Many printers are chunky beasts, but the Canon Pixma Pro-200 is a true giant. It actually isn’t all that heavy at 14.1kg, considering its size, but it has an enormous footprint, particularly when its rear input and front output trays are fully extended. It’s 837mm wide so, before you buy, make sure you factor in the price of a second desk to put it on.

The reason for its enormity is its ability to print on A3 paper. Actually, this isn’t strictly true, since the Epson Photo HD XP-15000 can also print on A3 and is significantly more compact. However, we can’t bring ourselves to be too critical of the Pixma Pro-200’s proportions because it prints photos like an absolute dream.

Every photo we printed came out perfectly. Blacks are deep and rich; skin tones of all shades look natural; and colours are bright and pin sharp. Whether we printed on Canon’s own A3+ paper or cheap 6 x 4in photo paper, the results were simply wonderful. We tested it with a broad range of photos, from bright, colourful prints to misty landscapes requiring subtle colour transitions, and it produced everything exceptionally. If you’re looking for a printer that can print off superb quality photos at any size, this really is the one.

Let’s not pretend that such luxury isn’t expensive, however, with the Pro-200 only just falling short of the £500 mark after tax. It also comes with a high printing cost. Canon only quotes cartridge capacity in terms of printing A3 photos, which makes sense given the type of printer it is, but isn’t a fair comparison to the prices we’ve quoted elsewhere.

However, we’ve tried to work out comparable print costs based on that. If anything, it’s likely to work out cheaper than the 13.4p colour and 13p mono figures that we arrived at, but even so, it’s best paired with an ink tank workhorse if you print with any kind of volume. This simply isn’t an everyday printer.

The Pro-200 requires more ink cartridges than any of the other printers we've tested, with space for eight cartridges at a time. These are the usual four colours, along with grey, light grey, photo cyan and photo magenta. This might leave you working through more cartridges, but it’s clearly part of the process that produces exceptional prints.

If there was any proof needed that this isn’t an appropriate printer for regular document work, take a look at its performance in our speed tests: you will have to look hard to find a printer that doesn’t outpace it, with mono print speeds of 2.5ppm and colour speeds of 1.6ppm at normal quality. Even in draft mode, it could only manage mono prints at 3.9ppm, which even the sub-£100 HP DeskJet 4120e puts to shame. Text and regular graphics really aren’t its thing, and it lagged a long way behind other printers in these tests.

The one speed test the Pro-200 didn’t fall foul of was our 6 x 4in photo printing test, where it lined up around the middle of the pack compared to rival inkjets. Those that beat it weren’t the best at producing photos and we suspect that most users won’t mind waiting a little bit longer to get prints that look this good.

Setting up and connecting the printer is as simple as Canon’s consumer models, and most easily done via the setup website, where you choose your printer from a list and are then guided through the process with as much (or as little) hand-holding as you need. There’s a CD included in the box, however, if you prefer that method. The printer can connect to a computer via USB, or connect to a network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet.

Photography enthusiasts might miss the fact that this doesn’t have a scanner built-in, especially given the size. It can’t automatically duplex, either, but if that stops you from printing regular documents on the Pro-200 by mistake, then it’s probably a good thing.

We’ve given this printer a five-star rating because it produced by far the best photo prints we've seen recently and, if that’s important to you or your business, this is definitely the printer to choose. If you want something that’s more versatile but can still print in A3, we recommend choosing the Epson XP-15000 instead - it’s significantly cheaper to both buy and run, particularly if you need to use the same device to print both text and photos.

However, image enthusiasts who end up with one of these in their office won’t be disappointed, as it really does produce the most exceptional prints.

Canon Pixma Pro-200 specifications

If your expectation is that a printer capable of printing on A3 paper must be huge, Epson’s Photo HD XP-15000 will be a pleasant surprise. It barely takes up any more room than a standard A4 multifunctional device – at least, not until you fold out the support arm for the rear paper feed, which necessarily extends some distance above the printer to stop A3 sheets in portrait orientation from bending. Even with all its trays and supports extended, however, it’s a lot smaller than the Canon Pixma Pro-200.

It’s also rather sleek, with an attractive black finish and pleasingly rounded lines. It looks distinctly similar to its stablemate, the Epson Expression Home XP-4100, complete with colour display and control pad.

While it may be the size of a multifunctional device, there’s no scanner to be found here. However, unlike Canon’s A3 printer, the XP-15000 is much better suited to being the only printer in your office because it’s just as capable of printing out documents without wasting precious photo ink.

It doesn’t have a dedicated high-capacity black cartridge for mono printing, using the same ink for photos and text, but black prints still work out at a reasonable 3.5p each. The printer uses six colour cartridges in total, with the standard black, cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges joined by additional photo red and grey.

They make a great job of printing photos onto photo paper, too: you can look forward to deep blacks and rich, bright colours. It’s only unfortunate for this printer that we had prints from the Canon Pixma Pro-200 available to compare against, because while the XP-15000 comes close, it can’t quite match the quality of the Canon’s prints.

On the other hand, while its photo performance is good, it’s not quite as versatile for mixed jobs as other machines we’ve tested. While the XP-15000 printed black text well, it struggled with our mixed text and colour document – especially when we dropped paper quality. For example, when we printed duplex on cheap plain paper, the ink soaked through the page.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the fastest inkjet we’ve tested, and its mono printing - which we clocked at 8 pages per minute - is outpaced by the printers aimed more at offices than photographers’ studios. However, it held its own on the colour printing side with a speed of 5ppm, and remained competitively speedy when printing a stack of 6 x 4in photos.

If you’re serious about your A3 photo prints, it’s worth considering the Canon Pixma Pro-200 over the Epson because the results are definitely superior. However, the Photo HD XP-15000 runs it a close second, and its relatively modest size makes it a good choice for offices that are tight on space.

It’s not just the footprint that’s small either; the price is surprisingly agreeable for an A3 inkjet, so if you can’t part with the eye-watering amount Canon is charging, the Epson Photo HD XP-15000 is a good compromise.

Epson Photo HD XP-15000 specifications

There are plenty of wide-format plotters to choose from, but most of them are pretty ugly. HP aims to change that: its DesignJet Studio family provides an affordable entry point into large-scale printing and manages to look good at the same time.

Targeting architects and designers, the range comprises four models – two 24in-wide versions for A1 printing and two 36in-wide ones for A0. The distinctive designs include the choice of a smart steel finish for the upper surface, or a wood effect for the Scandinavian touch.

We tested the latter and we can honestly say it’s smart enough that you’ll want to show it off to your clients. There isn’t a hint of boring grey or black anywhere: the rest of the chassis is constructed of plain white plastic, with the printer sitting on a minimalist white tubular steel stand.

HP DesignJet Studio 24in review: Features and paper handling

Our review sample arrived fully assembled, but we doubt it will take you long to put the stand together with the supplied Torx T-bar driver. The printer sits comfortably on top, at around waist height, and is fixed firmly in place with metal brackets on each side. The lower section of the stand provides a thick canvas shelf for storing prints and paper supplies. Above there’s a pull-out bar with a spring-loaded canvas paper-catching tray, which can be pushed back under the printer when not in use.

The plotter offers three paper input methods. The main feeder supports paper rolls up to 610mm wide; remove this and you can feed single sheets into the feeder slot, or use the multi-sheet feeder for A3 or A4 media. The printer can automatically switch between sources as needed, or you can manually select a source from the 8cm colour touch screen on the top panel – and while this feels a little small compared to the size of the unit itself, it provides easy access to all settings.

HP DesignJet Studio 24in review: Drivers and software

The printer is well connected, with built-in Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi and USB 2, along with WiFi Direct and AirPrint support. We found software installation took around 10 minutes, with the single setup utility loading the Windows printer drivers plus HP’s Print Preview, Support Assistant and Click apps.

This last app makes light work of printing multiple designs, posters and documents. You can just drag and drop files into its interface, shuffle them around to suit, use the nesting feature to automatically arrange them to minimise paper wastage, choose your driver settings and hit print.

You can also use HP’s Application Centre cloud portal to create posters. Run this on a host with Click installed and, when you’ve created your work of art, it can be passed directly to Click for printing. Mobile users can get in on the act too with HP’s free Smart apps.

As you’d expect, the printer has its own web interface which provides plenty of information on supplies plus tools for wireless network configuration, automatic firmware updates and access to HP’s ePrint services. After enabling ePrint, we were able to log onto our HP Smart cloud account and assign a unique email address to the printer, allowing remote users to send it documents from anywhere.

HP DesignJet Studio 24in review: Consumables

The printer comes with a set of half-empty starter cartridges; after these run out it uses the same consumables as its DesignJet stablemates. The HP 712 C, M and Y ink cartridges cost around £30 each, while the 38ml and 80ml black cartridges will set you back £33 and £45 respectively.

How long these will last naturally depends on your usage. During our presentation and poster print tests we could see ink levels dropping noticeably, but this will be less of a concern with CAD drawings as they’re mostly white space: HP estimates that 20ml of ink will yield 101 A1 pages, based on drawings with 5.2% page coverage.

Cartridge replacement is easy. Simply lift the flap at the front and the carrier moves into view and presents itself ready to receive new supplies. Pressing down a cartridge releases it, and new ones are installed by pushing them in until they click. You can use a similar process to replace the entire print head as needed: a new one costs £160, and removing the old head is a simple matter of taking out the cartridges and flipping up a release lever.

HP DesignJet Studio 24in review: Print performance

HP claims the DesignJet Studio 24in can churn out an A1 print in 26 seconds. This may be technically true, but it doesn’t take into account all the paper-handling operations that have to happen before and after each print. We used the Click app to output an A1 blueprint in Fast mode and found ourselves having to wait around 50 seconds in total, while the printer lined the paper up, completed the print, dried the ink and finally sliced the paper off the roll.

Producing the same A1 print in Normal mode took a total of 90 seconds, and in Best mode the job took a far longer 370 seconds. For master copies, however, the wait may well be worth it, as output quality for plans, design blueprints and posters is excellent. Lines in our test blueprints were clean, sharp and straight with no noticeable dusting, and there wasn’t a hint of banding in large single colour blocks. Even in Normal mode, the printer produced bold, punchy posters and presentations, on paper weights ranging from 80gsm to 220gsm.

HP DesignJet Studio 24-in review: Verdict

HP’s DesignJet Studio is ideal for architects, designers and creative studios wanting an affordable wide-format printer. We found it easy to use, and very versatile thanks to HP’s range of desktop and mobile apps. It’s capable of producing very high quality professional prints – and it certainly doesn’t hurt that it’s one of the most stylish-looking plotters we’ve ever seen.

HP DesignJet Studio 24-in specifications

The HL-J6100DW is larger than your average desktop inkjet, but that’s because it can turn out A3 prints just as happily as A4. That’s a handy trick, and while the £322 price tag isn’t the lowest we’ve seen, it’s a lot cheaper than most A3 lasers.

Running costs are low too: the printer ships with standard high-yield ink cartridges, which print a mono page for a penny and a colour one for 5p. When these are exhausted, the super-high-yield replacements cut costs further to just 0.9p for mono and 4p for colour – and, to keep wastage to a minimum, the printer’s Secure Function Lock can restrict colour printing to specific users.

This makes the HL-J6100DW well suited to busy offices, and it comes with no fewer than three 250-page A4/A3 trays, plus a 100-sheet MTP for media up to 220gsm. If your needs are more modest, the HL-J6000DW has two trays for around £70 less, but note that you can’t upgrade its capacity.

The HL-J6100DW is well connected too, providing built-in USB 2 and both 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11n wireless (though you can’t use both together). Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint make it easy to print from mobile devices, and an integrated NFC reader enables tap-to–print operations. You can even securely print from a wide range of cloud storage providers, using the 6.8cm colour touchscreen.

Installation isn’t quite instant: after you’ve fitted the cartridges, the printer whirrs away priming its reservoirs, while the software loads the drivers and updates the printer’s firmware for you. It also installs Brother’s iPrint&Scan desktop utility, which provides quick access for printing Office documents and PDFs. The whole operation took us 12 minutes from start to finish; we then took a moment to install the iOS software on our iPad, which allowed us to send documents and image files directly from the tablet to the printer.

You’ll also need to spend a few minutes setting up any required cloud connections. This is done via Brother’s Web Connect portal, where you can choose from six providers, add your account details and obtain a unique 11-digit code to be entered at the printer’s panel. We had no problems configuring our Dropbox and Google Drive accounts and setting an access PIN for each account.

As usual with inkjets, performance is mixed. We achieved the quoted mono and colour print speeds of 22ppm and 20ppm at the driver’s “Normal” setting, but high-quality and double-sided printing is much slower: our Word document crawled out at just 2.5ppm in Best mode, while duplexing it in Normal gave us an average speed of 13ppm.

It was a similar story with our 24-page colour DTP document, which arrived at 18ppm in Normal but only 2ppm in Best mode. An A3 colour poster printed in Normal and Best modes took 22 seconds and 415 seconds respectively, while an A4 colour photo was delivered in 198 seconds.

Thankfully, print quality is good even at Normal quality, with 12pt text looking beautifully clean and sharp. Smaller fonts suffered from a little dusting, but this went away entirely in Best mode. Mono photos also revealed good levels of detail in Best mode, while colour ones were bright and sharp with no hint of edge bleeding or any of the banding that often afflicts lasers. That makes the HL-J6100DW an excellent choice for bold, punchy marketing material – as long as you aren’t in a hurry.

Overall, this is a fine inkjet, with plenty of capacity and the convenient option of A3 printing. High-quality output can be slow, but the results are unimpeachable and you’ll be hard-pushed to find running costs any lower than this.

Brother HL-J6100DW specifications

Brother’s X-Series MFC-J6947DW is a multifunction printer that thinks big. It combines large-format printing with an A3 colour flatbed scanner, a duplex automatic document feeder, integrated fax and three A3-sized 250-page trays.

Connection options abound: both Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi are built-in – although you can’t use both together – along with USB 2, Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint. An NFC reader is ready for tap-to–print manoeuvres, and Brother’s mobile apps extend print and scan functions to a variety of cloud storage providers.

There’s one aspect of the MFC-J6947DW that’s small, however, and that’s the price. At £412, the hardware is eminently affordable and it comes with high-yield ink cartridges, rather than the half-empty starters supplied by certain vendors. Even better, once you have exhausted these, you can replace them with super high-yield versions for costs as low as 0.8p per mono A4 page and 3.5p for colour.

