet printer is now among their number.
I did an obsessive amount of research before I settled on the HP Smart Tank 7001. And going through all of the reviews for all the different brands of this style of printer left me more confused than before I started.
So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I went with HP — the brand of printer that I’ve had the least amount of trouble with.
One reason I prefer HP inkjet printers is that in the price range we’re talking about, these printers, hands down, have the best print quality out there. Period. That characteristic is maintained in this printer.

Now to the point: I have to do lots of document printing (I’ll cover color print quality below) and when I finally ran out of one bottle of black ink XP, I had printed the equivalent of four and three quarter reams of paper.

What about color, you ask?
I hesitate to put it in the same league with dedicated photo printers — but I’m not jerking your chain here when I tell you that on high quality photo papers or even the high grade plain papers, the quality is as good or a bit better than I’ve ever seen in a low cost home or small office printer.

You’ll be surprisingly and uncharacteristically pleased with this printer; and welcome to the new age of printing!

WARNING: this review is honest but it is not favorable. If you skip to its end, you’ll find the good point(s?) I bring up.

Before I discuss the printer, here is the background. I’ve been a professional computer geek (sys admin, as well as serious coder and architect) for over 30 years and happily used HP printers for almost all of that. Over the years I have actually spent my own, non-tax-deductible$$$ to buy and use either 5 or 6 HP Printers (my first was an LJ 4 back in 1993 and it ran beautifully until it finally died in 2015 .. and a usable lifespan of anywhere near 22 for years like a device like that is unusually good. In those 22 years I printed just under 100,000 pages and I was so satisfied that I immediately bought an HP 501DNe to replace it). I’ve also bought and used 5 different HP inkjet printers in that same time span, and the only problems I had with all but one of them had to do with the scandalous price of ink cartridges. (the other one was a lemon, and I have reviewed elsewhere on Amazon).

So I really like HP printers and after the first LJ4, I have bought them without hesitation. And I have had problems only with the last one (a 9018e which I suspect got dropped in shipping before I ever got its – and I won’ let its behavior influence my feelings ont he subjects).

So it was no surprise that I received an HP Smart Tank 7001 to replace the last inkjet (before consigning it to the scrap heap.)

It WAS a major surprise when the printer arrived: my wife had been looking at the printers I was considering and bought it for me as a “surprise” present. (I only wish she’d told me … or at least not used my card). [more on that later…]

Fortunately for me, a friend bought the same printer a few days before I did, and as I am the person which most of my friends believe can make *any* computer product or peripheral work flawlessly (they’re wrong, but they still think that). So when my friend, call him “Dave” called me and asked if I could come over to see why he couldn’t get his printer to work – and offered pizza as a reward – I went over on a Saturday morning to see what was the problem. Luckily I took my toolbox and a small multiple “gadgets” with me, and when I got to Dave’s house, he even met me in the driveway in case I needed help getting everything inside his house.

I will leave out the lurid details, but he had two problems. FIrst his phone had a horrible time connecting with the printer (first warning) second while we were doing the setup the Wi-Fi connection dropped over and over (hmmm.) That was suspicious since hs phone can talk to his computer (on the second floor of Dave’s house where his computer equipment lives) without dropping (distance about 40 feet through floors and walls). However even though the 7001 was only about 6 feet from his computer, it dropped many times (I lost count at 23) while I trying to hjelp him ((second warning).

We finally got it working and changed over to a USB interface. Sadly since the wi-fi in this printer is unreliable, he won’t be able to share the printer with his wife and daughters, and he was not a happy camper about that (I know that long USB cables are available, but they wanted to us Wi-Fi so that they could be anywhere int he house and print.

While I was working on Dave’s printer installation I had time to inspect the printer physically and I was VERY disappointed in what HP had done. I think someone else reviewed the printer and mentioned the problems with the paper tray. HP went from a good design (which might reasonably cost about a dollar per unit over what the cheaper and less reliable tray they opted for. Also Dave had often used the built-ocr conversion his previous HP inkjet printer. That’s because one of his daughters is “visually challenged” or as she likes to put it, “… as the proverbial bat.”

Overall this printer simply feels “cheaper” and less sturdy than any of the HP printers I have owned, and that is a sad situation. I suppose the real problem is the bean-counters got rid of the engineers and the new guys just couldn’t match up to the standards which their predecessors had used to make HP the most reliable printers that I’ve ever used.

