Verdict
If you’re after a cheap printer that won’t cost you a fortune in ink, HP’s Smart Tank 210 is bang on the money. While it’s basic, and it can be achingly slow, it’s surprisingly good at turning out photos or plain paper prints. Most importantly, it arrives with enough ink for around 6,000 pages or more, making it far better value than a cartridge-based equivalent. Unless you only print very occasionally, this printer should save you a tidy sum.
-
Very cheap to own
-
Good print quality
-
Reasonably smart
Key Features
-
Review Price:
£130
-
An ink-tank printer
This printer uses bottles of ink that cost less and last longer than cartridges. It’s a little more expensive to buy, but it should be far cheaper to own in the long run.
-
Pretty basic
The Smart Tank 210 is a printer only: it can’t scan, fax or copy. It doesn’t have a screen and it can’t automatically print both sides of each page, but you can share it over Wi-Fi.
Introduction
If you’re after a budget printer, you could spend as little as £40 picking up an entry level inkjet. The problem is that cheap printers often come with punishing running costs; it’s not uncommon for new cartridges to cost as much as the printer did, and to last only a couple of hundred pages. The HP Smart Tank 210 takes a different tack. While it’s significantly more expensive to buy, it’s almost guaranteed to cost you less overall to own.
That’s chiefly because it’s an ink tank printer, fitted with refillable tanks rather than slots for conventional cartridges. It arrives with a full set of bottles that should last for around 6000 full-colour pages – in fact, if you didn’t use black, the three colour bottles could last for more than 10000 prints. You’d spend £100s or even £1000s buying an equivalent number of cartridges or toners for a regular printer.
These low running costs are one of the reasons I love ink-tank printers, but another is that with long-lasting bottles rather than short-lived cartridges, they generate much less plastic waste. In theory, you could buy this printer and churn out 6000 pages for only around £130, a cost-per-page of around 2.2p including the printer. That’s hard to beat, so what’s the HP Smart Tank 210 itself actually like?
Design and Features
- Basic but smart
- Fiddly to set up
- No exciting features
There’s not all that much to this printer. It’s a squat off-white box with a few dark grey highlights, and a reasonably uncluttered appearance.
On the back you’ll find a simple extendable paper input tray, which outputs to an even simpler fold-out tray at the front. With no scanner, the top panel is almost featureless apart from a very basic set of buttons and a small LCD.
That would be it if the HP Smart Tank 210 wasn’t an ink tank printer. The splash of colour on its front panel isn’t just for show; the four windows here reveal the levels in its black, cyan, magenta and yellow tanks. It arrives with them empty, so the first job is to fill them up from the provided bottles of ink.
Like most refillable printers, you prime this one for action by simply removing the lid from a bottle, and upending it over the spigot on the relevant tank. Here there’s an important thing to watch out for – this printer’s bottles and tanks aren’t keyed to prevent mixing the colours up. That’s bad enough on a normal inkjet, but with a full tank potentially lasting years, here it could lead to thousands of pages of crossed colours.
Unlike rival ink tank printers from Epson and Canon, you also need to fit the print heads to the HP Smart Tank 210. I found this a needlessly fiddly job, particularly given the relatively narrow access available. Still, at least it’s a one-time only routine. In use you’ll need to keep an eye on the tank levels and top them up occasionally. My experience is that you can typically go many months – or even a couple of years – between refills.
The final setup task is to join this printer to your Wi-Fi, for which you’ll need the HP app. This detects the printer, asks you an unreasonable number of times if you want to share user data, and finally makes the HP Smart Tank 210 available to other devices on your network. If you have a PC you may prefer to download the Easy Start app and opt for the full suite of drivers, but without scan functionality it’s not really necessary.
Ink-tank printers cost more to buy than a cartridge equivalent, and pay you back over the long-term in lower running costs. They usually only become better value than a cheap cartridge device once you’ve printed a couple of thousand pages, which might take some users several years. With that in mind I prefer them to have a multi-year warranty, giving you the reassurance they’ll stay working long enough for you to recoup your money. While I’ve no reason to doubt HP’s build quality, it’s a shame this printer only gets 12 months’ cover.
On the other end of the scale, the HP Smart Tank 210 should save you bucket loads if you print in volume. Extra bottles of ink work out at about 0.2p per black page, or 0.5p for a full-colour page – far cheaper than standard inkjet or laser printers.
There’s precious little else of interest here. Although you can connect and share the HP Smart Tank 210 over a wireless network, there’s no wired Ethernet port or memory card slot. This printer can’t automatically print on both sides of a sheet – you’ll need to manually turn pages over if you want to duplex.
