Life

5 Reasons Your Family Still Needs a Printer

If the last time you owned a home printer was when you lived in a college dorm room littered with pizza boxes, your home office setup is in dire need of a tech upgrade. Sure, smartphones have helped streamline a lot of tasks over the years, but there’s no denying that sometimes you just need... View Article

by Stephan Lee

If the last time you owned a home printer was when you lived in a college dorm room littered with pizza boxes, your home office setup is in dire need of a tech upgrade. Sure, smartphones have helped streamline a lot of tasks over the years, but there’s no denying that sometimes you just need a document or photo you can hold in your hands.

And good news: Printer tech has come a long way since those pixelated printouts of your youth. In fact, the new ENVY Inspire Printer with HP+ is the best, most versatile home printer HP has ever created. What sets it apart even from other modern printers is that it comes loaded with HP+, a system that makes the printer even smarter — keeps itself up to date and secure — and ready to print at any time.

Now, if you’re still wondering how a printer would fit into your home, consider all the ways an ENVY Inspire can make your family’s life easier:

Recipes at your fingertips

You’ve almost memorized your go-to spaghetti carbonara recipe, but for now, you’re still tied to the cooking app on your phone — meaning you not only have to swipe every few minutes to keep the recipe displayed, but you’re also one wrong move away from dropping that phone into a piping hot pot of pasta. Take advantage of ENVY Inspire’s Print anywhere feature to save yourself the electronics clean-up. You can print out your recipes on-the-go from the grocery store or farmers market with the HP Smart App.

Vacation photos in a hurry

After the family trip to the Grand Canyon, you’re itching to frame and hang photos of your grand adventure. But the nearest drugstore photo kiosk is on the other side of town — and it’s usually broken anyway. Guess what? You can print your magazine-level shots at home on your ENVY Inspire. And before you ask: Yes, the quality is stellar; and yes, you can print remotely even while you’re on vacation using the HP Smart App. You’ll get vibrant, true-to-phone images in both traditional and modern photo sizes, like Instagram square and panoramic, and you can even do two-sided printing on 4×6” photos, so you can add text on the back of your images, such as dates, memories, and notes. Perfect for your scrapbooks and archives!

Easy access to your boarding pass, even with a dead battery

Speaking of that recent vacation, it’s a safe bet that at least one member of your family suffered through a dead phone battery during your trip. (Charging stations can be hard to come by in the middle of a national park…) And if you rely on your phone to flash your boarding pass for the flight home, you may very well find yourself stranded at security. Your safest bet for getting through smoothly is to always print out that boarding pass ahead of time — it’s your most important carry-on.

Forms, forms, forms

Nowadays, a lot of paperwork can be completed online — but not all. For instance, if you need to renew your passport, you’re not going to be able to submit a form online for that. Nope, you still have to print out your information on paper and mail it into the proper government agency. And let’s be real: You don’t want to print out all of that sensitive personal information at a public printing or mailing center.

Cards and keepsakes for every occasion

One of the many family photos you took this year is going to make an amazing Christmas card, but unless you upload it to one of those card-making sites pronto, you may not receive your box of season’s greetings until well after Presidents’ Day. Save yourself the stress over supply chain issues by printing those cards at home. Not a designer? No problem. The ENVY Inspire comes with plenty of templates to aid you in creating a stunning holiday card or keepsake. And with Instant Ink — a subscription service that helps you save up to 50 percent on ink and ensure new cartridges are delivered to your door in time — you won’t need to worry about running out of ink halfway through. You’ll be eligible to get six months of free Instant Ink through HP+ during setup!