HP+ Review – why an extra sign up adds value to your printer purchase

There’s no beating around the bush, it took me a while to get my head around the concept of HP+ – because it’s not a hardware feature of an HP printer, its an optional software choice which allows you to enable some additional benefits. That decision is all down to you the buyer.

You don’t buy HP+, you buy an HP printer which is HP+ capable, and then you enable HP+ during the setup of the printer if you choose to.

For the life of me I can’t see why you wouldn’t though. There’s no cost to sign up, in fact there’s no ongoing cost to be HP+ enabled. The only cost on top of the printer you purchased is the cost of replacing the ink cartridges, and you have the choice to do that at your local store, or sign up to the HP Instant Ink home delivery program with savings on retail prices.

But again, the first six months of HP Instant Ink is provided to you at no cost when you sign up to HP+, with no requirement to commit past that six months.

What HP+ enables is a cloud connected printer ecosystem that means you can print remotely, take advantage of the HP Smart App for advanced productivity, and be part of HP’s Forest First printing which plants trees or protect forests for every page you print.

Perhaps the real highlight though is the additional year of HP customer support. That means any issues you might have or questions you have, you can contact HP customer support for up to two years from the time of purchase.

All this sounds a bit high end really, support functionality, connectivity – the kind of things offered to Business customers. But the reality is, HP+ is just as suitable to families with kids at school, uni students doing assignments and small business owners. In our home, we installed the HP 9010e and trust me, during home-schooling we gave it a solid use.

It wasn’t more than two weeks after setup that our first Instant Ink delivery arrived, with the HP printer now cloud connected and ensuring that when we print more, HP will package up some more ink to be delivered direct to our door – and that doesn’t cost a cent for the first six months!

When contemplating an enhanced support and capability service that costs nothing to sign up to, I also wrongly assumed this was only for higher end (and higher priced) HP printers. Not at all, there are HP+ enabled printers for under $100.

As an individual unit, the 9010e we chose is a fast, very high quality printer that’s also a multi-function centre that has allowed me to scan in a bunch of old photos we stumbled across.

Using the HP Smart App, I can now be anywhere in the world, and print to my home printer – that’s proper cloud printing. Plus, because it’s cloud connected, this and any other HP+ printer will automatically detect and fix any issues before they become a problem.

Oh, and if you’re sharing the printer at home or at an office, HP+ enabled printers also feature “Private Pickup” which allows you to hit print on your PC, but instead of rushing to make sure no-one else grabs your prints, when you get to the printer, you enter a code for your print job to start. Genius!

If you’re wondering what that Ink is going to cost once your six month trial of Instant Ink ends – there are loads of plans, which can be changed month to month depending on your printing needs – starting at $1.99 a month. But also, there’s zero commitment to continue with Instant Ink after that six months.

Basically, what I’ve come to realise is that if you’re in the market for a printer, it’s not only useful to see that any HP+ enabled printer will be fully wireless printing capable, so you can print from your mobile devices with ease, but they have this extra “cloud” of capability hanging over them that is enabled at no charge when you setup the printer. Great value, great service – well worth a look.

This review was supported by HP, Supported editorial allows us to prioritise writing about things we’d love to share, but there’s only so much time in the day folks!