Although this is a very economical printer, it’s not the fastest around, with quoted print speeds of 22ppm for mono and 20ppm for colour. We found that, in Normal quality mode, our 22-page Word document did indeed appear in exactly one minute – but speeds fell to 5ppm in Fine mode and only 2.3ppm in Best mode. Our 24-page colour DTP test print was delivered at 17ppm in Normal, but again Best mode was far slower at a mere 2ppm.

For everyday office printing, this isn’t a disaster. Normal mode gives perfectly acceptable results on 75gsm paper, producing sharp, clear 12pt text with only a hint of dusting. But quality drops off slightly at smaller sizes, so for maximum readability, you might need to use either Fine or Best mode, or consider switching to heavier paper.

Colour results are excellent. Our test charts exhibited beautifully smooth transitions across complex colour fades, and grey shades were impeccably balanced. Colour photos printed on 100gsm paper had plenty of detail with no banding, while switching to 160gsm semi-gloss paper gave us sharp definition without any edge bleeding. The rich colour quality from Brother’s Innobella ink made our sample A3 posters look vibrant and eye-catching, and these took a very reasonable 23 seconds to emerge in Normal mode – although the wait was a lengthy six minutes in Best mode.

As usual, double-sided operations are slower. Our 22-page Word document emerged at 13ppm in duplex mode, while a ten-page copy job completed at 13ppm single-sided and 5ppm in duplex-to-duplex modes.

The printer comes with all the software you’re likely to need, including Brother’s ControlCenter4 scan management and OCR utility, the iPrint&Scan workflow app for Windows and Nuance’s PaperPort 14 SE document management tool. A free iPrint&Scan app is also available for Android and iOS: we tried this out on our iPad and had no problem pulling in scans over the network, browsing our cloud storage accounts and printing selected files.

Access controls are taken care of by Brother’s Secure Function Lock 3 feature. You can create up to 100 function profiles, set page limits for individual users and restrict access to colour, scan, copy and fax functions. You can also decide who’s allowed to access Brother’s Secure Cloud Print portal, which allows users to print PDFs, images and Office documents directly from a browser. Touchscreen operations, meanwhile, include scanning to email and PIN-protected access to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, OneNote, Evernote and Box accounts for cloud printing and scanning.

If your top priority is speed, the Brother MFC-J6947DW is certainly not the ideal choice, but for small businesses on a budget it’s a superb MFP. It offers a wealth of features with good colour quality at a great price – and the running costs are hard to beat.

Brother X-Series MFC-J6947DW specifications

Oki's C834dnw is an A3-capable colour laser printer, designed to provide workgroups and small businesses with a flexible colour workhorse. Rated at up to 36 pages per minute (ppm) on A4, and 20ppm on A3, it should be quick enough to keep pace with the majority of small business printing roles. With a recommended monthly print volume of 10,000, it's also built for relatively busy applications.

The C834dnw supports both wired and wireless networking - including the 5GHz band - and it can duplex print on paper up to A3 in size. Other specification highlights include touch controls, a gigabyte of onboard memory, broad operating system support, and language emulations that include PCL6 and PostScript 3. There's a USB host port for walk-up printing, but for some reason it's hidden on the back panel.

The C834dnw can handle paper from A6 all the way up to 1.3m banners, accommodating weights up to 256gsm via a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. The main tray holds only 300 sheets - a ream would be better - but it can accept media up to a substantial 220gsm. The face-down output on the top panel is rated at 250 pages, while a face-up tray at the rear can hold 100 sheets. All inputs and outputs support A3 paper. The available accessories include cabinets, casters, and paper and banner feeders, giving good scope for expansion.

Oki C834dnw review: Setting up

Oki says that the C834dnw is the smallest A3 colour laser on the market, but at around 40kg it's strictly a two-person lift. The printer's weight and size will rule out small or flimsy worktop locations, and you'll need to leave more space to access its rear output and USB port. While the main tray slides out conventionally from the front, its length means you'll also need more clearance here than for an A4 printer.

This printer pairs a big mono LCD screen with touch controls that only light up when applicable. It's a clear and responsive system, but the menu itself could be more straightforward. While some admin functions such as Wi-Fi setup are visible on the main menu, and accessible to those with the admin password, others are sequestered specifically within the Admin Setup menu. It's here that we first discovered that the gigabit Ethernet interface arrives restricted to 100Mbit/sec - we can't imagine why.

Once connected, you can of course manage the C834dnw remotely via its web admin interface. Again, the layout has its quirks, but for more advanced configuration it's easier and less bleepy than the control panel menu.

Our review sample was previously used so we can't be definitive about its physical preparation, but its quick setup sheet suggests you just pull out the four drums, remove the protective paper and refit them. Oki's software installer is straightforward, providing consumer-style recommended and custom installs, but also a batch installer for wider deployments. Although there's no on-disc option to download and use the latest drivers, the process does include a firmware update.

Oki C834dnw review: Printing

We tested the C834dnw using a wired Ethernet connection. Our initial, text-only results were as expected, but we noticed pauses during our more complex colour graphics test, and began investigating possible causes. After discovering the restricted network speed we restarted our tests with gigabit Ethernet enabled and verified.

This printer's width means it can load A4 paper in portrait or landscape orientation. When changing orientation, it's important to also adjust the size wheel on the paper tray to avoid an error message that prevents printing. Using the default, faster, portrait setting, the C834dnw delivered a first page of black text in 16 seconds from standby, going on to reach 27.3ppm over 25 pages. Our print tests include the time taken to spool and send the print job, which is less of a factor over longer jobs. Sure enough, over 100 pages it reached 31.9ppm, approaching Oki's claimed speed.

Colour print speeds were disappointing, however. Even using gigabit Ethernet, the C834dnw still encountered pauses, and could reach only 16.9ppm over our 24-page test - less than half its rated speed. Perhaps not surprisingly given that it uses the same graphics-rich document, our standard duplex test completed at a lacklustre 9.2 images per minute (ipm). We retested using a 50-page text document for a far more impressive 22.9ipm. The C834dnw was more competitive on A3, delivering text at 17.0ppm, colour graphics at 13.8ppm, and duplex colour graphics at 8.2ipm.

Graphics were generally excellent at the default settings, with a glossy toner sheen and punchy, accurate colours - although we noticed a breakdown in a smooth shade progression on one of our presentation slides. Black text looked great to the naked eye, although under magnification we could see some jaggedness at 8pt, becoming much more significant down to 5pt. Colour photos, printed at the maximum 600x1,200 dots per inch (dpi), looked promising, but were spoiled slightly by a subtle grid-like texture that wasn't present at the default 600x600dpi.

OKIC834dnw review: Verdict

The C834dnw uses separate toner and drums for each colour. Each drum is rated for 30,000 pages, and while you can buy toners good for 5,000 or 10,000 pages the ones in the box are rated for 2,500. Running costs work out at 8.8p per A4 page, of which the black component is a reasonable 1.2p, but strike out the 80,000-page transfer belt and 100,000-page fuser and costs fall to 6.8p and 0.7p respectively.

Like most laser-class workgroup printers, power consumption for the C834dnw peaks at more than a kilowatt: we measured 1,376 watts, dropping to 6 watts when power saving and 4 watts during sleep. Even when switched 'off' via the electronic power switch, the printer consumed a single watt.

The C834dnw is relatively compact and flexible, with various expansion options that should help it scale to support a growing business. While the absolute quality of its text falls far short of the best, its print quality is undoubtedly good enough to service most mainstream office printing and larger graphical jobs. At moderate volumes and especially in black it's reasonably affordable to run, but much less so than an equivalent inkjet. Overall it's worthy, but not exceptional.

Verdict

Oki's C834dnw is flexible and delivers fairly good results, but it's not especially fast or cheap to run.

Brother's Business Smart X-Series printers aim to deliver affordable A3 printing to SMBs on a tight budget. The MFC-J6945DW on review shows Brother isn't kidding around: this A3 colour inkjet MFP only costs just over 300 and sweetens the deal further with laser-trouncing running costs.

No half-empty starter cartridge trickery here either - this printer ships with Brother's standard high-yield ink cartridges. Once you've used these up, replace them with the super high yield versions and you'll pay 0.9p for an A4 mono page and only 3.6p for colour - costs no laser MFP in this price bracket can match.

The MFC-J6945DW is also well-connected; it offers 10/100 Ethernet, 11n wireless, NFC and USB 2, WiFi Direct plus AirPrint are present and correct, it supports Brother's extensive range of mobile apps and it works with a heap of cloud storage providers.

Installation on the lab's wired network was swift and the printer also checked for new firmware and upgraded itself with a couple of button presses. Desktop tools include Brother's ControlCenter4 (CC4) scan management utility, its Windows iPrint&Scan workflow app and Nuance's PaperPort 14 SE document management software. We also used the iPrint&Scan iOS app to scan documents to our iPad, browse our cloud storage accounts and choose files to print.

Brother's Web Connect portal makes light work of setting up direct scanning to the cloud. Choose from the eight supported providers, add your account details and enter the unique 11-digit code provided at the printer's panel.

The Secure Cloud Print service allows you to print Office, PDF and graphics files over the internet using a web browser. Enter and bookmark the printer's ID URL shown in its colour touchscreen, choose a local file, send it and enter the unique six-digit password at the printer to release it.

Brother claims A4 mono and colour print speeds of 22ppm and 20ppm but these are only achievable with the driver's Standard setting. Our 22-page Word document was printed at 22ppm in Standard mode but speed tumbled to 5ppm for Fine mode and 2.3ppm in Best mode.

A 24-page colour DTP print returned 17ppm in Standard and a pedestrian 2ppm in Best mode. A3 colour posters took 22s for Standard and just over 6m for Best while borderless A4 colour photos on glossy paper arrived in 3m 44s.

Duplexing our 22-page document print in Normal mode returned 13ppm while 10-page copies using the scanner's duplex ADF were timed at 13ppm and 5ppm for single-sided and duplex-to-duplex modes. Sound levels during testing weren't excessive as printing produced 66dB from one metre and copying 68dB.

Text quality depends entirely on paper weight and resolution with 75gsm paper and Normal mode revealing significant smearing and dusting on fonts smaller than 12pts. This cleared slightly at Best mode with 100gsm paper producing noticeably cleaner results.

No such problems with colour printing - our reports, photos and A3 posters at Best mode exhibited excellent levels of detail. They stood out with bold, punchy colours while large areas of single colours such as skies were as smooth as silk with no banding evident.

Access controls are good too. Enabling the printer's Secure Function Lock from its web interface allows you to decide who can print in colour and use functions such as scanning and copying. This links up with the driver's user authentication feature which can also be used to PIN protect confidential prints.

Small businesses that want affordable A3 colour printing won't find a better alternative to Brother's MFC-J6945DW. High resolution prints are slow but colour quality is very good, running costs are remarkably low and cloud support is outstanding.

Verdict

Small businesses that want affordable A3 colour printing won’t find a better alternative to Brother’s MFC-J6945DW. High resolution prints are slow but colour quality is very good, running costs are remarkably low and cloud support is outstanding.

4,800 x 1,200dpi A3 colour inkjet MFP

1,200 x 2,400dpi A3 colour flatbed scanner

512MB RAM

22/20ppm A4 mono/colour

9.3cm colour touchscreen

10/100 Ethernet

11n wireless

33.6Kb/sec fax

NFC

USB 2

duplex

2 x 250-page A3 paper trays

100-page MPT, 50-page DADF

max. rec. monthly duty cycle, 2,000 pages

575 x 477 x 379mm WDH

24.2kg

1yr RTB warranty

RUNNING COSTS

Super high yield ink:

K (6K pages), £51

C, Y, M (5K pages), £45 each

Overall cost per A4 page: mono, 0.9p; colour, 3.6p

Nearly everything about Epson's mighty WorkForce Pro WF-C8690DTWF is big. From its desktop bending 57.4kg to multiple A3+ paper inputs and huge 75,000 page maximum monthly duty cycle, this 4-in-1 colour inkjet MFP is geared up for print-hungry workgroups.

The review model has 250-page and 500-page A3+ paper trays, plus an 80-sheet rear MPT supporting A3+ sizes and 256gsm paper. You can add two more 500-sheet trays and bring the whole thing up to eye level with a wheeled floor cabinet.

The printer is small where it counts though, as the high-capacity DuraBrite Pro ink tanks deliver running costs that beat most lasers in this price range. Choose the Epson XXL cartridges and you'll be paying only 0.9p for a mono A4 page and 5.1p for a colour one.

Epson didn't include a setup disc with the demo printer so we had to download all drivers and software from its support site. Usefully, the update utility upgraded the printer's firmware, loaded the latest drivers and added fax driver, OCR and desktop scan utilities, as well as the Document Capture Pro tool which provides smart scan automation features.

On first contact with the printer's web console we found that the colour ink tanks were empty so these had to be replenished with new ones. A print quality test also showed the black nozzles were partially blocked and required a cleaning cycle to clear them.

Epson claims a top A4 speed of 24ppm but we could only achieve this in Standard mode with our 24-page Word document dropping to 7.5ppm in High mode. Speed dropped further for our 24-page colour DTP document, which averaged 20ppm and 6.6ppm for Standard and High modes.

Our A3 test poster took 22 seconds to print on plain paper and 130 seconds on photo paper while an A4 glossy photo took 80 seconds. Duplexing our 24-page Word document mustered 16ppm and copies of 10-pages using the scanner's DADF were timed at 16.2ppm and 7.3ppm for single-sided and duplex-to-duplex operations.

The copy tests produced the most noise as we recorded peak levels of 68dB from one metre. On the plus side, we measured the printer consuming no more than 45W whilst printing.

Text quality is variable: the Standard mode produced the best results with High mode introducing a slight dusting on smaller fonts. Epson scores higher for marketing material with both mono and colour photos revealing high levels of detail, no edge bleeding and none of the banding that often afflicts lasers.

Cheap 75gsm paper won't do for photos as it'll wrinkle but 100gsm paper produces far better results. A3 posters are also pleasing to the eye with the DuraBrite Pro ink delivering rich, vibrant colours that really make them stand out.

The printer's colour touchscreen makes light work of copy, scan and fax tasks. Scans can be sent to email addresses, SMB and FTP network locations or pushed to desktops running Document Capture Pro where we could browse them and remotely select their local scan automation jobs.

