Can AI make printing easier? HP thinks so, and it’s introduced a host of features for its printers under an umbrella it’s calling “HP AI” to prove it. To try it out, the company provided me with a printer that supports one aspect of HP AI—which can save a lot of paper, prevent reprint foibles, and cut the time it takes to print web pages.
I can report that, as with most AI efforts you’ve seen, it can be helpful, although there’s plenty of room for refinement and growth. But more on that later. Discussing the details of that particular tree won’t tell you much about the HP AI forest it fits into.
So, first off: What is HP AI? Unfortunately, it’s easy to get confused about what it actually is, what it does, and which printers it works with. That’s partly because it’s an overarching term that covers a broad range of features—both current and planned—and partly because HP tends to talk about it without always making a clear distinction between what it expects HP AI to eventually become, what it’s planning to roll out soon, and what’s actually available now.
Before I get to explaining the current features I saw, it’s worth discussing the first two categories—the forward-looking ones—so you can put my experience into the context of HP’s plans.
What HP AI Promises to Become
HP is aiming for a future where every HP AI feature will be working on every HP printer that can use that feature. If, for example, the feature requires a scanner and the ability to create user-defined commands to pick from a front-panel touch screen, it will, or at least should, work with any HP printer that has those two traits. Likewise, if the feature needs a scanner and the ability to send a scan to email, to a Word file, or to an Excel File, it should work with any all-in-one printer that can send scans to the appropriate format.
(Credit: David English)
HP declined to speculate on any possible features it may introduce over the long term. But it does plan to extend HP AI support to most of its relatively recent printers, as well as to all future models.
There’s a big limiting factor to all this, though: The printers must support the Printer Support Application (PSA) technology that Microsoft introduced in Windows 11. HP says that this would include most printers introduced over the last few years, but the older the printer, the less likely it is to work with PSA. Note also: Although PSA can work with Windows 10, HP strongly recommends against using its AI features in anything earlier than Windows 11.
HP AI: What’s on the Near Horizon
In the near term, HP says it will be adding features, extending the HP AI support to more printer models, and making HP AI available in countries beyond the US (the only place it’s available at this writing).
The current situation with HP AI and previously installed printers is more than a little surprising. At least with low-end printers (which means mostly inkjets), even if the model you have supports HP AI, you can’t add it if you originally installed the printer without it. (The situation is different for enterprise-level and some other lasers, as I’ll explain in the next section.)
This isn’t what you’d probably expect. If you installed the printer on September 14, 2025, one day before HP AI became available, you’d most likely assume that you could add the feature, even if it meant uninstalling the printer first, then reinstalling it on or after the 15th. After all, if you had simply waited till the 15th, the printer would have installed with the features. But it doesn’t work like that. HP says it will become possible in the near term to add the AI features to more previously installed printers among its supported models, but you’ll have to wait until the company makes some behind-the-scenes changes.
(Credit: HP)
There is no publicly available long-term road map for adding features. But HP says that along with the continuous improvements mentioned above, it will be adding a Precise Scan feature in the US and making its current Perfectly Formatted Prints feature (which HP refers to more informally as “Perfect Printing”) available in additional countries.
According to HP, the Precise Scan feature will deliver “clean, professional-quality scans in one seamless step with automatic image correction, smart file naming for quick retrieval, and easy multi-page capture.” The goal, in short, is to speed up the overall scanning process by handling more steps for you. The Perfectly Formatted Prints feature is the one I worked with. I’ll talk about it, along with other already available features, in the next section.
The State of HP AI Today: So, What’s Here Now?
HP AI today, as I experienced it, is…underwhelming. But it’s also intriguing. It works with a fairly long list of models; just buy one of the printers on the list and install the feature. To see the list of inkjets and low-end lasers (the models that support Perfect Printing), click here and then select Supported Printers. For HP’s two lists of compatible high-end lasers, click here, then scroll down and select “Which printer models support Editable OCR?” for the first list and “Which printer models support Scan to Email Summary Beta?” for the second.
As the names of the two selections imply, Editable OCR and Scan to Email Summary are the AI features supported by the models on the appropriate list, and the latter is in beta testing at this writing. One big difference between printers on these two lists and those on the first list is that for these models, HP has already made AI features available for printers that were originally installed without them.
I didn’t have a chance to work with either of those new features, though, because Editable OCR and Scan to Email Summary work only with select lasers at the moment, rather than with the inkjet that HP sent for testing. According to HP, Editable OCR transforms scans into editable Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. Broadly speaking, that’s what OCR programs like ABBYY FineReader were doing long before AI came on the scene.
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Scan to Email Summary brings something new to the table. According to HP, it goes beyond standard scan-to-email features by automatically generating appropriate subject lines for the emails, plus summaries of the content that it inserts into the message body. For printers that offer it, the option shows as a Scan to Email Summary shortcut on the front panel.