Print speed and quality
- Leisurely black printing, slower still in colour
- Surprisingly good print quality
- Quiet
If you’re in a hurry, the HP Smart Tank 210 isn’t the printer for you. It’s not too bad when printing black text, managing to deliver a first page in 13 seconds, and five pages in 36 seconds – that’s equivalent to 8.3 pages per minute (ppm). It’s a bit faster on longer jobs, especially if you can live with slightly less good Draft quality: it printed 20 pages of text at a rate of 10.3ppm.
Things are much, much less impressive in colour. The HP Smart Tank 210 shuffled its feet when printing a lightweight page of black text and colour graphics, delivering a first copy in 29 seconds, and needing fully two minutes to squeeze out five copies. Our 20 page colour job inched along at a woeful 1.8ppm, one of the slowest results we’ve measured in recent years.
Commendably, HP has resisted the urge to de-content this printer in silly ways. It supports borderless printing on paper up to A4, and is happy to turn its hand to the family snaps. Using the Maximum DPI setting means you’ll get up to 4,800×1,200 dots per inch (dpi) quality, but you’ll have to wait a long time to see if it’s any good. I timed a borderless A4 print at a beard-lengthening 14 minutes and 23 seconds. The printer took almost half an hour to hand over six borderless postcard (6×4”) prints.
One of the benefits of a slow printer is that they tend to be quiet, and that’s certainly the case here. It’s easy to live with the Smart Tank 210 in a small home office, or even in the lounge.
Happily, what the 210 lacked in speed it made up for in print quality, beginning with dark, crisp black text that was easily good enough for formal letters or business use. Printing in Draft quality reduced the impact a little, but the results were still quite impressive. Colours stood up well on plain paper, too. Our test graphics looked fairly punchy, if a little undersaturated, and there was nothing to suggest these prints had come from a particularly low-end printer.
The real surprise came when I looked at the photos I’d printed. While no match for a high-end photo printer, these snaps were more than good enough for family scrapbooks or creative projects. The only real disappointment here was that skin tones all seemed a bit too pale, with the fairest people looking almost ashen in a couple of shots.
Should you buy it?
You’re looking for a bargain
The HP Smart Tank 210 is inexpensive by ink-tank standards, and ridiculously cheap to run by any measure. It’s a great choice where you want to keep print costs down.
You want speed, panache, or lots of features
This is a simple printer. It’s slow, it can’t copy or scan, and it’s missing duplex printing. If it sounds too basic for your needs you’ll need to spend more.
Final Thoughts
I can’t pretend this is the best printer I’ve ever reviewed. If I ran a small business it would be too slow, and I’d bemoan its lack of scan and copy functionality. Even for my home office I’d strongly prefer it to have automatic duplex printing – it’s an easy and convenient way to save on paper.
But park all that. Considering its purchase price and how much ink you get in the box, the HP Smart Tank 210 has to be one of the best value printers you can buy. If I was on a tight budget, and looking for a printer that could deliver a few thousand pages for as little as possible, this one would be right at the top of my list. That could make it ideal for students, writers, or anyone who needs to print a reasonable amount on the smallest budget possible.
FAQs
You’ll need to install the HP app on a PC, tablet or smartphone. Make sure Bluetooth is on, and that you’re connected to your wireless network, then click the plus button in the app. It should find the printer and configure it for your network.
For many users, yes. An ink-tank printer costs more to buy, but less to run. The more you print, the more likely you are to find that a tank-based device costs less to run than a conventional cartridge-based inkjet, or a laser printer. In practice the breakeven point is typically around 2,000 pages – if you print significantly more than that in the printer’s lifetime you should end up paying a lot less.
The flip side is that if you don’t print that much, or the printer fails before you can and isn’t under warranty, you’ll end up losing out. For this reason it’s ideal to try and get at least a couple of years’ warranty if you can.
Test Data
Full Specs
| HP Smart Tank 210 Review | |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | HP |
| Quiet Mark Accredited | No |
| Size (Dimensions) | 434 x 360 x 135 MM |
| Weight | 3.73 KG |
| ASIN | B0GSGG1F19 |
| Release Date | 2026 |
| First Reviewed Date | 13/08/2026 |
| Model Number | 4A8H8A |
| Ports | USB 2 |
| Connectivity | 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) |
| Ink Cartridge support | 32XL black ink (6,700 pages), 31 cyan, magenta and yellow inks (10,100 pages each) |
| Printer Type | Colour |
| Ink Type | Bottle |
| UK RRP | £130 |
| USA RRP | TBC |
| EU RRP | €156 |
| CA RRP | TBC |
| AUD RRP | TBC |
Verdict
If you’re after a cheap printer that won’t cost you a fortune in ink, HP’s Smart Tank 210 is bang on the money. While it’s basic, and it can be achingly slow, it’s surprisingly good at turning out photos or plain paper prints. Most importantly, it arrives with enough ink for around 6,000 pages or more, making it far better value than a cartridge-based equivalent. Unless you only print very occasionally, this printer should save you a tidy sum.