Along with allowing remote users to email print jobs to the printer, Epson's Connect cloud service makes scanning even more interesting. Cloud destinations such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Box can be created from the portal, pushed to the printer and selected directly from its touchscreen.

Its low print speeds don't justify the high price tag but Epson's WorkForce Pro WF-C8690DTWF makes up for this with impressively low running costs and a huge duty cycle. Good output quality makes it a fine choice for producing marketing material and Epson offers extensive cloud support and a great scan software bundle.

Verdict

Its low print speeds don’t justify the high price tag but Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF-C8690DTWF makes up for this with impressively low running costs and a huge duty cycle. Good output quality makes it a fine choice for producing marketing material and Epson offers extensive cloud support and a great scan software bundle.

4800 x 1200dpi A3+ colour inkjet printer

600dpi flatbed colour scanner

24ppm A4 mono/colour

12.7cm colour touchscreen

Gigabit

11ac wireless

NFC

33.6Kbps fax/modem

USB 3 host, USB 2

Duplex

250/500-page A3+ paper trays

85-page A3+ rear MPT, 50-page DADF

Rec monthly duty cycle, 5,000 pages

613‎ x 755 x 620mm (WDH)

57.4kg

3yr on-site warranty

RUNNING COSTS

XXL ink: K (11.5K pages), £82

C, Y, M (8K pages), £112 each

Maintenance box (20K pages), £29

Overall cost per A4 page:

Mono, 0.9p;

Colour, 5.1p

There'll be a moment, after a long day, when you'll stop believing that Epson's WorkForce WF-7710DWF is a big, A3-capable multifunction peripheral, and instead start thinking that you've shrunk. It's exactly like a scaled up version of a regular inkjet MFP, with an A3-capable scanner, an A3+-capable printer, and a big colour touchscreen with chunky buttons.

Epson WorkForce WF-7710DWF review: Features

Happily, this Alice-in-Wonderland growth hasn't taken out any useful features: the WF-7710DWF can connect to a wired or wireless network, and print, scan, copy and fax single- or double-sided A3 documents.

With support for the cloud and mobile devices, and a USB port for walk-up scans or prints, it's hard to think of anything it doesn't do, although if you need a second paper cassette you'll have to spend another 30 or so on the otherwise identical WF-7720DTWF.

Epson WorkForce WF-7710DWF review: Performance

The WF-7710DWF prints a little faster than we'd expect from a typical A4 equivalent. It finished our 25-page black text test at 17ppm, and completed our more complex colour graphics test at a competitive 5.4ppm. It duplex-printed a 10-side colour document on to five sheets at a fair rate of 3.2ipm.

On A3 paper, five pages of black text completed in 43 seconds, while five graphics-rich colour pages took just over two minutes. Scaled up, our duplex test completed at 2.2ipm: that may be slow, but very few other printers can even print on both sides of an A3 sheet.

Both this MFP's scanner and its 35-page automatic document feeder top-out at A3, not A3+, but again, the list of MFPs that can duplex-scan A3 pages is a short one. Capture speeds were reasonably fast, with a preview of a 150dpi A4 image completing in just eight seconds. Even a 1,200dpi, 6x4in photo scan took less than a minute.

A single copy took nine seconds in black or 23 seconds in colour. Using the ADF, 10-page A4 copies needed one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half minutes respectively. This is one of very few devices that can complete an automatic, double-sided copy of a double-sided A3 document: we timed 10 sides on five pages at 4m 15s.

Epson WorkForce WF-7710DWF review: Results

For the most part, the results were great. Scans were as good as we expect from an Epson device, with good colour accuracy and excellent dynamic range. Plain paper prints were generally very good, too, with firm black text and bold colours, but duplex prints and copies were noticeably fainter, although you can increase the intensity of both at the cost of slower prints.

Photo prints aren't the WF-7710DWF's fort, however: although its pigment-based inks are fine for matt media, they can't produce a shiny finish on gloss paper.

Like a large minority of printers, the WF-7710DWF began warning of low ink during our standard tests, and two cartridges went on to run out during our extra A3 testing.

Replacement colour inks are available in standard or XL sizes, and there's an XXL black cartridge. Worked out for the highest capacities, running costs are a quite reasonable 7.1p per A4 page.

Epson WorkForce WF-7710DWF review: Verdict

Sensibly priced, with good performance, good results, reasonable running costs and a great selection of features, the WorkForce WF-7710DWF is an excellent choice for a micro-office that works extensively with A3 documents. It's a Best Buy.

Verdict

Sensibly priced, with good performance, good results, reasonable running costs and a great selection of features, the Epson WorkForce WF-7710DWF is an excellent choice for a micro-office that works extensively with A3 documents. It’s a best buy.

HP's OfficeJet Pro 7720 is an inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP) designed for moderate use in a small office. It's a bit bigger than the norm because it can print - but not scan or copy - on A3 paper. Few authorities would agree with HP's description of this as constituting wide format, but it's still a useful trick, particularly if you ever need to printd detailed plans, posters or spreadsheets at a more practical size.

Aside from A3 printing, the OfficeJet Pro 7720 supports wired and wireless network connections, can print on both sides of a sheet of paper (duplex, and has a 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for automated, multi-page faxes or copies.

Direct jobs such as copies and faxes are controlled through the obligatory touchscreen interface. The only significant omissions are duplex scanning - so you can't make automatic double-sided copies or faxes - and a USB port for direct printing or scanning.

HP OfficeJet Pro 7720: Software options

We've never been particularly keen on HP's oversimplified print and scan software, but the latest iterations aren't all that bad. On Windows 10 the print driver is neatly laid out over several tabs, but on Windows 7 you have to dive into unfriendly Advanced settings to change paper size. HP's TWAIN scan interface no longer induces fury, but it's still our least favourite among major manufacturers. The MFP's touch interface is decent, but its Copy page includes only a single start button that defaults to colour. If you want a black-only copy, you'll have to fiddle with the settings.

These are fairly minor grumbles, and in use the OfficeJet Pro 7720 quickly makes up for them. It raced through our 25-page text test at 22.7 pages per minute (ppm, and reached an impressive 8.6ppm on our more demanding colour graphics test. On A3 paper, five A3 pages of text took 26 seconds, while five graphics-rich pages took a minute. Even at the Maximum DPI setting, each 6x4in colour photo took little more than a minute.

Scans were swift, too, with A4 jobs at up to 300dpi taking around 10 seconds. Scanning a 6x4in photo at 600dpi took 19 seconds, and at 1,200 this took 63 seconds. At 16 seconds in black and 22 seconds in colour, single-page photocopies weren't especially fast, but 10-page copies from the ADF were competitive, taking one minute and 23 seconds in black, and one minute and 41 seconds in colour.

HP OfficeJet Pro 7720: Print quality

Print quality was generally excellent on plain paper, with photo prints being good for an office device. Copies were fine, if slightly drab, while scans were above average: colours were accurate and the focus was reasonably sharp, but this MFP struggled to capture subtle differences in the darkest shades. Enabling its Auto Exposure feature just tended to wash out the lightest regions, too.

The OfficeJet Pro 7720 accepts a range of ink cartridges, with the highest-capacity black supply stretching to 3,000 pages, and colour cartridges available at 1,600 pages. Calculated for these, running costs work out at a very competitive 5p per page.

Overall, this MFP finds a good balance between price, performance and features. If your home or small business needs A3 printing, and can live without duplex faxes or copies, it's an excellent choice.

Verdict

Overall, this MFP finds a good balance between price, performance and features. If your home or small business needs A3 printing, and can live without duplex faxes or copies, it's an excellent choice.

Prices for A3 colour printers are at an all-time low - so now's the perfect time to move your marketing, brochure and poster production in-house.

That's not to say that commercial print shops no longer have a role; they can still be the right answer for high-volume, one-off runs of specialist prints. But outsourcing means dealing with lead times, shipping costs and the temptation to pay for copies you don't need to get volume discounts. In-house printing gives you more control over your processes, and reduces costs in the medium term. You can cut wastage by printing only what you need, when you want it - and have it ready for distribution immediately.

That being the case, it's no surprise that A3 printers are fast becoming commodity items. Intense competition keeps driving printing costs down, while print technologies are constantly improving: many printers are capable of producing stunning results that look just as good as anything you'd get from a professional print bureau.

Pump up the volume

It's important to remember that the cost of the printer itself may be almost insignificant compared to your ongoing costs. Cheap printers often require more expensive consumables; for high print volumes this can hugely increase your total cost of ownership.

A case in point: we've tested big departmental lasers that produces mono and colour pages for 0.32p and 2.33p, alongside much cheaper LED printers that'll do them for 1.3p and 7.4p. If your workforce prints two quires of A4 colour pages every day for a year, the LED printers will end up costing you 1,350 in consumables - whereas the lasers will do them for 425. Scale up to an A4 ream per day and yearly colour running costs for the LED printers hit 13,505, versus 4,252 for the lasers. That's almost the total cost of the lasers recouped in a year.

Clearly, before you spend a penny, it's vital to calculate your page counts and colour usage requirements. Remember though that average running costs are calculated using 5% coverage on A4 paper. If you're printing a lot of A3 colour posters and brochures, consumable usage will be much higher.

Good technology

Conventional laser printers are a great choice for business printing, as they're fast, unfussy about paper quality and very reliable. They're affordable, too: A3 models are quite a bit more expensive than their A4 counterparts, but still well within reach of even the smallest business.

LED printers aren't that different to lasers, but have fewer moving parts and cost less to manufacture. They require more consumables than lasers, so printing costs can be higher, but speed and colour quality are just as good.

There are still good reasons to go the inkjet route. The latest business models combine high-capacity ink tanks with big duty cycles, and are a natural choice for high resolution photo printing. Be wary of the print speeds quoted by inkjet manufacturers, however: these are often based on low-resolution draft prints. Printing at the highest resolution is often markedly slower - we've seen some models that, in high-quality mode, deliver less than one tenth of the quoted top speeds.

Printer or MFP?

Aside from regular printing duties, a multi-function printer (MFP) comes with additional useful capabilities. Some are even endowed with big A3 colour flatbed scanners, teamed up with automatic document feeders (ADFs) for copy and scan functions.

If you don't already have a scanner, this can open up new ways to handle documents, and cut down on wastage by allowing you to digitise documents for archival and send scanned documents as emails. Some units come with fax capabilities as well - a technology that still, even in 2017, has a place in many industries.

MFPs may also come with cloud-enabled features, allowing them to link up with services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. This allows users to print documents stored in the cloud, and scan documents directly to their accounts.

All business-grade A3 printers and MFPs come with built-in Ethernet, but it's worth looking for wireless capabilities as well. Even if the printer itself can be conveniently hooked up to a physical connection, features such as AirPrint and WiFi Direct make it easy for users to print documents directly over the network from mobile devices. Consider NFC too, to enable "tap-to-print" services.

Curb their enthusiasm

One potential risk of installing a high-quality colour printer in your office is that employees may be tempted to use it for personal prints. If you don't want your business paying for this, then look for a printer with proper access-control features. For example, Brother's Secure Function Lock can restrict colour printing, enforce per-user page limits and require NFC ID tags for local authentication. Kyocera's ColourControl HyPAS app can require users to enter a PIN at the printer's control panel to unlock colour usage.

You can also reduce costs by using cheap 75gsm paper for draft documents, and print in duplex (double-sided) by default. We've yet to see a printer that can enforce duplex printing, but encouraging users to do this can slash your paper usage, which saves you money and is better for the environment.

A final thing to think about is security. If you're storing personally identifiable information on the printer, this will come under the remit of the GDPR in May 2018. Internet-connected printers can be easily hacked, so make sure you change all default passwords immediately, and if you're choosing a printer with internal storage, make sure it can be encrypted.

A good A3 printer can make insourcing for SMEs a reality; many are capable of producing high-quality marketing material on demand. Whether you choose laser, LED or inkjet, they can often offer an impressive range of features. Shop around, and see which one will bring out your inner designer.

Brother's MFC-J6930DW is a business inkjet with connections. This A3 MFP comes as standard with Fast Ethernet, 11n wireless, NFC and USB 2, it supports WiFi Direct plus AirPrint, and works happily with more cloud and mobile services than you can shake a stick at.

It also dispels the myth that business inkjets are more expensive to run than lasers. Once you've used up the standard ink cartridges, opt for the high-yield versions and you'll get an A4 mono page for only 0.8p and a colour one for 4.2p.

At 23kgs, this inkjet is no lightweight and offers two 250-sheet input trays that can both handle A3 paper. The rear 100-sheet multipurpose tray provides a flatter paper path through the printer and along with A3 sizes, it accepts heavy 260gms paper.

The A3 flatbed scanner has a high 1200 x 4800dpi optical resolution and is teamed up with a 50-page ADF that has its own sensor for one-pass duplex scans. The colour LCD touchscreen rounds the picture out nicely, and we found it provides easy access to all print, scan, copy and fax functions.

It also makes light work of connecting to cloud services, with quick access options for box, Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox, Facebook, Flickr, OneNote and OneDrive services. We selected Google Drive, loaded Brother's registration web portal on a logged in desktop, entered the unique code at the printer and enabled PIN protected access - simple.

Wireless access can be set up from the printer's panel but you can't have the wired connection active simultaneously. NFC provides tap to print and scan options for Android devices only but with AirPrint enabled, we could print directly from our iPad.

Using Brother's iPrint&Scan iOS app, we scanned documents to our iPad and browsed our Google, Dropbox, Evernote, OneDrive and iCloud accounts and chose files to print. We also used the Windows Phone version to network connect to the printer for scan and print operations.

So far, the picture looks rosy - but the bad news is the quoted print speeds are only possible on the driver's draft Fast mode. Even these aren't achievable in the real world, and our 35-page Word document with a full page text spread took 75 seconds for 28ppm.

Stepping up to Normal mode returned 18ppm while the Best setting took nearly 16 minutes for a sluggardly 2.2ppm. Similarly, our 24-page colour DTP print returned a pedestrian 1.9ppm in Best mode while a colour A3 poster on glossy paper took over 6 minutes to emerge.

Duplexing our 35-page print in Normal mode returned a noisy 10.4ppm. The scanner's top resolution delivers excellent quality but its ADF is slow, with a 10-page single-sided copy returning 12.2ppm and a duplex-to-duplex copy mustering only 5.3ppm.

Brother rewarded our patience as print quality is very good. Text at 12pts is clean and sharp with only smaller fonts exhibiting a slight dusting while mono photos revealed good levels of detail in Best mode.