As I said this printer is a lightweight – and doing away with a direct ethernet conneciton ruined it for me as well. (Over the yjears I’ve used PC’s, Sun and HP workstations, and first Unix (SVR4) and noe Linux computers with my HP printers, and they were always quite agnostic about what OSes were connect to them. I don’t know whjether these new models will still do that and I had no way to find out.

I also WILL not have a way to find out any time in the foreseeable future. After spending almost 18 hours with that printer (over 2 days), and after feeling how flimsey and “cheap” the printer felt (and hearing one set of strange noises the first two times (only the first two) the printer was turned on and went through its “boot up sequence” I returned it without ever opening it.

I will buy another printer from Amazon in the near future (my friend got his at a large chain-store and saved about 40 cents somehow) and it may well be another HP.

HOWEVER before I buy it I will find a friend who had that particular model and go see how he/she likes or dislikes it, and I will get to see how well it performs … all before I lay down my own cash (OK, credit card) to buy it for my self.

Based on my expeience with Dave’s 7001, I cannot recommend this printer to anyone who wants a reliable and easy-to-set-up printer. The advantage of being cartridge-free notwithstanding (even at a discount cartridge prices are obscene IMHO) , what good is a cheaply made, unreliable, finicky printer to the end user.

If HP is planning to build the the future of their “small home office” line of printers on something like this, it is a sad state of affairs. They cannot count on users’ brand loyalty to keep a line of reduced-feature printers which also have reduced ability to communicate in first place when those users have to replace their older (but probably still working very well) printers.

And FWIW I hate this review. The only good thing I have to say about this printer is that:
a) tank-type ink-jet printers (or all-in-one’s) are cheaper to operate than their cartridge-type
“relatives.” and
b) The printer’s USB interface seems to work very well.

Overall – I am happy with this printer. It packs a lot of power in such a small box. Great stuff – Continues: 1- No ink cartridges, but tanks instead of the colors. I currently have another printer and this is an upgrade when it comes to color utilization and value for money. 2- Filling up the cartridges was a breeze, there was no spillage, and loved the sound it made while filling up. 3- It comes with everything included, like the manual, but I preferred downloading the app and following the prompts on my phone. It even let me send links to my other devices to get the app installed. This was super helpful. 4- The whole set-up process is very well thought out and designed for the best user onboarding experience. The best thing was about the flawless sync between the app and the printer. It guided me through the whole process and kept giving me prompts and the printer was able to successfully sense the completed step and communicated with the app to inform me. 5- I read about issues regarding wi-fi connectivity, which is critical to me and was a make-or-break deal. I was surprised at how quickly it connected with my wifi and the connection through the app was seamless. The improvement areas: 1- For a $400 printer, this is very basic and bare-bones. I can get a competitor product with more bells and whistles. 2- The LCD screen is such a turndown. They could’ve done better by adding a color LCD with the ability to do many tasks. In summary, it is still a very nice printer and can print a lot of pages for you, but if you are looking for a high-tech product with a UI, this is not for you. I will be using this for my car dealership and there, I need speed and cost-effectiveness, and this printer hits a bullseye there.

I wanted to contact hp before writing this review. However, they require you to call and wait on hold for help. I am a graphic designer and I loved the idea of using refillable ink tanks. My issue is when I just the ink jet photo paper it smears. There has been many nights of me working with black fingertip because of smeared ink. When I first noticed it was doing this I would give it about a hour to dry and still to no avail. Still smeared… it’s really hard to work using this printer and not very efficient due to having to wait for ink to dry.

EDIT:
I took away one star because the HP Smart App is useless. The limited paper settings require trial and error to get the settings right for different media. Over the holidays, I made ornaments and keepsakes for family and friends. I wasted a lot of sticker paper, labels, and photo paper. When I finally figured out which settings to use with what media, it was a breeze. Still love the printer, just hate the software.