-
Very cheap to own
-
Good print quality
-
Reasonably smart
Key Features
-
Review Price:
£130
-
An ink-tank printer
This printer uses bottles of ink that cost less and last longer than cartridges. It’s a little more expensive to buy, but it should be far cheaper to own in the long run.
-
Pretty basic
The Smart Tank 210 is a printer only: it can’t scan, fax or copy. It doesn’t have a screen and it can’t automatically print both sides of each page, but you can share it over Wi-Fi.
Introduction
If you’re after a budget printer, you could spend as little as £40 picking up an entry level inkjet. The problem is that cheap printers often come with punishing running costs; it’s not uncommon for new cartridges to cost as much as the printer did, and to last only a couple of hundred pages. The HP Smart Tank 210 takes a different tack. While it’s significantly more expensive to buy, it’s almost guaranteed to cost you less overall to own.
That’s chiefly because it’s an ink tank printer, fitted with refillable tanks rather than slots for conventional cartridges. It arrives with a full set of bottles that should last for around 6000 full-colour pages – in fact, if you didn’t use black, the three colour bottles could last for more than 10000 prints. You’d spend £100s or even £1000s buying an equivalent number of cartridges or toners for a regular printer.
These low running costs are one of the reasons I love ink-tank printers, but another is that with long-lasting bottles rather than short-lived cartridges, they generate much less plastic waste. In theory, you could buy this printer and churn out 6000 pages for only around £130, a cost-per-page of around 2.2p including the printer. That’s hard to beat, so what’s the HP Smart Tank 210 itself actually like?
Design and Features
- Basic but smart
- Fiddly to set up
- No exciting features
There’s not all that much to this printer. It’s a squat off-white box with a few dark grey highlights, and a reasonably uncluttered appearance.
On the back you’ll find a simple extendable paper input tray, which outputs to an even simpler fold-out tray at the front. With no scanner, the top panel is almost featureless apart from a very basic set of buttons and a small LCD.
That would be it if the HP Smart Tank 210 wasn’t an ink tank printer. The splash of colour on its front panel isn’t just for show; the four windows here reveal the levels in its black, cyan, magenta and yellow tanks. It arrives with them empty, so the first job is to fill them up from the provided bottles of ink.
Like most refillable printers, you prime this one for action by simply removing the lid from a bottle, and upending it over the spigot on the relevant tank. Here there’s an important thing to watch out for – this printer’s bottles and tanks aren’t keyed to prevent mixing the colours up. That’s bad enough on a normal inkjet, but with a full tank potentially lasting years, here it could lead to thousands of pages of crossed colours.
Unlike rival ink tank printers from Epson and Canon, you also need to fit the print heads to the HP Smart Tank 210. I found this a needlessly fiddly job, particularly given the relatively narrow access available. Still, at least it’s a one-time only routine. In use you’ll need to keep an eye on the tank levels and top them up occasionally. My experience is that you can typically go many months – or even a couple of years – between refills.
The final setup task is to join this printer to your Wi-Fi, for which you’ll need the HP app. This detects the printer, asks you an unreasonable number of times if you want to share user data, and finally makes the HP Smart Tank 210 available to other devices on your network. If you have a PC you may prefer to download the Easy Start app and opt for the full suite of drivers, but without scan functionality it’s not really necessary.
Ink-tank printers cost more to buy than a cartridge equivalent, and pay you back over the long-term in lower running costs. They usually only become better value than a cheap cartridge device once you’ve printed a couple of thousand pages, which might take some users several years. With that in mind I prefer them to have a multi-year warranty, giving you the reassurance they’ll stay working long enough for you to recoup your money. While I’ve no reason to doubt HP’s build quality, it’s a shame this printer only gets 12 months’ cover.
On the other end of the scale, the HP Smart Tank 210 should save you bucket loads if you print in volume. Extra bottles of ink work out at about 0.2p per black page, or 0.5p for a full-colour page – far cheaper than standard inkjet or laser printers.
There’s precious little else of interest here. Although you can connect and share the HP Smart Tank 210 over a wireless network, there’s no wired Ethernet port or memory card slot. This printer can’t automatically print on both sides of a sheet – you’ll need to manually turn pages over if you want to duplex.