The edge bleeding and print head scuffing we saw with Brother's old inkjet MFPs was mercifully missing, and the MFC-J6930DW delivered excellent detail, good contrast and bright colours for A4 photos and A3 posters. High resolution A3 prints have an unhealthy appetite for ink, but you can enable the Secure Function Lock from the web interface and restrict its usage to specific users.

Print speeds are entirely dependent on the chosen resolution but there's no denying this is one of the best connected MFPs. Print and scan quality are good enough for design work, running costs are commendably low and at only 177, the MFC-J6930DW represents great value for budget-conscious small businesses.

Space-poor SMEs that want a compact A3 colour LED printer will be tempted by Oki's C843dn as it's probably the smallest on the market. It'll also please the budget-conscious amongst them as it's one the cheapest as well.

Build quality isn't compromised either; the C843dn weighs in at 40kg, so it'll need to sit on a very sturdy desk. Paper choices start with a single 300-sheet A3 lower tray and 100-sheet A3 MPT, to which you can add three extra 530-sheet trays and a wheeled base.

Sitting at the top of Oki's C800 family, the C843dn is the only member with a true 1200dpi print engine. It made its mark in our output quality tests by delivering pin-sharp text down to the smallest of font sizes and mono photos with good levels of detail in darker areas.

Colour output is equally good and we noticed immediately that the unsightly cross-hatching that afflicts Oki's lower-end LED printers wasn't evident at all. The level of detail in photographs is good with the rich colour saturation making our A3 posters pack a real punch.

The driver's Photo Enhance feature made noticeable differences to our A4 photos and A3 posters by sharpening focus and increasing depth. The only drawback is it mucks around with contrast so some detail in darker areas was lost.

Oki's LED technology is less complicated than lasers and provides a straight paper path through the printer. Opening the rear paper output and front MPT allows the printer to handle heavy 256gsm paper and print banners up to 1,321mm long.

Print speeds are on the money - although for A4 prints, they will only be achieved with the paper placed lengthways across the tray. With the short side towards the paper path we saw A4 print speeds drop to 18ppm.

The integral duplexer also returned A4 speeds of 18ppm and it's quite clever as it reverses the paper inside the printer instead of snatching it back at the last second. When changing paper sizes, remember to set the dial on the paper tray as a mismatch will cause the printer to drop back to the MPT.

There are a lot of consumables, with image drums and toner cartridges for each colour plus a fuser unit and transfer belt. Even so, for a budget-priced A3 printer, running costs are reasonable, with a mono A4 page costing 1.3p and colour one costing 7.4p.

The C843dn can be registered directly with Google Cloud Print using the small LCD display panel, but no other cloud features are supported. AirPrint is also off the menu, so we couldn't access the printer via our iPad or use Oki's iOS Mobile Print app. Although it discovered the printer, it refused to connect to it.

The Windows driver offers good levels of control over the printing process with options for duplexing, creating booklets or posters and PIN securing jobs for walk up and print tasks. Further printing permissions can be enforced by creating users from the web interface and assigning roles to determine whether they can use colour.

The optional 16GB SDHC card increases security further with encryption and secure erase of confidential print jobs. Wireless costs an extra 34 and requires a small 11n card fitted into a slot in the side of the printer.

Oki's C843dn is a compact A3 LED printer that brings in-house colour poster and brochure production within the budgets of small businesses. High running costs make it best suited to moderate print volumes, but it has a good turn of speed and there are no compromises with print quality either.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 274

Verdict

Oki's C843dn is a compact A3 LED printer that brings in-house colour poster and brochure production within the budgets of small businesses. High running costs make it best suited to moderate print volumes, but it has a good turn of speed and there are no compromises with print quality either.

1200 x 1200dpi A3 colour LED printer

512MB RAM (max 768MB)

35/20ppm A4/A3

Gigabit

Duplex

2 x USB 2

300-sheet A3 input tray

100-sheet MPT

Max. rec. monthly duty cycle, 5,000 pages

449 x 552 x 360mm WDH

40kgs

3yrs extended warranty (on registration)

Epson's WorkForce Pro WF-8010DW is ready for hard hitting workgroups as this A3+ inkjet has an enormous 65,000 page maximum monthly duty cycle. It teams this up with impressively low running costs and also claims a speedy 34ppm top speed for both A4 mono and colour prints.

It's aimed at businesses that want plenty of paper choices to hand, as the single 250-sheet A3+ base cassette can be augmented with three more 500-sheet trays. The large rear MPT has room for 80-sheets up to A3+ sizes and it can handle 256gms heavyweight paper as well.

The WF-8010DW uses the same PrecisionCore print head technology as Epson's commercial printers while its high-capacity DuraBrite Pro ink tanks deliver laser-matching print costs. Go for the high-yield XL cartridges and you'll pay a penny for a mono A4 page and 4.3p for a colour one.

Deployment got off to a poor start as the setup disk wasn't included, so we had to download all the drivers and software from Epson's support site. The Windows drivers and software update tool loaded without any problems but Epson's Easy Photo Print utility failed to work until we had located and installed the separate Easy Print module.

Our first test print also showed the black ink nozzles were partially blocked so we had to run a wasteful cleaning cycle and nozzle pattern test to remedy this. With its nose wiped clean, the printer then proceeded to produce an impressive print quality.

The driver's Standard mode delivered the sharpest text, as we found the High setting left a slight dusting around smaller fonts. The latter produced superior mono photos though, with good levels of detail and lacking the banding evident in Standard mode prints.

Stay on the High road for colour, as you'll be greeted with bold, punchy reports and sharp, glossy photos with no banding or edge bleeding. The rich colour quality from the DuraBrite Pro ink really made our test A3 posters look good and we found them vibrant and eye-catching.

You won't have to wait long either; A3 posters on 100gms paper at the High setting took 16 seconds to produce. Even on premium glossy photo paper, the printer delivered an A3 colour poster in 129 seconds and an A4 photo in 75 seconds.

Alas, for general office printing, we couldn't get close to Epson's claimed speeds as even on the driver's Economy setting, our 34-page Word document returned a noisy 22ppm. Best mode dropped this to 12.5ppm whilst duplexing the document in Standard mode returned a cacophonous 16ppm.

The printer is well connected, although you can't have wired and wireless connection active together. We printed directly from our iPad over AirPrint and WiFi Direct and used Epson's iPrint iOS app to print files straight from our Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote and OneDrive accounts.

The Epson Connect cloud service allows remote users to email print jobs as attachments to the printer. After registering, we received a unique email address for the printer and used our account portal to create approved sender lists and decide which features they could access.

Businesses with a fleet of Epson printers will find the Device Admin tool useful as it allows them all to be managed from one interface. Along with scheduled usage reports, it can also apply device templates to maintain settings consistency.

With its huge duty cycle, the WF-8010DW has the staying power to keep up with print hungry workgroups. Real world print speeds are well down on those quoted, but for a sub-300 A3 printer, colour quality is very good - and it's cheap to run as well.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 274

Verdict

With its huge duty cycle, the WF-8010DW has the staying power to keep up with print hungry workgroups. Real world print speeds are well down on those quoted, but for a sub-£300 A3 printer, colour quality is very good - and it’s cheap to run as well.

4800 x 1200dpi A3+ colour inkjet printer

512MB RAM

34ppm A4 mono/colour

Gigabit

11n wireless

WiFi Direct

AirPrint

USB 2

Duplex

250-sheet A3+ paper tray

80-sheet A3+ rear MPT, max monthly duty cycle, 65,000 pages

567‎ x 570 x 378 mm WDH

26kgs

1yr on-site warranty

Kyocera's TASKalfa MFPs target businesses rationalising their printer fleet and those tiring of the high costs of outsourcing. As the entry point of a new TASKalfa A3 family, the 2552ci combines print, copy and scan features with a 1200dpi engine, a versatile range of options and top print quality.

True, the 25/12ppm A4/A3 print speeds are hardly earth-shattering but it's more about what you can do with this printer. Designers with an eye on the big picture will warm to the SRA3 support, as the 2552ci can use 450 x 320mm paper for in-house borderless prints and posters.

The base system comes with 500-sheet A4 and A3/SRA3 paper drawers, to which three high-capacity options can be added for a total of 7,150 pages. You have a choice of three document processors for the A3 flatbed colour scanner, internal and external document finishers, a job separator, mailbox sorter - the list is endless.

Kyocera could have stretched its generosity to including wireless, WiFi Direct, NFC and fax, but these are all optional boards. At 90kgs, the 2552ci is no lightweight either and we found the CB-7110M wheeled base cabinet a real boon when we needed to move the printer.

The high starting price is tempered by Kyocera's legendarily low running costs. Combine the big 20K black and 12K colour cartridges with an OPC drum rated for at least 200K pages, and you'll get a mono A4 page for a mere 0.3p and a colour one for only 2.3p.

The price includes a 32GB M.2 SSD making the 2552ci HyPAS-ready out of the box. This allowed us to run multiple Cloud Direct apps supporting Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox and OneDrive.

Supplied as PKG files, we installed them on the printer from a USB stick, after which they appeared in the printer's user-friendly 22.8cm colour touchscreen. At 100 each, they aren't cheap but we used them for scanning to and printing from all our cloud accounts directly at the operator panel.

Costing 125, the ColourControl app enforces printing restrictions at the control panel and with it linked up to our Active Directory server, we applied user-based PIN restrictions to authorise colour usage. Kyocera also offers a USB card reader kit for walk-up authentication using security keys.

The 2552ci isn't totally bereft of standard cloud features, as integral support for Google Cloud Print and AirPrint can be enabled from the main web console. We had no problems printing directly from our iPad and used the free MyPanel iOS app to link up with our EverNote, Dropbox and OneDrive accounts to print from and scan to them.

The printer returned the quoted speeds across all our A4 and A3 colour and mono tests, while its 1200dpi engine delivered stunning print quality with razor sharp text and superbly detailed mono photographs. It really comes alive with colour in the mix; our test photos and A3 posters had real pizzazz with excellent colour balance, detail and not even a hint of banding in large single colour areas.

Our colour chart revealed extremely smooth transitions across complex colour fades (even on A3 paper), while grey shades using equal mixes of C, Y and M toner were perfectly reproduced. Along with a host of paper handling features, the Windows driver offers a Vivid setting which made our A3 posters even more fetching.

The TASKalfa 2552ci isn't the fastest laser MFP on the block but it's easily the most versatile and cheapest to run. If you can overcome the initial price barrier, there's no doubt in our minds this is the perfect choice for producing high-volume, high-quality advertising and marketing material.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 274

Verdict

The TASKalfa 2552ci isn’t the fastest laser MFP on the block but it’s easily the most versatile and cheapest to run. If you can overcome the initial price barrier, there’s no doubt in our minds this is the perfect choice for producing high-volume, high-quality advertising and marketing material.

1200 x 1200dpi A3 colour laser MFP

600dpi A3 colour flatbed scanner

25/12ppm A4/A3

1GHz FreeScale CPU

4GB RAM

32GB M.2 SSD

5 x USB 2

Gigabit

Duplex

2 x 500-sheet cassette (A4 and SRA3)

150-sheet MPT

50-sheet ADF

Rec. monthly duty cycle – 4,000 pages

602 x 665 x 790mm WDH

90kgs

1yr on-site warranty

Over the last three years HP's PageWide technology has become a revolutionary force in the A4 office printer market, giving businesses a real alternative to the office laser printer with higher speeds and lower costs. Yet HP's ambitions never ended there. One of PageWide's key strengths has always been its ability to scale, as proven by its adoption for the large-format production printers in HP's PageWide XL range, and for full-sized commercial printers in the HP PageWide Web Press line. Now PageWide is ready to transform one of printing's biggest, most competitive markets the $55 billion A3 office printer market as part of HP's new sixteen-strong line-up of A3 Multifunction Printers (MFPs).

The PageWide difference

PageWide is an inkjet-based technology, but one that takes a different path from the inkjet printers you might see in smaller businesses or the home. Where they have a single, narrow printhead that has to move across the page while the paper rolls through the feed mechanism underneath, PageWide printers use an array of printheads spanning the whole width of the page. With over 40,000 nozzles depositing tiny droplets of ink across the A4 page at once, PageWide is a more efficient way to print.

Let's break that down. When only the paper moves underneath the printhead you can reach much higher speeds, allowing PageWide printers to match and even beat laser printers on performance. The technology is also more energy efficient, while running costs drop, particularly when it comes to colour. What's more, with fewer moving parts there's less to go wrong. As a result, HP's PageWide printers are amongst the most reliable in their class.

With its new line of A3 MFPs, HP set its sights on transforming the business A3 market, including not just laser printers and MFPs but copiers too. From the start, it saw PageWide as a crucial part of this vision, because the factors that make PageWide such a strong technology for A4 printing make it even stronger for A3. And as HP's PageWide MFPs feature the same advanced management and security features as their laser equivalents, you're not making any compromises when you take the PageWide route.

Performance

With a PageWide print array covering the whole width of the A3 page, the major factor limiting print speed becomes how fast you can, with consistency and accuracy, move an A3 sheet of paper through the feed. Here HP has done some impressive work with the new A3 line-up, enabling even the entry-level PageWide Pro MFP printers to reach speeds of 40ppm (or 60ppm in General Office Mode). Move up to the higher-end PageWide Pro MFO and PageWide Enterprise MFP products and you could be looking at 60ppm or 80ppm in General Office mode.

To put that into perspective, these are printers competing in the same price class as 25ppm to 45ppm laser printers. With that kind of performance you can tackle the heaviest jobs without causing a queue at the output tray, get a proposal printed ready for a last-minute meeting, or even reduce the number of printers in your office. That's a huge advantage. Combine it with high-performance scanning, and you get an MFP that could make your copier obsolete.

Affordable colour

In the A4 space, PageWide has consistently come out on top for cost per page, both in monochrome and in colour, by up to 50% per colour page. That makes colour affordable for everyday business printing, so that it's no longer reserved for client-side materials or board-level reports. If there are documents where a splash of colour can bring a point into focus or help make key data in a chart stand out, it's a no-brainer. Your teams can use colour where they need to, for legibility or impact, and you don't need to worry about busting budgets.

Security and Management

Printer security is vital. As enterprises have learnt to toughen up their networks, hackers are looking for less obvious but still useful vulnerabilities, and any device with a connection, a microprocessor, firmware, BIOS and storage is fair game. Luckily, HP has invested millions in developing security features both at the hardware and software level, protecting against intrusion over the network and attempts to meddle with the firmware or the BIOS.

