

Prints of our standard Photoshop test files were a little over-saturated, and a bit too red all around. We printed a wide variety of test pages on the J4680 and found the prints to be of good quality. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that push scanning from the J4680 to my MacBook over an Airport network worked seamlessly as well, as many printers we've tested in the past either skip support for network scanning or offer it via some tedious workaround. That sure beats configuring the device using the printer's on-board menus and controls, like I've had to do with other multifunction printers. The printer showed up as a Bonjour printer automatically, and you can join individual wireless networks via HP's Control Center software on your Mac. It was easy to set up the J4680 to connect to the office wireless network. Unlike some HP printers, the J4680 doesn't offer support for a photo color ink cartridge. HP also sells a high-yield black print cartridge at $28, it costs a little less than two standard-yield black cartridges, and promises to print 700 pages before running out of ink. Replacement cartridges cost $15 for the black and $25 for the tri-color. The J4680 uses two ink cartridges, one black and one tri-color (cyan, magenta, and yellow), that claim to yield 200 and 360 prints, respectively. The scanner reads the sheet and makes any necessary adjustments.

With the J4680, you simply lay the printed sheet on the scanner bed and press OK. In itself, this isn't unusual, but many printers require you to analyze this test output yourself, choosing which bars line up best and then using the printer's on-board menus to input that info.
HP OFFICEJET J4680 SCANNER SOFTWARE MAC INSTALL
Second, after you install the print cartridges, the printer asks to insert a sheet of paper so that it can print out an alignment page. The widget gives you a quick glimpse of your ink supply and allows you to launch the standard HP printer maintenance utility software. First, when running the software installer, you're asked if you want to install HP's Inkjet Utility Widget, which runs in OS X's Dashboard. There were also a couple of cool setup features I hadn't seen before in an HP multifunction device. Setting up the printer was easy enough: just attach the included USB and power cables, install the software and print cartridges, and you're ready to go. HP boasts about the J4680's 20-page-per-minute black-and-white print speeds and 17-page-per-minute color print speeds, but in our real-world tests, the printer proved to be something of a slowpoke. But the J460 also has a built-in fax machine, wireless connectivity, and a 20-sheet auto document feeder. For $130, you might not be surprised to find print, scan, and copy capabilities in HP's OfficeJet J4680 multifunction ink-jet printer.