Print speed and quality
- Leisurely black printing, slower still in colour
- Surprisingly good print quality
- Quiet
If you’re in a hurry, the HP Smart Tank 210 isn’t the printer for you. It’s not too bad when printing black text, managing to deliver a first page in 13 seconds, and five pages in 36 seconds – that’s equivalent to 8.3 pages per minute (ppm). It’s a bit faster on longer jobs, especially if you can live with slightly less good Draft quality: it printed 20 pages of text at a rate of 10.3ppm.
Things are much, much less impressive in colour. The HP Smart Tank 210 shuffled its feet when printing a lightweight page of black text and colour graphics, delivering a first copy in 29 seconds, and needing fully two minutes to squeeze out five copies. Our 20 page colour job inched along at a woeful 1.8ppm, one of the slowest results we’ve measured in recent years.
Commendably, HP has resisted the urge to de-content this printer in silly ways. It supports borderless printing on paper up to A4, and is happy to turn its hand to the family snaps. Using the Maximum DPI setting means you’ll get up to 4,800×1,200 dots per inch (dpi) quality, but you’ll have to wait a long time to see if it’s any good. I timed a borderless A4 print at a beard-lengthening 14 minutes and 23 seconds. The printer took almost half an hour to hand over six borderless postcard (6×4”) prints.
One of the benefits of a slow printer is that they tend to be quiet, and that’s certainly the case here. It’s easy to live with the Smart Tank 210 in a small home office, or even in the lounge.
Happily, what the 210 lacked in speed it made up for in print quality, beginning with dark, crisp black text that was easily good enough for formal letters or business use. Printing in Draft quality reduced the impact a little, but the results were still quite impressive. Colours stood up well on plain paper, too. Our test graphics looked fairly punchy, if a little undersaturated, and there was nothing to suggest these prints had come from a particularly low-end printer.
The real surprise came when I looked at the photos I’d printed. While no match for a high-end photo printer, these snaps were more than good enough for family scrapbooks or creative projects. The only real disappointment here was that skin tones all seemed a bit too pale, with the fairest people looking almost ashen in a couple of shots.
Should you buy it?
You’re looking for a bargain
The HP Smart Tank 210 is inexpensive by ink-tank standards, and ridiculously cheap to run by any measure. It’s a great choice where you want to keep print costs down.
You want speed, panache, or lots of features
This is a simple printer. It’s slow, it can’t copy or scan, and it’s missing duplex printing. If it sounds too basic for your needs you’ll need to spend more.
Final Thoughts
I can’t pretend this is the best printer I’ve ever reviewed. If I ran a small business it would be too slow, and I’d bemoan its lack of scan and copy functionality. Even for my home office I’d strongly prefer it to have automatic duplex printing – it’s an easy and convenient way to save on paper.
But park all that. Considering its purchase price and how much ink you get in the box, the HP Smart Tank 210 has to be one of the best value printers you can buy. If I was on a tight budget, and looking for a printer that could deliver a few thousand pages for as little as possible, this one would be right at the top of my list. That could make it ideal for students, writers, or anyone who needs to print a reasonable amount on the smallest budget possible.
FAQs
You’ll need to install the HP app on a PC, tablet or smartphone. Make sure Bluetooth is on, and that you’re connected to your wireless network, then click the plus button in the app. It should find the printer and configure it for your network.
For many users, yes. An ink-tank printer costs more to buy, but less to run. The more you print, the more likely you are to find that a tank-based device costs less to run than a conventional cartridge-based inkjet, or a laser printer. In practice the breakeven point is typically around 2,000 pages – if you print significantly more than that in the printer’s lifetime you should end up paying a lot less.
The flip side is that if you don’t print that much, or the printer fails before you can and isn’t under warranty, you’ll end up losing out. For this reason it’s ideal to try and get at least a couple of years’ warranty if you can.
Test Data
Full Specs
| HP Smart Tank 210 Review | |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | HP |
| Quiet Mark Accredited | No |
| Size (Dimensions) | 434 x 360 x 135 MM |
| Weight | 3.73 KG |
| ASIN | B0GSGG1F19 |
| Release Date | 2026 |
| First Reviewed Date | 13/08/2026 |
| Model Number | 4A8H8A |
| Ports | USB 2 |
| Connectivity | 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) |
| Ink Cartridge support | 32XL black ink (6,700 pages), 31 cyan, magenta and yellow inks (10,100 pages each) |
| Printer Type | Colour |
| Ink Type | Bottle |
| UK RRP | £130 |
| USA RRP | TBC |
| EU RRP | €156 |
| CA RRP | TBC |
| AUD RRP | TBC |