The same HP JetAdvantage tools and features you'll find in the latest HP LaserJet Pro and Enterprise MFP printers can be found in the PageWide Pro and Enterprise lines. These are designed to be the world's most secure A3 printers, and the PageWide models are no less secure than their LaserJet cousins. When it comes to protecting your documents, your network and your data, rival print solutions can't compete.

It's a similar story with management features, with all the centralised management, reporting and configuration features you'd find in HP's Enterprise lasers replicated in the PageWide Pro and Enterprise lines. In effect, managing a PageWide A3 printer is no different to managing an A3 laser printer; you can still set and enforce policies, control access, track usage and monitor supplies, with enterprise-grade tools that make handling a fleet of printers much less of a burden. What's more, these printers have been designed from the ground-up to work as part of a Managed Print Services solution. You can trust your chosen partner or provider to cover your printing needs while you focus on the real business objectives that could help your organisation grow.

More uptime

PageWide is now established as a tried, trusted and reliable technology, and HP designed the new A3 models to be even more robust. With fewer components inside the printer there are only three that might realistically need replacing, while the PageWide head itself is designed to be self-cleaning and work intelligently around clogged nozzles or alignment problems. These are printers that work for years with the bare minimum of user intervention. That's good news for MPS providers and even better news for the businesses they serve.

Perhaps most importantly, these are next-generation smart printers, complete with pro-active, sensor-based systems that can report back to IT managers or MPS partners to alert them should any concerns bubble up. If a component can't perform at the right level or gets too hot, you'll find out before things go wrong, not after a breakdown. Plus, when it's easier to pinpoint the problem it's easier and faster to get a fix, even on the initial call. That means printers that stay up and running every hour, every day for longer, and that won't let you down.

Paper handling and Finishing Options

If you think that PageWide can't cover the needs of the most demanding office, you might be surprised. Even the base-level A3 models can handle 30,000 page recommended monthly duty cycles, while the higher-end models reach 50,000 pages. Feeders and stands take you up from a standard 650 sheet input tray capacity to 1,200 sheets, 1,750 sheets or even 2,650 sheets, while a Stapler-Stacker/Hole Punch unit adds enterprise-grade finishing options to the mix.

You might not know PageWide technology, but it's perfect for A3 printing, primed for enterprise and fully-prepared to cover all your office printing and copying needs. And if you've already seen what it can do for A4 office printing, well, you haven't seen anything yet.

The word "creativity" was a definite constant at yesterday's Microsoft launch event, repeated by pretty much every speaker.

In his opening speech, executive VP, Terry Myerson said: "What unites all of us is that we're creators of our individual lives".

Microsoft said it wishes to develop technological tools that can be used by professionals in different fields to turn their ideas into a final product using new creative possibilities.

This notion is at the core of many new products presented yesterday, including the Windows 10 Creators update, Xbox features and the new Surface Studio desktop PC.

Windows 10 Creators Update

Windows 10 Update, has 'creativity' within its very name. Some of the features of Windows 10 Creators Update include 3D tools, new communication widgets, integration with HoloLens and new Xbox Live features.

The update will include a 3D feature for PowerPoint, which it's hoped will help users create more engaging presentations - no more death by slidedeck.

Microsoft also announced a partnership with positioning product maker Trimble to bring creations made in its SketchUp software into the 3D Paint community.

At the event, Windows Experience Group's general manager, Megan Saunders, showcased some of Windows 10's new 3D tools, including Paint 3D. This feature allows users to capture objects in 3D using their phone's camera, a feature that should be available for Windows 10 Mobile soon, and iOS and Android in the future. Users can also create emojis or 3D drawings from scratch and print these using a 3D printer.

Saunders said: "We need to make 3D creation as simple as taking a picture on your phone".

The update also allows customers to use their computers with VR headsets or HoloLens' augmented reality and brings new features for Xbox and Windows PC gamers, allowing more cross-platform interaction, further game broadcasting tools and the possibility to create their own tournaments.

Surface Studio

In addition the new SurfaceBook i7, said to have "twice the graphics", better performance and up to 16 hours of battery life, Microsoft announced a new desktop computer called Surface Studio.

Surface Studio is, once again, centred on creativity, with an Intel Core i7 processor, nVidia GTX 980m GPU, 23GB of memory, 2GB hard-drive and 28in touchscreen display that pushes over 13 million pixels. The display uses a technology called TrueColor, said to enhance the depth of colour. It can also be folded down and used as a graphics tablet.

At first glance, this would appear to be the perfect tool for graphics designers and other creative professionals, and can be used in combination with the Surface Pen to produce high quality digital designs.

Panos Panay, corporate VP of devices at Microsoft presented the product saying: "Every one of us is a creator; we want to use this product to help all of us create."

Richard Edwards, principal research analyst at Ovum, questioned whether the Surface Studio would help pick up falling PC sales, saying: "It's clear whom Microsoft is wooing with this device: the creative pro. With the Surface Pen and the newly introduced Surface Dial (a radial haptic input device), Microsoft is clearly increasing the versatility of an already capable genre, but is it enough to relight the fire under the corporate PC market?"

Edwards believes that business and corporate buyers will still prefer Windows 7 to Windows 10, making Surface Studio a device specific for creative professionals.

At the end of the event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella summed perfectly what Microsoft's ethos is at the moment.

Nadella said: "I believe that the next ten years will be defined by technology that empowers profound creation."

"Every choice we (Microsoft) make is about finding that balance between consumption and creative expression," Nadella added.

We've all met our share of stupid printers, from the ones that try to suck three sheets of paper from the input tray, then choke, to the ones that seem to eat incoming print jobs or break down just when you need them most. These are the printers that cause misery, fury and frustration; the printers that cause shaking fists, hissed threats and grumpy frowns.

But what if someone made a smarter kind of printer, not merely in the sense of something with an Internet connection and a colour touchscreen, but in the sense of a printer that somehow knew' what was going on inside it and could play an active role in keeping itself monitored, managed and maintained? What if these smart features meant more uptime and less downtime, giving you a printer you could rely on, whatever your needs? Wouldn't that help turn your frown upside down?

Well, that's exactly what HP is building with its new 16-strong line of A3 Office MFPs. Designed to work within a Managed Print Services (MPS) solution, they have the smarts to replace both your office lasers and your copiers too, giving you robust, reliable and secure printing and copying without any drama on the way.

The Building Blocks of Smart

To build a smart printer takes a combination of things, beginning with smart sensors inside the supplies and core components, capturing data on heat and performance that can be used to highlight potential faults. It also requires smart monitoring features inside the printer that can aggregate and analyse the data from these sensors and connect to HP management services, running in the cloud. These are the final parts of the puzzle, giving end-users or their MPS partners real-time, proactive information on the state of the supplies and the core components, to the extent of delivering proactive warnings that a part might malfunction before it does.

Few companies would have the expertise required to deliver all three building blocks, but then HP sits in a unique position. On the one hand, it has technology and experience in developing and using embedded sensors; they're already inside HP PCs and laptops and HP printers, not to mention the consumables used in HP printers. In its JetIntelligence toner cartridges, HP has built sensors that measure how many times the components have rotated, the amount of toner used, how much that toner has worn down and various environmental conditions that might affect the cartridge and its lifespan.

Beyond that, HP has unmatched experience in developing software, firmware and Web-based services to monitor, manage and support enterprise printers. Is it any wonder that the first truly smart printers should come from HP?

The Smart Advantage

So what can all this smart technology do? Well, bear in mind that HP's new A3 Office MFPs are designed to form part of an MPS solution, where HP and its partners provide all the hardware, software and services a business needs for copying and printing, starting with consultancy and progressing through configuration, management, monitoring and maintenance, all for a predictable monthly cost.

In this sector, reliability is crucial. The client enterprise pays for prints and copies, trusting the MPS provider to ensure that everything just works. That MPS provider wants to minimise its own interventions and service costs, while ensuring that the client gets the service that they're paying for. It's in both parties' interests to maximise uptime, minimise downtime and reduce the need for service calls. This is where the new breed of smart printers can help.

Current HP LaserJet and OfficeJet printers already use sensors to cut hassle and minimise downtime by monitoring the consumables and ensuring that replacements arrive before the old ones run out. The new A3 PageWide and LaserJet models extend that to other, more permanent components too. The hardware design helps, with both the PageWide and LaserJet models designed to minimise the number of working parts and build them into modular units that can be more easily replaced. However, HP's sensor-based, data-driven smart approach takes this to a whole new level.

Down with Downtime

For instance, imagine you're a technician, out on a call with a client. While you're on the road, you get a message from your cloud-based management portal that a printer with a different client in the nearby area is warning of a fault. While you're close you can visit the client, check the component and even replace it with a spare from the van. Meanwhile, the printer can intelligently modify performance to keep the component running until a replacement arrives. The provider fixes the issue before it even becomes an issue, without the time and expense involved in making two individual service calls. There's no significant downtime, so you get a happier client. That's good news for everyone concerned.

Not only does the provider know when a part is failing, they also know exactly which part or parts are involved. Combine that with the streamlined, modular design and it's easier to arrive with the right components, replace them faster and improve the provider's crucial first-time fix rate.

This is a world away from the standard story of the dumb' office printer, let alone its even dumber cousin, the office copier. Here even good suppliers only achieve a fix on the first call 80% of the time, with a smaller proportion making it to 90% or beyond. Otherwise, the tale is too often one of sudden failures, service call-outs that don't end in a resolution and downtime while a replacement part is found. That's a scenario that ends in dissatisfaction at the client's end and additional costs and hassle for the provider.

Both deserve better. Wouldn't it be great to have a first-time fix rate closer to 100% - or better still to fix a problem before the client even had to make a support call? That's what HP is hoping to achieve.

It's this approach to predictive management that HP sees as a key differentiator in its new assault on the A3 office printing market. As David Ryan, General Manager of the EMEA Print Business Group, puts it, it can enable the channel partner to be able to service its printers more efficiently and visit them no more than they have to, but also ensure that the end customer using the device has that device running more of the time, delivering the right quality printing, copying and scanning in fact, all the things they want.' That's the promise of smart printers, and it's fast becoming a reality.

HP Inc is dropping $1 billion (750 million) to pick up Samsung's printer business.

The deal takes aim at the $55 billion copier industry, which HP said "hasn't innovated in decades".

"Copiers are outdated, complicated machines with dozens of replaceable parts requiring inefficient service and maintenance agreements," HP said in a statement announcing the acquisition.

"Customers are frequently frustrated with the number of visits needed to keep copier machines functioning," the company said. "Today, HP is investing to disrupt this category by replacing copiers with superior multifunction printer (MFP) technology."

HP pointed to Samsung's "formidable portfolio" of multi-function printers that "deliver the performance of copiers" with the easy of use of printers, saying that will be combined with its own PageWide inkjet technologies and mobile and cloud printing systems.

Expanding into the stagnant copier market could help bulk up HP's sales in the print segment. HP already holds one-third of the printer market, but IDC stats suggest that figure is down by 19% from a year ago.

The move is the latest of many changes at the company. Last year, what was then known as Hewlett-Packard split into printers and PC firm HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), a business IT firm that announced the sale of its software assets to Micro Focus last week.

"When we became a separate company just ten months ago, it enabled us to become nimble and focus on accelerating growth and reinventing industries," said Dion Weisler, president and CEO of HP. "The acquisition of Samsung's printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers."

The deal is the largest print acquisition in HP's history, and will see Samsung spin off its printer division with 6,000 employees, which will be sold to HP. The deal is expected to close within a year.

You'll still be able to buy a Samsung branded printer in some regions, but the Korean company will simply get them from HP.

A3 printing for less than 100 is a tempting deal indeed. And not only is Epson's WorkForce WF-7110DTW cheap to buy, it offers low running costs, integral duplexing, and both wired and wireless networking, with support for Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint.

Weighing over 15kg, this is a chunky printer - but it puts its size to good use. Its twin 250-sheet input trays both offer telescopic sliders, allowing each to handle A3 and A3+ paper sizes. The A3+ manual feed slot at the back offers a flatter paper path through the printer, for heavyweight paper up to 256gsm.

Like most inkjet manufacturers, Epson offers a choice of ink capacities: with the standard cartridges, running costs for mono and colour A4 pages work out to approximately 3p and 10.4p per page. The high-capacity XL cartridges are a better bet, slashing page costs to only 1.3p and 6.2p.

Epson claims mono print speeds of 18ppm, which we found were achievable in the standard driver mode - although text quality isn't great, with small fonts suffering from a light dusting. The high-quality mode produces much sharper prints, but speed falls to less than 5ppm.

Print speeds were decent in our 24-page colour DTP test, which completed at nearly 12ppm in standard mode (2ppm faster than claimed). Photos and graphics looked grainy, though, so we wouldn't use this mode for professional presentations.

Switching to high-quality mode transformed print quality, with sharp, detailed colour photos on inkjet-quality paper - but speed tumbled to less than 3ppm.

For a business--class printer, the WF-7110DTW makes a good fist of photos: on 160gsm semi-gloss paper, it delivered highly detailed pictures with excellent contrast and no hint of bleeding or banding. Poster-sized prints are a pleasure, too. An A3 print took 1min 1sec on 100gsm paper and looked good enough to be framed.

The Epson isn't as fast as HP's PageWide Pro 452dw, but this means that the ink dries during printing, with no curling or wrinkling. Power consumption is also very low, with the printer maxing out at only 18W.

Epson's installation routine gets you up and running quickly. It loads the driver, checks for the latest firmware and automatically updates the printer as needed. It also loads a network status monitor, complete with nozzle-cleaning and alignment-checking tools, plus Epson's handy Easy Photo Print utility.

The software then automatically registered the printer with our Epson Connect cloud account, meaning our remote users could email print jobs to it as attachments from anywhere. You can choose the first part of its email address, and from the web portal you can create approved sender lists and decide who can print photos.

The printer's web interface is minimal, but provides swift access to wired or wireless network settings. We found it easy to register the printer with our Google Cloud Print account, and we had no problems enabling AirPrint and using it to print from our iPad.

Apart from the photo controls in the Epson Connect portal, there are no facilities for restricting colour printing or setting page limits for users.

You can disable the WSD protocol to stop people from using it on the sly, but the only other option is to remotely lock the LCD control panel, which must be done through the separate EpsonNet utility.

