The HP Smart Tank 7001 (or 7005 in the UK and Europe) is a refillable inkjet aimed at the home or the office. It’s a neat desktop design with enough room for 250 sheets of Letter paper in its protruding tray and a Letter-sized scanner bed on top. Self-healing dual-band wi-fi and Bluetooth are built in and it can auto-duplex, but there’s no multipurpose input tray and no touchscreen.

If that seems mean for a printer costing around US$260 (£230), remember that this is a supertank, so you’ll save money on ink in the long term and there’s a generous amount of ink in the box. But Smart Tank makes up a relatively small part of HP’s printer line-up so let’s see how it compares to the best ink tank printers, from MegaTanks to EcoTanks, currently crowding the market.

HP Smart Tank 7001: Design and build

The HP Smart Tank 7001 (let's stick with the US name now) looks pretty sharp with its crisp lines, light basalt livery and seamlessly integrated ink tanks. It’s only a pity the paper tray sticks out at the front like that, because it makes the footprint larger than that of its two nearest rivals, the Canon PIXMA G3270 and Epson EcoTank ET-2850. But being larger, does enable it to hold more paper. With room for 250 sheets of Letter, or A4 paper instead of the 100-sheet capacity of its peers, it could serve an office more efficiently. The four ink reservoirs are about the same size as those of the Canon and Epson, holding 70ml of each colored ink and 135ml of black. That’s enough to keep you printing for two years, according to HP in the US. In the UK, HP says three years because there’s one extra bottle in the box, so I’ll take both claims with a very large pinch of salt. Clear plastic windows into these tanks make it easy to check your levels at a glance, which is important because running out of ink can allow problematic air bubbles into the system. The tiny two-line display is not backlit, so it’s harder to see, as are the small black buttons of the up-facing control panel.

The plastic casing and the various plastic flaps all feel rather flimsy, especially the scanner cover. The glass scanner platen is also Letter-sized, offering a more satisfactory way to scan documents than a phone camera. There’s a connection at the back for a USB data cable, but no front USB Host port and no Ethernet port. Lift up the scanner and you’ll see the lids of the four ink tanks and the two moving printheads. Unlike Epson and Canon’s printers, these print heads are replaceable, which could be an advantage.

HP Smart Tank 7001: Features & specifications

Compared to the best all-in-one printers at this price point, the features list might look a little thin, but remember that this is a supertank so you’re benefiting from the low running cost and plentiful inbox ink. There’s no touchscreen, for example, no USB Host port, no ADF (automatic document feed), no NFC and no multipurpose input. It’s a similar story with Epson and Canon’s entry-level ink tanks. It does come with dual-band wi-fi with Apple AirPrint compatibility and a scanner. It does not possess an inbuilt fax modem, but it can receive and print a fax by using the HP Smart app to harness your smartphone. If you want to send a fax, you’ll need to step up to the $400 HP Smart Tank 7602, which also sports an ADF.

One thing the HP Smart Tank 7001 does offer over and above the competition is Bluetooth, which I found to be a real advantage during the initial setup procedure.

HP Smart Tank 7001: Setup and operation

The setup process for the HP Smart Tank 7001 is similar to any new inkjet, except for two extra steps. You have to pour your ink from bottles into the tanks and attach the two printheads. The easiest way to get started is to download HP’s companion app called HP Smart and use that to get your printer onto your local wi-fi network. Making a wi-fi connection with a new printer always feels like it’s in the hands of the gods, but Bluetooth connecting is more reliable. Letting your smartphone then share your wi-fi details saves you from having to type in the password, something that would take ages using the printer’s primitive non-touchscreen display.

Pouring ink into the tanks is not too fiddly, but neither is it completely fool-proof, as it is with Canon and Epson’s systems. I’ve read user reviews where new owners have spilled ink and even poured it into the wrong tank, so be careful! I found that pouring in three quarters of each bottle was not enough to satisfy the HP’s sensors. Unlike Canon and Epson, you need to fill to the brim to proceed with setup. The only disadvantage of a ink tank printer is that transporting them when the tanks are full is a potential hazard.

In operation, the HP Smart Tank 7001 is fine, although there’s no denying that it would be easier with a touchscreen interface. The two-line display is not easy to see. HP are probably assuming that we’ll all be using the app on our smartphones and laptops to control the printer and to be fair, that is the best way to do it. HP Smart works equally well on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Chrome. The only problems I encountered were paper jams, or to be precise, the printer’s failure to turn pages in order to print the other side when auto duplexing. This happened any time the paper in the tray was less than perfectly flat.