I purchased this printer (HP Smart Tank 7001) in April, 2022. The setup could be simpler, but I got through it. I have it on my WI-Fi network and can print from any computer in my house and from my phone. I did some adjusting and worked with the settings when I first started using this printer. When I had my settings the way I wanted, the prints I now get are fantastic. Before tweaking any of the settings, the prints were very good, but I’m picky. I have used regular copy paper, different weight HP papers, card stock, photo paper, sticker paper and printable vinyl. I use the recommended settings and the prints come out great. Unless the app that measures the ink is off, I still have a lot of ink… and I have printed a lot of pages. Maybe I got lucky, but this is the best printer I have ever purchased. It was also the most expensive inkjet printer I have ever purchased. To me it is worth it. So far, I have not had any trouble and hopefully I will not. I will try to update this review again in 6 months or so and let you know how it is going. For now, happy with my purchase.

Initial impressions:

Visually, the HP Smart Tank 7001 All-in-One printer is one of the most plain and unassuming printers I have ever owned. Different shades of crème and grey an HP logo an interesting appliance does not make. The LCD is small without touch capability. There is a power button, two-sided ID card scanner button, color copier button, monochrome copy button, Wi-Fi toggle button, printer information button, down arrow resume button, and an X button that cancels whatever function the printer is executing. The paper tray accommodates 100 sheets of paper. The paper tray will also accommodate everything from 4×6 to 8.5×14. Finally, the high-capacity ink tanks have slightly transparent windows that allow you to check the ink levels.

The 7001 was designed to be a fast, high volume office printer. Who cares what it looks like just as long as it does the job it was intended to do? And it does its job well.

Setup:

The reference guide will walk you through the initial printer setup.
Setup took me about 30 minutes from start to finish minus the time it took me to unpack. Setup includes filling each ink tank using the included bottles of HP branded ink, priming the system, installing the black and color print heads, aligning the printer, loading HP Smart, and setting up Wi-Fi. There is no RJ-45 jack to hardwire the 7001 to your network. There is a USB A port on the back so you can directly connect the printer to your workstation.

Printer calibration is the easiest calibration of any printer ever! I would kiss the engineering who put this together if I could. Typical calibration is printing out pages of color boxes, lines, and text that you is visually inspected and then reported back to a software driven calibration wizard. Some calibration prints are so small that the only way you can work with them is using a high-powered magnifying glass. HP, in its wisdom, chose to let the high-resolution build in scanner do that work for you. The printer printed a calibration page, I placed it on the scanner, pressed a button, and presto-chango the printer is magically calibrated! Thank the heavens and thank you HP. I cannot express enough gratitude for this feature.

Part of setup is installing HP Smart. HP Smart includes your printer drivers, cloud services, and supply store.

The 7001 is feature packed, integrates with a home or office network with little effort, and is integrated to HP Cloud platform through your HP Smart or HP Passport account. There is a lot going on here for such a simple and plain looking printer.

Printing:

Print quality is dependent on your content. Text prints, color or black and white, are crisp and easy to read. I did not notice any artifacts around the letters. Time to first print was just a few seconds. Not the fastest I have seen but still fast enough. Copies of text documents, bills, invoices, and marketing material with about 25% ink coverage are also very crisp and clean. Though, the color of the copy may not 100% match the original. Business documents with embedded graphics such as images, graphs, and charts were also reproduced with no issues. Excel spreadsheets also looked great. Essentially, if this printer is purely for school, general office work, or high-capacity printing then the 7001 should be on your short list.

I ran into some issues copying high gloss images with high color saturation. In my case, I copied the cover of Eaglemoss’ Battlestar Galactica Shipyards book. For some reason, this gives all printers a hard time. I copied the book cover in both color and monochrome. I got a lot of vertical and horizontal scan lines. The color saturation was good, but color reproduction was inaccurate. Crimson turn to orange and blacks turned to shades of grey.

As a second and third test I scanned the book covers for Battletech Total Warfare and a glossy from inside the book. Again, color saturation was good. But, unlike my last test, there were no printer lines or distortions in the copy. In the end, you may need to experiment with what works and what does not.