The Epson is an impressive printer. It's no workhorse, but would make a perfect second printer for a business wanting affordable A3 colour prints.

Verdict

The Epson is an impressive printer. It’s no workhorse, but would make a perfect second printer for a business wanting affordable A3 colour prints.

4,800 x 2,400dpi A3 inkjet printer

128MB RAM

18/10ppm mono/colour

USB 2

10/100 Ethernet

802.11n wireless

Wi-Fi Direct

AirPrint

5.5cm LCD screen

Duplex

2 x 250-sheet A3/A3+ input trays

Single-page A3+ rear feed slot

Max monthly duty cycle, 20,000 pages

567 x 424 x 304mm (WDH)

15.6kg

1yr on-site warranty

HP seems to be rather fond of reorganisations.

This week, it confirmed that it will merge its printing (IPG) and personal computer (PSG) divisions, in an attempt to improve margins and cut costs. Dave Donatelli, currently HP's executive in charge of storage and servers, will head the new Enterprise group.

Maybe it should give Tim Cook and Jonny Ive a call.

But we have been here before. Under Leo Apotheker, HP was poised to dispose of its PC-making operations altogether, in a move industry experts described as "doing an IBM", reducing reliance on hardware sales and focusing instead on software and services. And before that, Carly Fiorina put HP's PC under control of Viyomesh Joshi, the long-standing head of IPG, only for that decision to be reversed by Fiorina's successor, Mark Hurd. HP's PC division moves almost as often as HP changes its CEOs.

This time, though, HP boss Meg Whitman seems serious. Beyond the usual management speak the reorganisation will provide "the best in customer focused innovation and operational efficiency", Whitman says, HP's consumer and peripherals businesses face some real structural problems.

The printing division, once HP's cash cow, faces weaker growth. Analysts expect the global market for computer printers to grow at just one to two per cent a year, against perhaps a five per cent growth rate for PCs. Then there are the margins. HP's printing business enjoys some healthy margins 15.4 per cent at the last count whilst the PC division struggles to make margins of six per cent.

But more worrying for Whitman must be the trend: margins in the PC business have recovered, but the printer group margins have declined since 2009.

Merging the two divisions will help bring some efficiencies, and could make it easier for HP to sell bundles of printers and PCs, especially in the consumer and SME markets. But it will do little to help its industrial-scale digital presses, sold to replace conventional printing presses, or its large-format printers, sold to the graphic arts, architecture and point-of-sale businesses. Although these products are niche, they deliver both strong margins, and good services revenues.

But in the mass market, HP struggles because it lacks one, single (and increasingly important) part of the information distribution chain: a tablet. The main reason printer, and printer consumable, sales are expected to decline over the next few years is that consumers and analysts are printing less information, especially in mature markets such as Europe and the US.

We are consuming more information on smartphones, connected TVs and especially, tablets. And HP, since it wound down its WebOS operations last year, lacks a mass-market tablet offering. Just how important that market is, is illustrated by Apple's sale of three million iPads in three days.

Merging the IPG and PC divisions at HP will not address the fact that more and more people are viewing business information on a tablet device, and those tablets are mostly made by HP's Silicon Valley neighbour Apple. Perhaps HP should focus instead on finding markets for some of its highly innovative patents and inventions, such as flexible displays. But for now, as Gartner analyst Mark Fabbi puts it, HP is still "less than the sum of its parts".

Maybe it should give Tim Cook and Jonny Ive a call.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT Pro.

HP has been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons recently, from the abandonment of webOS, the uncertainty surrounding the future of its PC division and the replacement of Leo Apotheker with Meg Whitman as CEO. The company's printer division, the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), continues to chug on regardless though, raking in revenues and profits. We had a chat with Vyomesh Joshi, the Executive Vice President in charge of IPG, about his thoughts on the future of printing.

IT Pro: One of HP's competitors is making a lot of noise about how inkjets could replace lasers for many businesses they're cheaper to run, use less energy etc. what's your view on that?

VJ: Depending on which segment really clearly the HP Inkjet WebPress has the best technology and we are way ahead of anybody else. A lot of people talk about interesting inkjet technology, but they don't have the real commercial installed base to make that happen.

'Speeds and feeds' are no longer a differentiation it's all about web services and software solutions to really make a difference.

With inkjets in business we've already started with the OfficeJet Pro and we're getting tremendous success against low-end lasers. We have inkjets in the DesignJet and Scitex area. For mid-range offices, we believe laser is a very good technology, so in both technologies we [HP] are the leaders. We sell more inkjet cartridges than anybody else in the world by a factor of ten. In the end, it's a matter of what's right for the customer, not the technology first.

IT Pro: So you don't think inkjets would be suitable for medium-sized businesses and enterprises?

VJ: I'm not saying whether it's suitable or not. Right now, we believe that we have an excellent portfolio with lasers. I would rather have more focus on solutions and software than just hardware and supplies. 'Speeds and feeds' are no longer a differentiation it's all about web services and software solutions to really make a difference.

IT Pro: So that's where you seen the main difference between HP and its competitors, in software and services rather than hardware?

VJ: No, we are ahead in everything. Look at our innovation we have 14,700 patents! We have better inkjet solutions than anyone else in the world, so I wouldn't say that at all. Competitors all want to find their own niche and we have a broad portfolio and we are going to continue to work on that.

IT Pro: With inkjets, do you think it is a mature technology or are there big developments on the way?

VJ: I firmly believe that inkjet technology has a long way to go. We have our own Moore's Law - every 18 months we are doubling the speed of our inkjets. In 1984 we had 96 dpi from 12 nozzles. Now we are at 8,000 pages a minute with WebPress! We can continue to improve the speed and improve the quality and take the cost of printing down. So we have tremendous room for improvement in inkjet technology.

The important part is the apps and not the operating systems, so there is a big shift going on. Applications are now platforms in themselves, like Facebook.

VJ on webOS printers

We are looking at that. We already have web-connected printers and all our printers have a thin, web operating system. It's there in the 20 million printers we ship, a thin web operating system which is how they connect to the cloud. The important part is the apps and not the operating systems, so there is a big shift going on. Applications are now platforms in themselves, like Facebook. There are lots of photos on Facebook that people want to print and that is more important for us than any operating system.

IT Pro: When it comes to cloud printing, there doesn't seem to be an industry standard at the moment. There's HP ePrint, there's Google Cloud Print, HP's competitors have their own systems. Do you think that will discourage consumers and businesses from adopting cloud printing?

VJ: Nope, because the important part is ease of use. So with our solution, you can have any operating system you could have a Nokia phone, a HTC or Sony Ericsson Android phone, an iPhone, if you can email then you can print. It's very different from the PC world where you have to know your operating system and get drivers. Now, we don't have the concept of drivers! If the customer doesn't have to think about it, that's the best solution.

IT Pro: But surely, customers at the moment do have to think about it!

VJ: No they don't. They don't need a driver to print if you know the email address of the printer then you can print. If you have any iOS device, it will automatically discover the printer thanks to AirPrint.

Just having PC connectivity in those {emerging} markets is not enough.

IT Pro: When it comes to emerging markets such as Brazil, India, China etc, is the potential there for cloud printing greater or less than Europe?

VJ: In some ways it's greater. In those markets, the penetration of smartphones is much higher than that of PCs. Then there's sheer numbers there are 250-300 million mobile subscribers in China and they're adding something like five million every month! It's crazy numbers! So, just having PC connectivity in those markets is not enough.

Kyocera-Mita recently announced four new A3 multifunction peripherals (MFPs) for workgroups, of which this is the cheapest. Like the faster FS-6030MFP, the FS-6025MFP prints and copies in mono only, but it can scan in colour at up to 600dpi.

Two further devices, the FS-C8020MFP and FS-C8025MFP, are similar but are based on colour printers. All four belong to the Ecosys family of devices, meaning that in normal use it shouldn't be necessary to replace anything but their toner. In the case of the FS-6025MFP, the drum and developer are guaranteed for three years or 300,000 pages, while the toner is a 15,000-page supply that costs around 70 ex VAT, giving a cost per A4 page of just under 0.5 pence.

There are two versions of the FS-6025MFP and, at the time of writing, some online retailers appeared to have their models, part codes and prices confused. The model reviewed here has the part code 1102L33NL0 and comes with a basic document processor capable of directing output to one of two stacks. The FS-6025MFP/B (part code 1102L33NL1) costs less and goes without.

The FS-6025MFP is necessarily bulky, but it's not too big to sit on a low desk or table. Although it looks good, we've got reservations about its predominantly white plastic, which is likely to get grubby after a couple of years' service. It generally feels sturdy though, with various sliders and openings operating with satisfying clicks and clunks. Only the left-most paper guide in the standard 500-sheet cassette spoils the impression; it's quite flexible and we have doubts whether it's fully up to taming reams of paper for several years.

Things are slightly less straightforward when it comes to installing the software, however. Although the default setup includes the scanner's TWAIN driver, subsequently opening an image application reveals this isn't actually configured until the installed TWAIN Driver Setting application has been run. It's an unusual extra step and, unless you're connecting via USB, you'll need to select the MFP model and manually enter its IP address to add the device to the list of TWAIN sources, which could get wearing if there are many users to set up.

Kyocera-Mita claims that the FS-6025MFP produces similar levels of noise to a desktop printer. It's certainly quieter than we'd expect, but it's hard to avoid the suspicion that this is, in part, because it's also slower. Despite a quoted 25 A4 pages per minute, it delivered our 25-page text document at just 16.5ppm and a more complex 24-page graphical document at a glacial 11.1ppm. Scaling each up to A3 resulted in speeds of 11.5 and 9.2ppm respectively.

Using duplex to print 10 sides of text onto five pages took a minute for A4 paper, and a further 15 seconds when printing on A3. Fortunately, the print quality was very good across our tests, with crisp text, and graphics that were accurately shaded and free from banding or other artefacts.

Photocopies were sharp and artefact-free, but we had to lift the density by three stops to avoid dark and dingy copies. At least copying is quick, with the FS-6025MFP taking just nine seconds to make a single A4 copy from the scanner glass, and duplicating a 10-page simplex document in only 48 seconds.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

We're not overly impressed with the FS-6025MFP's speeds or the variable quality of its results. However, it is easy to use, particularly for staff walking up to the touchscreen. More importantly perhaps, it's reasonably priced and simple to maintain, with a single high-capacity consumable that results in very low running costs. A two-year warranty help to make it a sound investment, but you'll buy it with your head rather than your heart.

Maximum print resolution

600x600dpi

Maximum optical scan resolution (output bit depth)

600x600dpi (24-bit)

QUOTED PRINT SPEEDS

Quoted speed, mono A4: 25ppm

Quoted speed, mono A3: 12ppm

TESTED PRINT SPEEDS

First mono page from sleep: 51s

First mono page from standby: 13s

25-page mono document - total time 1m 31s (16.5ppm)

24-page greyscale graphics document - total time 2m 10s (11.1ppm)

Two 10x8" photos - total time 30s

Six 6x4" photos - total time 35s

TESTED SCAN SPEEDS

A4 document at 300dpi: 26s

6x4" print at 600dpi: 21s

TESTED COPY SPEEDS

Single A4 page, mono, default quality: 9s

10 A4 pages (many to many), default quality: 48s

PHYSICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL

Standard interfaces: USB, 10/100/1,000 Mbit/s Ethernet, USB Host

Optional interfaces: Memory card

Dimensions (HxWxD): 694x590x590mm

Weight: 52.2kg

Noise: 45.5dB(A)

Maximum duty cycle (pages per month): 80,000 pages

Power consumption standby: 1W

Power consumption idle: 35W

Power consumption active: 138W

PAPER HANDLING

Maximum paper size: Up to A3

Maximum paper weight: 163gsm

Standard paper inputs (capacity): 2 (600)

Output tray capacity: 250+50 sheets

Duplex: Yes

Automatic Document Feeder capacity: 50

COPY FEATURES

Maximum number of copies: 999

Copier zoom range: 25-400%

FAX FEATURES

Fax modem: 33.6Kbit/s

Maximum mono fax resolution: Not disclosed

Maximum memory capacity (mono pages): Not disclosed

GENERAL

Technology: Mono laser

Language(s): PCL6, KPDL3 (PostScript compatible), PDF direct print, XPS direct print

Supported operating systems: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X 10.4 or later

Memory: 512MB

Upgrades: 500-sheet paper feeder, twin 500-sheet paper feeder (maximum 1,600-page input), 500-sheet document finisher, various wooden/metal bases/cabinets, memory (maximum 1.5GB)

BUYING INFORMATION

Price: £1,393 (£1,671 inc VAT)

Part code: 1102L33NL0

Cost per mono A4 page: 0.5p (excl VAT, ISO/IEC 19752)

Capacity of supplied toner (pages): 3,000 pages

Capacity of supplied drum: Lifetime (guaranteed for three years/300,000 pages)

Estimated total ownership cost - three years' light use (3,600 pages) £1,463

Estimated total ownership cost - three years' medium use (27,000 pages) £1,533

Estimated total ownership cost - three years' heavy use (108,000 pages) £1,883

Warranty duration and terms: Two years return to base

The fi-6800 sits almost at the top of Fujitsu's range of production and departmental scanners, second only to the 14,000 fi-5950. It's a mid-volume A3 production scanner with all of the features that would suggest including a considerable price tag. That said, it's cheaper than two of its principle competitors: Canon's range-topping DR-X10C and Kodak's i4600.

Like most document scanners the fi-6800's maximum 600dpi optical resolution is nothing special, but it's capable of impressive speeds. Fujitsu quotes a maximum 100 A4 pages per minute (ppm) in portrait orientation and 130ppm for landscape when scanning simplex. With considerable onboard processing and memory, duplex jobs should be as fast you could scan all 260 sides of 130 A4 pages in a minute. The fi-6800 can handle media weights from as low as 20gsm up to 209gsm, and sizes from A8 up to A3, with custom support for long media of up to three metres.

As you'd expect from a device designed to process around 60,000 scans per day, the fi-6800 is built from very heavy duty plastics, mounted onto a metal chassis. It's surprisingly compact for such a well specified scanner, but at 32 kilograms it's far heavier than it looks. At the front is a 500-page paper chute that folds out and extends to fully contain A3 paper, while the output tray also has an extending paper support. Both feel strong enough to cope with the weight of a ream and are motorised to keep the geometry of the paper path consistent as a scan progresses.