Trying Out ‘Perfect Printing’: Expect Some Imperfections
For my hands-on introduction to HP AI, the company sent me an HP Smart Tank 7602 All-in-One, which I originally reviewed back in 2022. The only AI feature it offers—so the only one I’ve actually worked with—is Perfect Printing, shown in the image below.
(Credit: HP/PCMag)
The idea: When you print from a web browser—Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome only—the AI tries to save you paper and ink by analyzing the page and offering choices about what to include, what to leave out, and what layout to use.
When Perfect Printing works (which it sometimes didn’t, in my tests), it absolutely succeeds in saving paper and ink. In one test run, I tried printing out my own review of the Smart Tank 7602. Without using the AI feature, the page count for the preview was 38 sheets. Perfect Printing reduced it to 14 sheets without my doing anything, and it gave me option buttons to adjust the layout, the content to print, and the text alignment and font size. After clicking a few choices—most notably, the No Images and 2 Columns buttons—I wound up with a page count of just five sheets.
(Credit: HP/PCMag)
You’ll notice that the option buttons in Perfect Printing aren’t always the same. The image below shows the choices Perfect Printing presented me for three different web pages: the Smart Tank 7602 review on the left, and two different recipe pages in the middle and right. As you can see, the buttons vary from page to page based on what the AI found during its analysis…
(Credit: HP/PCMag)
If you’re just looking to save on paper and ink, Perfect Printing can serve nicely—at least with webpages it handles well. Even HP acknowledges that the feature works better with some sites than others, and the company particularly recommends it for pages with recipes, weather, or travel information, among others.
Recommended by Our Editors
In a worst-case example, shown below, Perfect Printing was useless for formatting a 10-day forecast from Weather Underground. Even with the All Content button selected, it found only enough information for a single two-column page, and none of it had anything to do with weather…
(Credit: HP/PCMag/Weather Underground)
HP says it’s working to improve the AI’s performance and expand the range of sites it can handle. To make sure you know that, the Perfect Printing screen shows the message “HP AI is optimizing your layout—results may vary as it continues to learn and improve” while it keeps you posted on each step of its analysis and print optimization…
(Credit: HP/PCMag)
Indeed, there’s lots of room for improvement—or nits to pick, depending on your point of view. For example, you must go through two option screens after choosing the initial print command: the one that shows the optimized image—which you can see in several of the pictures above—and the one that comes before it, as shown just below…
(Credit: HP/PCMag/Allrecipes)
Note that this first screen lets you specify some basic settings, including, in this case, “Black and white printing,” “Print on both sides,” and “Flip on long edge.” But there can be glitches when moving from the first screen to the next one: In the bottom right of the second screen shown below, you can see that the two-sided settings were passed along, while the black-and-white setting was not.
(Credit: HP/PCMag/Allrecipes)
I also ran across some other issues. The options for my printer review included a No Images button, but even without picking it, the AI had already eliminated all of the printer photos without giving me the option to add them back. And when it leaves images in, as it did with the recipes page, the No Images choice is all or nothing, so you don’t have the option of printing just the images you want. (HP says it plans to address this issue.)
I also ran into inconsistent speed. Using the same webpage, the entire optimization sometimes took only a few seconds, sometimes took much longer, and sometimes—as shown below—returned the message, “Unable to optimize right now. HP AI is a new technology and will improve over time. You can still print using the original settings.” I’m guessing this is just a temporary glitch, typical of the growing pains for any new technology. But if you’re trying to print, say, a recipe for a meal you need to start cooking immediately, you may be less forgiving than I was in my testing.
(Credit: HP/PCMag)
HP AI: It’s an Early Work in Progress
Adding all this up, HP AI for printing is really in its infancy. What’s available now are baby steps, harbingers of things to come. (Pick your favorite cliché.) My sense is that no single functional capability here is going to wow anyone (despite HP’s briefing that shows testers exclaiming, “Wow!”).
That said, every little bit helps. As it stands now, Perfect Printing can quickly reformat some percentage of webpages to save paper and ink, though it may not give you exactly what you want, and it can miss the mark entirely on some pages. A collection of capabilities like this, as they get better and better, might well add up to make printing and scanning easier, faster, and far less frustrating overall.
Today’s HP AI, by itself, won’t make you love your printer. But if these early tricks keep improving, it might—finally!—give you fewer reasons to hate it.
About Our Expert
M. David Stone
Contributing Editor
Experience
Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I’ve covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I’ve written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.
I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who worked on every “Project Printer” blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year’s big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)
I’ve always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.
Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE’s Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).
Having covered a wide range of subjects, I’ve developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.
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