HP Smart Tank 7001: Performance

The HP Smart Tank 7001 performed some tasks well, and others poorly. Consecutive pages of text appear at a rapid and reliable rate of 15 per minute in simplex mode and the characters look black and bold with no overrun. At point size four, everything is still legible and whenever I try to smudge the print with my thumb as the pages emerge, the pigment ink is already set and smudge resistant. The same is true in draft mode. The print is just slightly paler and less sharp, but still acceptable. The problem comes when auto duplexing as any slight crease in the paper prevents the printer from turning the page successfully. After printing one side, the paper is thrust out and drawn back in ready to turn, except that it cannot seem to align the paper in order to pull it all the way in. You can play tug of war with the stricken page until it’s aligned correctly, but most of the time the printer gives up and flashes an error message instead. From trawling user reviews, I can see I’m not the only one to experience this problem.

In simplex mode, the HP printed successfully on a range of paper stock, from 4” x 6” glossy photo paper to card up to 200g/m2 in weight. That’s not actually very thick and the fact that its rivals can handle 300g/m2 card suggests that the HP just isn’t very good at handling paper. Printing in color shows how vibrant HP’s ink is. Color documents really catch the eye with their bright reds and blues. With photos on photo paper, the colors look a little too bright making them feel unrealistic. So, while photos are initially quite pleasing for their strong detail and bold colors, they don’t stack up against photos from a dedicated photo printer.

The scanner worked flawlessly despite the disconcerting way its light flashes the whole time the scanner lid is open. You can hit the copy button on the machine or scan using the HP Smart app where you have the option of choosing the number of copies and to reduce or enlarge them. The scan resolution is 1,200dpi and the duplicates look almost as sharp and only slightly paler than the original.

HP Smart Tank 7001: Consumables

HP’s bottled ink is around 80 percent cheaper than its cartridge ink, but it’s essentially the same stuff. In this case, the three colors, cyan, magenta and yellow are dye-based while black is a pigment. That’s quite common with office inkjets where a pigment black, which is more resistant to smudging and fading, works best for black and white text handouts, while dyes are better suited to color images.

There are five or six ink bottles in the box depending on where you purchased the printer. The 135-ml bottle of black ink (HP 32XL) yields 6,000 monochrome pages, while the three 70ml bottles of C/M/Y should yield 8,000 color pages. That’s an order of magnitude more than the ink in one of HP’s inkjet cartridges.

HP Smart Tank 7001: Maintenance

Just like any of the best inkjet printers, ink tank printers don’t like being left unused for long periods because the liquid ink dries on the printhead, clogging the nozzles. To clean it you can usually just run a printhead cleaning cycle or two, and because bottled ink is relatively cheap, that’s less of a problem for supertanks. This printer is somewhat unusual in having two replaceable printheads, one black and one tricolor. Assuming this doesn’t mean they are prone to failing, it suggests that the printer’s operational life can be extended by simply buying new print heads, which are reasonably priced.

HP Smart Tank 7001: Final verdict

Supertank printers often appear overpriced because we’re used to cartridge-based inkjets being subsidized by the inflated cost of their cartridges, but that razor-and-blades business model does not apply here. Comparing the HP Smart Tank 7001/7005 with other supertanks suggests that it’s pretty fair value. There’s no touchscreen display, no NFC, no ADF and only one input, but it does have other features. There’s a decent Letter-sized scanner and strong wireless connectivity with dual-band wi-fi and Bluetooth. The 250-sheet paper capacity beats its nearest supertank rivals and there’s a useful amount of bottled ink in the box.

It prints both monochrome and color documents well and fairly quickly too, but it’s not great with photographs, which look a bit garish. And it’s not great at handling paper stock. The 200g/m2 card limitation is very light and the trouble it had during the test in turning over imperfect sheets of paper while duplexing is a concern. There’s no doubt HP’s bottled ink printer offers better value than a comparable cartridge-bound HP, but it faces strong competition from other supertanks by Canon and Epson. Canon’s equivalent offers better photo quality, while Epson beats HP on overall performance. However, with its higher paper capacity and faster print speed, the HP Smart Tank 7001/7005 is better qualified for an office job.

Find a unit for the home and office in our round-up of the best home printers around.

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Synology’s DiskStation DS423+ is a home and small office NAS, offering four SATA drive bays, and supporting up to a whopping 72TB of storage. With a Celeron J4125 processor and 2GB of RAM, it’s similarly specified to the two-bay DS224+. Unfortunately, that extends to its dual gigabit Ethernet ports, which look like a misstep when many competitors now offer 2.5GbE. Synology hasn’t been overly generous when it comes to other ports, either. You won’t find HDMI here, and there are only two USB-A 3.2 ports – and they’re the slower, 5Gbits/sec Gen 1.

The DS423+ does have a trick up its sleeve in the shape of two NVMe SSD slots. Drives in these can be configured as a cache for hard disk volumes, used to create a flash storage pool, or split between the two roles. A single SSD doesn’t offer data redundancy, though, so you’ll need to use both slots for caching if you want to accelerate disk writes as well as reads.