Fujitsu doesn't suggest a minimum specification for the host computer, so we used USB to connect the fi-6800 to a run-of-the-mill Core i3 PC running Windows 7, and conducted our tests using Fujitsu's oddly titled 'ScandAll' software. At the default 300dpi setting, scanning 100 sheets into compressed TIFF files took just 61 seconds; almost exactly the claimed speed. Repeated with a landscape orientation the same test took 53 seconds; an impressive 113ppm, but a little way short of the claimed 130ppm.

We wanted to see whether increasing the scan quality would slow things down, so we disabled hardware image compression and repeated the portrait A4 test in 24-bit colour mode. The fi-6800 shot through our stack of paper at the same rate until roughly the eightieth page, at which point it began to pause momentarily between picking sheets. On investigation we realised that the host computer was struggling to keep up with images of almost 100MB each. This aside, no options appeared to slow the fi-6800 down other than switching to the maximum 600dpi resolution, which halves its engine speed. The physical scanning of duplex jobs was every bit as fast as in simplex, although the host took a few extra seconds to finish processing the additional sides.

ScandAll offers a grainy preview of scanned pages and allows you to apply tools such as deskew or full orientation correction before applying any changes and starting the next job. It's not the best software we've used and, depending on the host PC, some post-processing operations could take a minute or more on a job totalling several hundred pages. Fujitsu caters for more demanding applications by bundling Kofax VRS Pro. We found scanned images to be a little too dark at the default setting and, unfortunately, it's not possible to adjust this from the scanner's own control panel. However, we were very happy with the scan quality after making the adjustment in software.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

With lower volume scanners such as Canon's £2,400 ImageFormula DR-6030C built to handle 10,000 operations a day, you need to be serious about scanning to justify the extra investment in such a heavy duty device. However, where there's a proven need for a robust, quick and reliable production scanner the fi-6800 is competitively priced and more than up to the job.

A3 duplex production scanner

Optical resolution: 600x600dpi

24-bit colour

Compatible with Windows XP/Vista/7

Power consumption: standby 47W, scanning 182W

Part code PA03575-B001

Canon's ImageFormula DR-6030C drops into the company's huge range of professional scanners, replacing the DR-5010C. Like the outgoing model, whose paper handling mechanism it shares, the DR-6030C is a small-volume production sheet scanner. It's designed for anything up to 10,000 scans a day and can get through 60 A4 pages per minute, scanning either the top or bottom side, or both in a single pass.

While it's compact, being smaller than most consumer-level, desktop mono laser printers, the DR-6030C can accommodate A3 originals. That gives its paper transport the width to also handle A4 paper in landscape orientation, upping its maximum A4 scan rate to 80ppm. That's not its only trick; flipping down a rear panel opens a straight paper path, which Canon says is good for media up to a heavyweight 546gsm.

Although squat, the DR-6030C is remarkably heavy thanks to robust plastics, which are all screwed down onto a metal base. Setting it up involves removing countless bits of orange packing tape, but it's otherwise quick and easy. Everything feels incredibly well put together, with the exception of the so-called document eject guide, a slot-in plastic spike designed to beef up the output tray. We found it was far too easy to knock the tray upwards, unhooking the spike which then needs to be refitted.

With an input capacity of 100 sheets, the DR-6030C is designed with attended batch scans in mind, and as such there are USB and SCSI interfaces for connection to a workstation, but no network port. Canon doesn't give recommended minimum specifications for the host PC, but our tests suggest that it doesn't need to be anything special for everyday jobs. That said, there are many image-processing features in the driver such as text orientation recognition. Switching them on adds a significant processor overhead, so if you want to use these features we'd opt for a computer with a modern multi-core processor to keep things moving smoothly.

In landscape orientation, the scanner fed, ejected and processed a single A4 sheet in six seconds, slowing down only by fractions of a second as the resolution was increased. Connected via USB the pause between sheets depends on the host's speed and the options selected, but it's momentary for simplex jobs at 150dpi. With deskew disabled, we timed a stack of 100 sheets at six and a quarter minutes, suggesting that the scanner is quite happy to continue feeding as the driver processes previous pages.

We continued testing, feeding and refeeding the scruffiest media we could find, but we had no paper jams: we thus wouldn't expect them to be a regular occurence, but when they happen it's obvious how to open up the DR-6030C's central mechanism for removal. This is shaped like an 'L' lying on its back, allowing it to pivot up and out through 90 degrees to give brilliantly easy access to the whole paper path.

With a maximum resolution of 600dpi it's obvious that this scanner is optimised for documents, forms and other office work, but its image quality is surprisingly good. Scans are crisp even at the highest resolutions, and colours are faithful enough. Our only criticism is a slight loss of detail between subtly different, very light shades, but this simply isn't an issue for the intended use.

Canon claims class-leading energy efficiency for this scanner, with a 46-watt operating power consumption. In our tests it used a maximum of only 22W, dropping to just 2W on standby. It's not tricky or expensive to maintain, either, with the only consumable being an exchange roller kit rated at 250,000 scans a monthly job at worst.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The DR-6030C is reasonably priced for a production scanner, efficient and likely to prove highly reliable. It's easy to use, and easy to clear paper jams should they ever happen. As such, it's ideal for any organisation needing a user-friendly scanner capable of handling significant volumes.

Optical resolution: 600x600dpi 24-bit colour Compatible with Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 Part code: 4624B002

Inkjet printers are growing in popularity in the small business sector. In general, they cost less to run and buy than laser printers with similar capabilities. However, they still have to contend with the assumption that they suffer from slow speeds and inferior print quality. HP's latest A3+ wide format inkjet, the HP Officejet 7000, makes a good argument for the effectiveness of inkjets in an office environment. A3 printing has numerous business uses, like folded A4 brochures, posters, charts and plans.

The Officejet 7000 is surprisingly compact A3+ printer. It has a footprint of just 574 x 402mm, small enough to fit on a mid-sized desk without much trouble, but can handle paper sizes of up to 330 x 1,118mm. It looks rather smart, although its black plastic chassis isn't as sturdy as some other large-format inkjets we've seen. It has a monthly duty cycle of 7,000 A4 pages. This is a one-time maximum rather than a recommended usage figure, but indicates that it should easily meet the requirements of a typical small workgroup.

Its specification is pared down to the essentials, with USB and 10/100 Ethernet connections, four ink cartridges and a single paper tray capable of holding up to 150 sheets of A4 copier paper. The output tray has enough room for 100 sheets. There are no extra features like PictBridge or memory card slots, but neither is a great loss in a business printer. The network port is vital if you want to share the Officejet between several machines in a small workgroup. We would have welcomed a larger paper tray and automatic duplexer, though. The printer can handle media of up to 280gsm, including specialist card and photo papers, along with envelopes and transparencies.

HP quotes two sets of A4 print speed figures for the Officejet 7000. The first of these is a traditional pages per minute (ppm) measurement of 33ppm black and 32ppm colour. HP has also tested the printer's speed using the new ISO/IEC 24734 standard. We list these figures in our specifications in images per minute (ipm) the HP quotes speeds of 8ipm mono and 7ipm colour.

Ppm is the older and more widely used standard for quoting print speeds. Ppm tests are designed to be as fast as possible: they use low-quality draft settings and ignore the time taken to print the first few pages. This allows manufacturers to quote incredibly fast speeds, sometimes over 30ppm, for even the slowest of printers. The documents used to produce these speeds are not standardised. Each manufacturer used their own set of documents for ppm print speed tests, which means that printers from different companies were not directly comparable.

The new images per minute (ipm) figures also measure how many pages are printed every minute, but use a specific set of documents, which include pages of graphics, tables, and formal letters. These are printed at normal quality, rather than draft, in accordance with the criteria of ISO/IEC 24734. This guarantees that every printer is tested in the same way. These ipm figures are far more representative of real-world use than ppm measurements.

HP's figures accurately reflect the results of our own tests. A standard-quality page of mono text printed at 9.6ppm, while our heavily illustrated mixed-colour business documents emerged at a very reasonable 3.8ppm. Draft text that looks good enough for everyday printing emerged at a blistering 17.6ppm.

Standard quality mono text is sharp enough to rival a laser printer, even on cheap 80gsm paper, thanks to HP's pigmented black ink. We got even better results using 120gsm inkjet paper, while HP's own-brand brochure papers are pricey but produce flawless glossy results. Our illustrated presentation documents and colour business graphics also looked excellent on 80gsm, with bright, smooth block colours and no visible banding.

Photo printing isn't the Officejet's strong point. Only the dye-based cyan, magenta and yellow inks are suitable for use on photographic paper, so black is created by combining these three colours on the page. This means that dark areas look a little washed out, but image quality was otherwise good. Although it can't take the place of a fully-fledged photo printer, the Officejet is certainly up to printing the odd poster. It's quick, too: a best-quality A3 photo print emerged in five minutes and 26 seconds and costs around 1.70 including both ink and paper.

Alongside excellent print quality, the Officejet 7000's most appealing feature is its low print costs. The printer comes with standard HP 920 ink cartridges capable of printing 420 black and 300 colour pages. When you replace your inks, we recommend HP's high yield 920XL cartridges, which can produce 1,200 black and 700 colour prints.

We've calculated our print costs based on these figures. Pricing for these cartridges is around 17 for black and 7.50 for each colour cartridges (prices quoted include VAT). This produces a mono page cost of just 1.4p and a combined black and colour pages of 4.7p per A4 page.

Verdict

HP's Officejet 7000 is a phenomenal business inket. Despite being one of the cheapest A3+ printers on the market, it costs remarkably little to run. Text and graphical print quality are both excellent and its photo printing is good enough for most business uses. Although it's not as sturdy as some large-format office printers, it's sleek, well designed and easy to use and install. This printer ticks all the boxes and is a perfect addition to any small office with big printing requirements.

Technology: Thermal inkjet Print resolution: 4,800x1,200dpi (optimised) OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista, MacOS X v10.4/10.5 Maximum paper size: A3+ Maximum Paper weight: 280gsm Paper tray capacity: 150 sheets Maximum duty cycle: 7000 pages per month Duplex: No PictBridge support: No Borderless printing: A3+ Direct (PC-less) printing: No Memory card support: None CD printing: No Connectivity: USB, 10/100 Ethernet Dimensions: 402x574x181mm Weight: 7.0kg

At the departmental level, printers are normally aimed at either an office environment, where the key requirement is to print text and perhaps business graphics, or at a creative workgroup, where colour proofing of graphic and photo content is more important.

Konica Minolta's Magicolor 8650DN is designed to straddle both uses and has an eye open for short-run copy bureau use as well. A real jack of all trades, but does it escape the end of that aphorism?

Given that the printer can handle A3 documents as standard, it has a fairly modest footprint. Although it will be happier sitting on its own stand than on a desk, it should be comparatively easy to tuck it away in the corner of an office. The top of the Magicolor8650DN is fairly conventional with pages feeding out from right to left along its top cover.

At the right-hand end of the top cover is long, lozenge-shaped gantry, which has a control panel and display set into its curved front end. The display is backlit and can show text in a variety of sizes, as well as bit-mapped graphics.

At the bottom of the front panel are two, standard paper drawers and each can take up to 500 sheets of standard 80gsm A4 or A3 paper. They can also handle much heavier grades than this, up to 256gsm, but the 100-sheet special purpose tray, which folds down from the right-hand side, can go still higher, up to 271gsm.

Consumables are easy to get at, all sitting behind the fold-down front panel, in typical photocopier style. There are four separate toner cartridges and four photoconductor drums, as well as a waste toner bottle. The photoconductor drums have service lives of 90,000 pages for colour and 120,000 pages for black, but the toner cartridges are 'starter' units, offering 6,000 and 9,000 pages. Full-yield replacements provide up to 20,000 and 26,000 pages, respectively.

Supplied software includes drivers for PCL 6 and PostScript Level 3 as standard and there's support for Windows 2000, XP and Vista, OS 9.2 and OSX, Netware 4, 5 and 6 and various Linux distributions.

Although the machine is well-configured in its default state, there are plenty of ways to extend its capabilities. As well as up to two more 500-sheet trays, a bulk 2,500-sheet tray and a banner tray for long pages, you can fit a finisher, a four-bin mailbox, a four-hole punch and a saddle stitcher.

You can also fit a 60GB hard drive and an authentication scanner for USB drives. This actually looks at the veins in your finger to determine identify rather than your fingerprints, but thankfully doesn't yet ask for blood type or DNA breakdown before letting you print.

Konica Minolta rates the Magicolor at 35ppm for both black and colour prints. This is for A4 single-sized prints, so we started testing on that paper size. A five-page text document clocked up 20ppm, but as we increased the document length, first to 20 pages 30ppm and then to 60 pages 34ppm within a smidgeon of the claimed speed. Colour graphics didn't slow the printer down much, either and printing duplex pages still returned 27 sides per minute on a 60-side job.

Since A3 print is standard, plenty of people will be wanting to print that size and we saw simplex pages printing at 15ppm and duplex ones at 11ppm. Overall, a more than respectable result on speed, but how about the prints themselves?

Black text is very clear and precise, with a slight sheen adding to the professional effect of the page. Colour business graphics, however, are over-bright at default settings and adjustments may well need to be made to get colours looking more natural.

The print samples supplied by Konica Minolta show that it is possible to get natural colours from the machine, but our own photo sample showed colours which veered too far towards the primaries. Detail levels, from the 600dpi print engine, are fine for most business purposes.

In calculating costs, we're assuming you're unlikely to reach the 400,000 pages the fuser is designed to last, so haven't included a replacement in calculations. The transfer belt and roller are each rated at 150,000 pages, so it's possible these parts won't need to be changed, either.

That leaves the toner cartridges, drums and the waste toner bottle. Using the best internet prices we could find gives a cost per ISO black page of 1.36p and one for ISO colour of 6.25p. Both these figures are good, with the colour cost being particularly impressive.

Given the asking price of the printer itself at under 2,400, the TCO of the Magicolor 8650DN is low. If you prefer to pay for your printing on a per-click basis, there's a version of this machine in Konica Minolta's BizHub range, which is charged in this way.

Verdict

The feature set for this printer, including duplex print on A4 and A3 paper, twin paper trays and Gigabit Ethernet, makes it look very attractive as the basis for office and graphic printing. Given its flexible expansion options, it should be able to grow with your business too.

