HP DeskJet 2855e Review: Cheap to Buy, Fussy to Set Up

Updated June 15, 2026

Print Speed Up to 5.5 ppm color, 7.5 ppm black

Functions Print, scan, copy (color all-in-one)

Connectivity Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz only — Ethernet port, but Wi-Fi-only setup

Ink System Cartridge; 3-month Instant Ink trial included

Paper Capacity 60-sheet input tray

Our Verdict

The hardware is fine — crisp text, true scan-and-copy, a fair entry price for a light-printing home. What decides this printer is everything wrapped around the hardware: a 2.4 GHz-only radio that stalls on modern mesh routers, an HP Smart setup app owners fight, and an account-and-subscription wall at first run. Buy it for a Windows or Android home that prints a few times a month and you'll likely be happy; bring it to an iPhone-only house or a 5 GHz mesh network and it can lock you out of the one machine that was supposed to just connect.

Best for: Light-use homes printing mostly black text and school worksheets from a Windows PC or Android phone, and willing to live with HP's setup app and an Instant Ink account.

Amazon prices and availability are refreshed live and are subject to change. The price shown on Amazon at purchase applies.

Check Price on Amazon Video included — skip to watch

Video Review

Watch on YouTube · Adam’s Simple & Fast Reviews

Check Price on Amazon

Overview

A budget all-in-one with a catch

The DeskJet 2855e is the printer you buy the night before a school project is due. It's HP's cheapest current all-in-one, and the listing pitches it squarely — The DeskJet 2855e is perfect for homes printing to-do lists, letters, and the odd recipe. At that job, it mostly delivers.

The honest framing isn't print quality. It's everything you get through before the first page lands, and what the ink costs once it does. That's the lens this site puts on every machine — the cartridge-versus-tank math of what it actually costs to own over time, not what it costs on the shelf.

Across the 13 owner reviews we read, the split is sharp. One end of it sounds like this:

As a homeschooling parent, the HP DeskJet 2855e has been a very helpful addition to our daily routine, one owner writes. Another spends an evening unable to make it print at all. Same printer — the difference is almost never the hardware.

What the spec sheet says

The spec sheet is modest and, to HP's credit, honest. The listing claims Print speeds up to 5.5 ppm color and a touch quicker in black — slow by office standards, fine for short bursts. It's a true color all-in-one, and one owner's summary captures the appeal: I can print, scan, and copy without needing multiple machines. HP also markets a flourish — HP AI easily removes unwanted content for cleaner pages — but none of that is the story.

The connectivity is. In HP's own box copy, This printer is only 2.4 ghz capable. On an older single-band router that limit is invisible. On a modern mesh system that blends both bands under one network name and steers devices to 5 GHz, it's a wall: the printer can't see the network it's being told to join.

There's a wired escape hatch, and it's hidden. As one owner found, The printer does have an Ethernet port (cable NOT provided) but the setup app only offered the option to set up by wifi. A network jack you can't reach during setup is exactly the detail that turns a ten-minute job into a support ticket. Connectivity reliability, not resolution, separates a good budget printer from a returned one — we lay out the full scoring logic in our comparison criteria for inkjet printers.

Performance & Real-World Testing

When it prints, it prints well

The most consistent praise in the review set is the text. One owner reports that Text documents come out crisp, sharp, and perfectly legible — good output for a compact budget DeskJet. For homework, worksheets, and letters, the page that comes out is not where this machine disappoints.

The disappointment is upstream, in HP's software. The single most representative line across the reviews: The printer itself is completely fine, but the program written by HP is a complete mess. Setup runs through the HP Smart app — one owner, frustrated into capitals, that THEY MAKE YOU SIGN UP FOR INK SERVICES 2 TIMES and create an account first — and another Actually got test prints and info prints, but no file prints. The hardware works; the pipeline to it doesn't.

Where it goes wrong

The iPhone story is worse. One parent tried, unsuccessfully, to set the printer up to print from my son's iPhone. Apple's AirPrint wireless printing is supposed to make that trivial; for some households it never connects. If everyone in your home is on iOS, that isn't a footnote — it's a reason to shortlist something else first.

It isn't universal, and the record is honest about that. Plenty of owners report the opposite — Setup was quick and easy, print quality is great, and the Wi-Fi connection works perfectly. For the homes it suits, the text quality punches above the price. The line between the two camps is router type and platform: a Windows or Android home on a plain 2.4 GHz network tends to sail through; an iPhone home on a mesh network tends to stall.

Value Analysis

Cheap to buy, dear to feed

Here's where the cheap printer gets expensive. The 2855e is a cartridge machine, and cartridge machines make their money after you've bought them. The sticker is low; the ink is where HP earns it back — the razor-and-blades model, pointed straight at your printer.

It ships with a 3-month trial of HP's Instant Ink subscription, which mails cartridges based on how much you print. HP's own terms note that After 3 months, monthly fee applies unless you cancel, and the catch owners learn late is that cancelling stops those Instant Ink cartridges from printing at the end of the final billing cycle. You can run standard cartridges bought outright instead, but the setup flow is built to steer you onto the plan.

Independent testing backs the cost gap. RTINGS' independent cost-per-print and page-yield testing puts cartridge cost-per-page many times higher than bottle ink, and Consumer Reports' inkjet running-cost and reliability testing reaches the same verdict. A cartridge model is cheaper to buy and dearer to feed; a supertank is the reverse. The month the lines meet is the month the cheap printer stops being cheap.

The volume test

So the value verdict splits by how much you print. Print rarely and the 2855e is honestly cheap to own. Print every day and it quietly becomes the expensive machine — the money saved at checkout is gone by the third cartridge set. We run that cartridge-versus-tank fork across the whole catalog in our type-versus-type tradeoffs analysis.

What to Expect Over Time

Living with it: support and idle time

Two things shape life with the 2855e past the first week: support, and idleness.

Support, because when the software breaks, HP's chat is where you land. One owner logged 40 min wasted on the chat - problem not resolved. Budget that time before you need it, not during a deadline.

Idleness, because every inkjet has one failure mode a laser doesn't: liquid ink dries in the nozzles when the printer sits unused, and the machine spends ink on automatic cleaning cycles to clear it. A printer bought for occasional school runs is, by definition, idle most of the month. Print something in color once a week and it rarely bites; leave it dark over several weeks and the clog you meet is the evening you need a boarding pass. We grade how each machine holds up against the full owner record in our inkjet printers evidence hub, and track the idle-clog risk in our safety and known-risks guidance.

The Instant Ink account is the third long-term thread. It's a relationship, not a one-time purchase: another login, another subscription to remember, one more thing that can interrupt printing if a card expires. For the owner in our research who just wanted a printer "that doesn't require a subscription or an account," it's the whole problem in one sentence.