This is one of the easiest NAS devices we’ve tested when it comes to setup. Its lockable caddies are tool-less for 3.5in disks. It’s also quicker and easier than the norm to access its NVMe slots – you simply flip the enclosure on its back, pop open two small covers and click the drives in. Even the memory expansion slot can be accessed without tools.

We initially configured this NAS with four 1TB disks configured in a RAID5 array. While Synology, like other manufacturers, is usually quite relaxed about the brand of hard disk you fit, this doesn’t extend to NVM drives. The DS423+ was happy to use two unapproved 1TB WD Black drives as a disk cache, but you can use only approved SSDs to create a storage pool. At the time of our review there were just four approved SSDs on the compatibility list: they’re all made by Synology and have either 400GB or 800GB capacities, limiting you to an 800GB maximum for a flash volume with data redundancy.

With or without disk caching, this isn’t a particularly fast NAS. It lined up closely with other gigabit Ethernet devices in ATTO Disk Benchmark, hitting peak transfer rates of 110MB/sec (write) and 113MB/sec (read). It scored a fair 348 in the PCMark 10 Data Drive benchmark, and managed 59MB/sec writes and 46MB/sec reads in our 11GB Windows file copy test. We retested it when configured with two large WD disks, but its performance was essentially unchanged.

It’s fair to point out that disk caches become more effective over time, and our benchmarks don’t particularly show the benefits. It’s also worth noting that port bonding – in which the NAS balances the load across both Ethernet ports – would help the DS423+ deliver a greater throughput in a multi-user setup. Even so, no single user would see data transfer rates above the 113MB/sec gigabit Ethernet limit, which puts this NAS at a disadvantage when compared with 2.5GbE rivals such as QNAP’s TS-464.

That’s a shame, because it’s simple to manage Synology NAS boxes. DSM manages to combine user friendliness with plenty of functionality, spanning networking, security and convenience features such as QuickConnect, which lets you access the NAS remotely. You can bolt on extras through the Package Center, which at the time of writing offered 107 apps.

Highlights include strong third-party apps such as Plex Media Center, WordPress and various developer tools, but also Synology’s own software, which tends to focus on business requirements. Examples include Surveillance Station, Synology Mail Server and even the Synology Office suite. There are also tools such as Synology High Availability, which lets you use a second NAS to provide failover cover should the active server fail.

In most ways, the DS423+ is a great product for small businesses, and if speed isn’t a major concern then it’s a good choice. However, with only 1GbE network interfaces – and no expansion slot to upgrade them – it could become a bottleneck in a growing business, particularly one that needs to back up or work with large volumes of data. If that’s likely to be you, we’d advise stretching your budget to get the upgradability of Synology’s DS923+ or the better specification of Asustor’s Nimbustor 4 Gen2.

We also ranked the best apps for small businesses.

At first glance Synology’s DiskStation DS224+ looks much like the cheaper DiskStation DS223. It’s the same color and dimensions, and has the same button, port and LED layout on the front panel. Snoop around a bit and you’ll spot a significant improvement, though: this NAS has dual 1GbE ports, which can be used to offer faster throughput and failover support.

There’s a bigger upgrade inside, where the DS224+ has an Intel Celeron J4125 processor rather than the limp Realtek in the DS223. Its 2GB of memory is also upgradable to 6GB via a spare slot, accessible without tools if you remove the drive caddies. Synology talks up the enhanced performance of the DS224+ when compared to previous-generation devices, and this processor should certainly help if you’re intending to use it as a media server in the home.

It’s usually easy to set up Synology devices, and the DS224+ obliges with tool-free caddies for 3.5in SATA drives – as with other contenders here, you’ll need to screw in 2.5in disks. You can quickly track down any local DiskStations via the Web Assistant. Once you’re into the web interface, it’s simple to install Synology’s DSM software and configure the storage.

We added two 4TB disks provided by Synology, configuring them in a RAID1 array and formatting them with Btrfs; EXT4 is available if needed. The DS224+ delivered on its improved specifications, outpacing the DS223 in 4KB and 16KB file operations in ATTO Disk Benchmark. It was also a little quicker to write files in our Windows file copy test, hitting 60MB/sec compared to 52MB/sec for the DS223.

This is something of a distraction from the fact that this NAS is throttled by its gigabit Ethernet ports. In our tests it sustained a maximum transfer speed of 113MB/sec. In comparison, 2.5GbE connections can deliver up to 283MB/sec. It’s easy to bond the two network interfaces, but this won’t improve speeds to a single client; instead it helps increase bandwidth when there are multiple users.

Synology pitches this NAS as a data storage device for edge deployments, which is likely to mean home workers and micro offices. Synology’s software is certainly more than equal to the role, combining a solid feature set with 107 apps available through Package Center. Perhaps this NAS’s slower Ethernet won’t be a problem for home workers primarily connecting via Wi-Fi, but if you have several users we’d recommend paying more for an alternative with a 2.5GbE interface.

We've also rated the best laptops for working from home.