Scanning:

Scanning is clean and accurate. I had no issues capturing a perfect reproduction of my subject. The scan cover only opens and closes. The hinges will not expand to accommodate something tall like a book. The cover needs to remain in the vertical open position when scanning large objects. The scanner light also blinks every few seconds when the scanner cover is open. I do not know why.
If you frequently scan multi-page documents, then you may want to upgrade to the 7301 that comes with the automatic document scanner. If your scanning needs are modest and typically limited to a single document, ID card, or other single use scenarios then you will find this scanner to be sharp, accurate, and adequate. There is also a feature in HP Smart that purports to remove scratches and other imperfections in your scanned document. I have not had the opportunity to try this feature yet so I cannot report on its quality.
Finally, I cannot scan an image directly to a computer from the HP Smart Tank 7001 interface. I find this disappointing but it is not a deal breaker for my uses.

Copy:

Coping single pages is easy. Place the page on the scanner, press either the color or monochrome button, and then the 7001 will print out a copy. Press either button multiple times and the printer will copy the image as many times as you pressed the button. If you need to cancel the job then press the X button and the printer will spit out the unfinished page and cancel the job.

Color accuracy is not 100%. This is most noticeable with deep reds such as crimson or deep blues like ultramarine blue. For example, crimson red is more orange than red when copying my test book cover. This could be an issue for those of you who require color accuracy. For example, your business is selling deep red roses and you need to print marketing materials that reflect photographs of those roses. This is not the printer that will give that level of accuracy. But, if you need to print a report with a pie chart that includes a red wedge then this printer is accurate enough to get the job done.

HP Smart:

HP Smart is what connects your mobile life to your HP Smart Tank 7001. I downloaded HP Smart to my Windows 11 laptop from the Microsoft Store. I also downloaded the app to my iPhone from the Apple App Store. The app gives me full control over the printer, the printer properties, the printer network configuration, the ability to scan a document directly to my phone, mobile faxing capabilities, direct printing capabilities from anywhere in the world using any device I have HP Smart installed on, secure printing, and a bunch of other stuff I have not yet dug into. This is a digital cloud solution for your mobile printing needs. This takes an otherwise unremarkable printer and super charges it with a backend software package with features normally reserved for an enterprise network.

You can do remote printing, mobile faxing, mobile scanning, adjust print settings, add additional HP printers to your network, create shortcut and storage locations for files, images, and faxes, and invite other people to your HP Smart cloud. One very useful feature is Secure Print. HP Smart will hold your mobile print jobs until HP Smart confirms that you are next to one of the printers that are part of your HP Smart network before releasing the job for print. HP Smart accomplishes this by using the location services of your phone and the built-in location services of your printer to confirm you are near an HP Smart printer that is part of your HP Smart network of printers. Yes, I said network of printers. This means you can setup multiple HP Smart printers in multiple geographical locations and print to any one of them.

HP Smart app also gives you direct access to printer settings such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DNS, IPv4 and IPv6 settings, passwords, and other features including Quite Mode.

Everything else:

Filling the ink tank is billed as clean and spill proof. Except, you have to remove the cap of the HP ink bottles, remove the foil seal which exposes the entire bottle to your room, and then put the cap back on. If you accidently mishandle the bottle when removing the foil seal, or accidently bump it, then you have ink all over your room. In all honesty, the foil seal is unnecessary. HP should simply remove it all together. The bottle is already sealed and airtight. Just get rid of the part and the step in the filling process. Maybe HP will improve this in future bottle releases.

Filling the tanks using the flip-top bottle top is easy, clean, and fast. The bottle opening has a rubber seal that does not open until you insert the spout from the tank into the bottle. Wait a minute and the tank is filled.

The print heads are user installable and user replaceable. It is far cheaper to replace a print head than it is to replace a whole printer. This saves me money. This is a no brainer.

HP needs to address the battery killing features of HP Smart mobile. The app will want to continue to update and perform services in the background when not in use. You can turn background service off which will save your battery. But, you will also miss out on the services this provides.

Final Thoughts:

This is a solid home office/small business printer. It is plain looking. The combination of the 7001 capabilities and the cloud power of HP Smart creates a compelling case to invest in this flexible, mobile All-in-One solution. The 7001 does not have all the convenience of other All-in-One solutions at this price point like automatic document scanning, smart card readers, or LCD touch screen controls. But it ticks enough boxes to put this on my short list of solutions.

Work in IT and impressed by the amount of ink! I can print for days! Setup was easy but my parents would have been lost. Help your parents out. The glug glug glug as the in tanks filled was quite satisfying. First print was a success! Black and white document. Nothing fancy. My better half has the need to print the universe so hope this helps.