HP Smart Tank 7301

The Smart Tank 7301 delivers the low running cost that defines this tier. Filled from HP’s ink bottles rather than cartridges, it prints a black page for about 0.40 cents and a color page for roughly 1.22 cents on original ink — figures that put it right alongside the Epson and Canon supertanks and an order of magnitude below any cartridge inkjet. Its color cost in particular is among the lowest in the guide.

HP sweetens the up-front math by including about two years of ink in the box — enough for roughly 6,000 black or 8,000 color pages before you refill — so the printer effectively prints “free” for a long stretch after purchase. As with all supply figures, prices move over time, so treat these as current estimates and check before buying. On the measure our framework weights highest, this is a clear strength.

Bottom line on running cost: Genuine supertank economics — about four-tenths of a cent per black page, class-low color cost, and roughly two years of ink included. A top-tier result on our most heavily weighted category.

For everyday office work the 7301 prints cleanly — sharp, readable text and solid color on documents, charts, and the occasional photo. It’s a capable everyday printer whose output looks professional across the material a home office actually produces.

It lands a step below the class leaders here rather than at the top. The Epson ET-4950’s pigment black gives it a slight edge in crispness on plain-paper text, and the six-color ET-8550 is in another league for photos. For documents and general color, though, the Smart Tank 7301’s quality is more than sufficient, and the gap is one you’d only notice in a side-by-side comparison.

Bottom line on print quality: Clean, professional documents and good everyday color. A notch behind the pigment-black and six-color Epson tanks, but well up to home-office work.

HP rates the 7301 at about 15 pages per minute in black and 9 in color — typical inkjet pace, quick enough for everyday jobs though a laser will beat it on long text runs. It handles paper well for its class, with automatic two-sided printing, a 35-sheet automatic document feeder for multi-page copies and scans, and a 250-sheet main input tray so reloads are infrequent.

That feeder-plus-duplex combination is exactly what a home office needs to copy and scan multi-page documents without babysitting the machine, and it’s an advantage over the barer tank models that skip the ADF entirely. For the volume a typical home office runs, speed and paper handling are a non-issue here.

Bottom line on speed & paper handling: Solid inkjet speed with auto-duplex, a 35-sheet ADF, and a 250-sheet tray — everything a home office needs for multi-page work, short of laser-grade text speed.

The 7301 is well-equipped where it counts. Connectivity is a genuine strength: it offers dual-band Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB, so it drops onto a wired network as easily as a wireless one — and a wired option is the most stable way to share a printer among several people. Walk-up control is the one place it economises — a 2-line LCD with guided buttons rather than a touchscreen — but the 35-sheet ADF and auto-duplex round out a capable everyday feature set, with HP’s mobile and app printing on top.

What holds it just below the top office tanks is the absence of a fax — it prints, scans, and copies, but faxing is reserved for HP’s step-up Smart Tank model. Fax matters less than it once did, but some home offices still rely on it, and against a fully-loaded all-in-one like the ET-4950 that includes it, the 7301 comes up a feature short. Everything else here is present and well-executed.

Bottom line on features & connectivity: Excellent connectivity — Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB — plus an ADF and auto-duplex. The gaps are fax and a touchscreen panel, which cap it just below the fully-loaded office tanks.

As a refillable-tank printer, the Smart Tank 7301 is filled from ink bottles rather than cartridges, which is exactly the design that gives it — and every tank printer — its durable low running cost. There’s no per-cartridge replacement cycle to manage, and supply flexibility is high: this is a bottle-fed tank, the most economical way to keep a printer stocked.

We place it a half-step below the Epson and Canon tanks in this category, and the reason is track record rather than anything about its supplies: Epson’s EcoTank and Canon’s MegaTank have simply been in the refillable-tank market longer, with a deeper reliability history to point to. HP’s Smart Tank line is well-regarded and the 7301 is a dependable machine; as with any inkjet, printing something every so often keeps the head healthy. It carries a one-year limited warranty, standard for the category.

Bottom line on consumable freedom & reliability: A bottle-fed tank with high supply flexibility and low upkeep, held just short of the Epson and Canon leaders only on length of track record.

The 7301’s value case is strong, and the roughly two years of ink included in the box is the headline: it meaningfully lowers the real cost of ownership in the early going, on top of the low per-page cost that follows. Priced competitively against the other supertank all-in-ones, it gives you the ADF, auto-duplex, and full connectivity without a premium.

It carries a one-year limited warranty, standard for the class. As with every tank printer, the value story is a long-game one — the higher entry price relative to a cartridge machine is recovered quickly through cheap refills — and the bundled ink shortens that payback period further.

Bottom line on value & warranty: Competitive pricing, a full feature set, and about two years of ink in the box make for strong long-term value. Standard one-year warranty.