DPI: 600 x 600dpi, 35/35ppm A3 colour laser printer

Paper tray: 2 x 500 sheet paper tray + 150 sheet multi-purpose tray

Duty cycle: 2,500 – 150,000 pages per month average

Connections: USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet

Languages: PCL 6 and PostScript Level 3

Features: A3 print, duplex print, USB drive port, fast print

A4 printers are the workhorses of the modern office, but their limitations soon become obvious if you need to print complex project management charts, spreadsheets or glossy posters for the next big presentation. Despite its usefulness, A3 and ledger sized printing and scanning is often a luxury that many small businesses are hard pressed to afford but Brother is hoping to change that will its MFC-6890CDW.

Brother's recent A3 MFPs, including last year's MFC -6490CW have managed to keep purchase and print costs low compared to the rest of the A3 all-in-one market. A large part of this is because they use inkjet, rather than laser, print technology. As well as costing less to buy, business inkjets like the MFC-6890CDW have lower colour running costs than their laser counterparts, thanks to large ink tanks that can be replaced without changing an expensive print head.

The MFC-6890CDW is well specified, starting with A3+/ledger printing, scanning and fax capabilities. It has USB, Ethernet and 802.11b/g wireless networking, along with a PictBridge USB port that images can be printed from and scanned to. The printer has a 2,000 page recommended monthly duty cycle, total paper capacity of 350 sheets and a 50-sheet ADF for faxing and scanning multi-page documents.

Unfortunately, although the MFP has an automatic duplexer, it isn't equipped with a duplex scanner, which means that photocopying two-sided documents required us to manually flip the page we were scanning half-way through hardly convenient.

The most obvious difference between this MFP and last year's models is the addition of a touchscreen on the device's front panel. This is fairly easy to use thanks to its large, friendly on-screen buttons, although a vertical screen size of just 4cm means that scrolling through menus with one finger can be fiddly.

There are still some button controls. Four buttons to the right of the screen let you switch between fax, scan, copy and photo capture modes. The printer also has the usual colour copy, mono copy and cancel keys, along with the an alphanumeric keypad, programmable buttons and shortcut buttons for useful features like Duplex copying, although Duplex copying and printing is only possible from Tray 1.

Tray 1 has a relatively low capacity of 100 sheets of 80gsm copier paper. As well as being the only source for duplex prints, it's also the only tray that you can make borderless prints from. This a less than ideal combination, as we would have preferred to be able keep Tray 1 permanently stocked with photo paper and use Tray 2, which can hold 250 sheets of standard A4, for duplex printing.

Both trays can take paper sizes up to A3+ when fully expanded. The printer can't automatically detect which paper size you're using in each tray, so you'll have to set this manually. Fortunately, this is easy to do using the built-in menus.

The MFP doesn't have a web interface, which is a serious disadvantage, although Brother's Windows and Mac ControlCenter3 utility lets you configure many of the printer's settings remotely. After some initial difficulty in finding the printer's default password access' the utility proved to be a helpful addition to the MFP's built-in menus, although it doesn't provide access to all settings.

You can use it to set up profiles to scan directly to a designated PC or FTP server at the touch of a button, configure an admin email address for the delivery of error reports and add numbers to your quick-dial fax list, but not all print and copy settings can be adjusted. For instance, we were unable to change the default paper tray.

The scanner has a maximum optical scan resolution of 1,200 x 2,400dpi, although the highest optical resolution that can be selected using the Windows driver is 1,200 x 1,200dpi. The scanner interface is easy to use, and conveniently remains open between scans, but it's hardly overburdened with features. It can't auto-detect paper size, so you either have to crop your images manually or select from a pull-down menu of common sizes ranging from business card to A3.

Scans were sharp and clearly defined, and colours were generally accurate, although dark shades tended to merge into each other. An A3 scan at 300dpi took 44 seconds and an A4 scan at the same resolution took 33 seconds.

The printer comes with a set of standard ink cartridges, which yield 450 black and pages and 325 pages each of cyan, magenta, and yellow. High yield cartridges make for the best print costs, though, and are economically priced at under 9 for each of the three 750 page colour cartridges and less than 17 for the 900 page black ink tank.

Based on ISO/IEC 24711 page yield figures, this gives us A4 print costs of 1.9p per mono page and 5.4p per page of mixed colour and black printing. That's reasonably good value when compared to most current print costs for both inkjet and laser printers aimed at SMEs.

A3 costs are less easily calculated and less representative there's no international standard for A3 page yield but an A3 colour page with 20 per cent ink coverage, an organisational chart perhaps, would cost around 20p in ink, while we estimate the cost of a full poster-sized A3 photo print at around 2, including the cost of Brother's Innobella glossy A3 photo paper. Using a similar calculation, a 6 x 4in photo print costs around 47p.

Print quality was usable but a little unimpressive. Mono text at Normal quality was fuzzy around the edges, while fast draft text was extremely pale and only suitable for proofing a document before printing it properly. Photo quality was rather better, with sharp definition and solid colours, although pale shades had a visible magenta tint.

Unfortunately, the MFC-6890CDW's print speeds are poor. Even pale draft prints only emerged at 7.3ppm, while standard-quality mono text documents printed at 4.4ppm. Colour was also slugging at 2.1ppm, while a borderless A3 poster on photographic paper took a massive 40 minutes and 35 seconds.

We like the range of features on offer but the speeds from this machine speeds were not impressive and we feel most businesses would be better served by an inexpensive mono laser for day-to-day printing.

However, if you want a device that can handle a range of specialist printing and imaging tasks, from scanning magazines and copying double-sided documents to printing posters and blueprints, this versatile MFP can do it all - just not very quickly.

Verdict

The MFC-6890CDW is cheap to run and relatively inexpensive to buy, with generally good print quality. It has a decent range of features, including both duplex printing and scanning, but we were disappointed by its lack of a web interface and irritated by duplex printing that only works from the lower-capacity tray and duplex copying that requires you to manually flip the page you're trying to copy. Though its well featured, ultimately, the low print speeds make this MFP an unsuitable choice if you want to buy only one printer for your office.

Dpi: 1,200 x 6,000 dpi print resolution

PPM: 35ppm mono/28ppm colour quoted maximum speed

Scan resolution: 1,200 x 2,400dpi

Interfaces: USB, 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11b/g, PictBridge USB

Dimensions: 323 x 540 x 488mm

Warranty: Two -year RTB warranty

PSU: 3W standby, 5W idle, 16W active

With its latest MC860dn, Oki has taken the compact design of its 8000 series A3 colour lasers and produced a multifunction printer (MFP) that's one of the smallest of its type. With top claimed A4 mono and colour print speeds of 34ppm and 26ppm respectively it also rivals many of the larger MFP solutions from vendors such as HP, but comes in with a price tag that makes it more affordable for smaller businesses.

It offers A3/A4 print, copy, scan and fax functions straight out of the box and the base unit on review here can be upgraded with plenty of paper handling options. The MC860dn includes network support plus an internal duplex unit and you can add a second base unit with an extra 500-sheet tray or go for the version with two trays that takes paper capacity to 1,460 sheets.

The MC860dn looks and feels very well built and compared with some of the A3 monsters we've had in the lab is definitely a lot more compact. It's small enough to sit on a desktop although this will need to be sturdy as the base system tips the scales at 68kgs. The colour scanner offers a top 600dpi resolution and includes a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that can handle A3 and A4 paper sizes.

We found the operator control panel easy enough to use with its large LCD touch screen display frequently providing hints and tips on various operations. Basic colour or mono copies and scans are one button operations and you can also scan documents directly to email, local and network PCs or to a USB storage device inserted in the front port. Note that you can't print from a USB device.

For network scans you can create profiles using the touch screen panel where you describe the destination system, the target folder and whether the image should be output in PDF, JPEG, XPS or TIFF format. We had no problems sending scanned documents directly to a folder on our test server over CIFS and FTP.

Oki's Configuration Tool makes this process even easier as it is used to remotely add entries and import text files to lists on the printer for fax speed dials, group phone books, email addresses and copy destination profiles. We were able to configure the printer's email settings and copy documents directly as email attachments. Access to printer functions and colour printing can be strictly controlled with user names and PIN numbers, which determine precisely what they are allowed to do.

The 40GB hard disk is for storing overlays, fonts and macros and can be used to automatically collate multiple copies of large documents. Confidential prints can be spooled to the hard disk and held back until an operator enters their PIN number at the printer. Oki also provides a simple utility for remotely accessing the drive and managing its contents and the disk also offers secure erase and data encryption features.

Oki's software bundle includes the Actkey utility, which pulls documents directly from the printer to a local folder over a USB connection. A system tray tool alerts you when a print is completed or a fax has been received or sent and the package is rounded off with ScanSoft OmniPage SE 4 and PaperPort SE OCR and document management utilities. Oki also includes its PrintSuperVision tool, which installs a web server on your chosen management station from where you can remotely view and access all networked printers including those from other vendors.

Our performance tests showed the MC860dn delivering on all counts, with it producing a 34-page Word document in 61 seconds and tackling our 24-page heavy duty colour DTP document in 52 seconds. The latter took the same time on the General 600dpi and Fine 1,200 x 600 dpi driver settings and on the top interpolated ProQ2400 option it took a further seven seconds. A4 Copy operations are slower with a 12-page colour document taking 66 seconds from button press to final page for an average of 11ppm. Mono copies are much speedier with the same document reproduced in this mode in 45 seconds.

General colour output quality is very good with crisp, sharp text across a range of font sizes. Our colour test chart showed almost imperceptible stepping across colour fades and grey shades using different mixes of cyan, yellow and magenta were faithfully reproduced. Colour scans of reports are reasonably good if a little grainy, but quality does drop when scanning photos and particularly on mono scans.

Colour print output bears the characteristic vibrancy and high levels of detail we've seen with most of Oki's colour LED printers, so reports and A3 picture posters have that extra zing to make them stand out. We also found that the cross-hatch banding effect characteristic of this LED technology was almost unnoticeable.

There are consumables galore as you have toner cartridges, drum kits, fusers and transfer belts to replace. Mono cartridges are good for 9,500 pages, whilst colour ones last for 10,000 pages and adding everything together delivers a mono A4 page for just under a penny and a colour one at very reasonable 5.6 pence.

The MC860dn shows A3 colour MFPs don't need a huge amount of office space. Along with its compact design, it provides good overall output quality, delivers on its performance promises and compared with similar products from the likes of HP looks particularly good value.

Verdict

Colour A3 MFP printers can represent a significant outlay and the MC860dn is an affordable option for smaller businesses. It provides 4-in-1 functions in a remarkably compact unit, comes with a comprehensive range of print management tools and delivers good print speeds and low running costs.

SPECIFICATIONS Type: A3 colour LED printer Scanner/Copier: A3/A4 600dpi colour Print speeds: Claimed A4 - 34ppm mono/26ppm colour Resolutions: 600 x 600dpi, 1200 x 600dpi; ProQ2400 Processor: 500MHz Memory: 512MB Duplex: Yes Hard disk: 40GB Ports: Parallel; 2 x USB2; 2 x RJ-11 PSTN, 10/100 Ethernet Fax: 33.6Kbps Capacity: 300-sheet A3/A4 lower tray; 100-sheet MPT; 50-sheet ADF

Colour laser multifunction printers for workgroups are a convenient and often cost-effective option, as they serve as scanner, copier and fax machine, as well as a networked printer. Konica Minolta's Magicolor 4695MF is a substantial machine designed for relatively high duty cycles and includes both PCL and PostScript Level 3 emulations.

If you're installing the machine you'll know just how substantial, as it weighs 55kg, so is a definite two-person lift. It's not clear why it has to be quite so heavy or have such a large footprint there are A3 machines that take up less desk space. Once set up, though, its conventional lines mean it won't be a stranger to anybody who has used a photocopier before.

The control panel is straightforward, with a 4-line by 16-character backlit LCD display, bracketed on the right by a four-way menu navigation ring and on the left by fax function buttons. To the right of the navigation ring is a number pad for fax dialling and to the right of that are mode buttons for fax, scan and copy, as well as colour and black-and-white start buttons and one for cancelling a job.

At the top of the machine is a 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and a very large, counter-balanced cover for the A4 flatbed scanner. There's a 250-sheet tray at the base of the front panel, where you load paper in landscape mode, like a copier, and there's a 100-sheet, multi-purpose tray that folds down from the right-hand side for occasional print on special media. The output tray hangs like a balcony from the left-hand side of the machine, further increasing its footprint.

Although a 500-sheet secondary tray is available as an option, it seems odd not to provide a higher capacity tray as standard, on a machine with a 120,000-page duty cycle. In a busy office, you could be refilling it rather too regularly.

Because of its basis as a copier, the Magicolor 4695MF can perform some neat tricks. As well as fairly normal enlargement and reduction copying, the machine can produce a duplex copy from two scanned pages, enlarge a page up to four pages and repeat a small, scanned image multiple times on a single page.

There's a copy of Nuance PaperPort for document management, but the machine also comes with Konica Minolta's own PageScope suite, covering network handling. Both PCL and PostScript Level 3 are provided in emulation.

The Magicolor 4695MF is rated at 24ppm for both black and colour pages, but under our tests, where we print in normal mode and include processing time, we saw no more than 17ppm for black text print. Our five-page, text and colour graphics test took 1:05, or a speed of just 4.61ppm and printing a 10-page, 20-side duplex document took a very leisurely 4:42, giving a page speed of 2.13ppm. This slow duplex speed may discourage customers from making the paper savings available with double-sided printing a shame.

Print quality, using Konica Minolta's Simitri HD polymerised toner, is generally very good, with almost die-cut black lettering and vibrant colour graphics. Konica Minolta claims prints are matt, but they're only semi-matt, with black in particular still having a sheen to it. Photographic images, as long as you select photo print in the driver, are more natural than from many colour laser engines.

Colour photocopies from both the flatbed and the ADF are perfectly acceptable, though some tints look a little faded. The scanner has a maximum 600dpi resolution, so is fine for OCR and general-purpose scanning. It produces good images and there's sufficient onboard memory to hold several page images, so when copying, the scanner doesn't have to wait for the previous page to finish printing.

All consumables are at the front of the device, behind the hinge-down front panel, and toner and drum units slide out from the front, keeping maintenance easy. Toner cartridges provide 4,000 pages in standard capacity or 8,000 pages in high capacity and the drum units only need to be replaced after 30,000 pages. The fuser, transfer belt and transfer roller are considered to be maintenance items and have service lives of 120,000 pages.

Given the going rate for the consumables on the web, we calculate page costs of 1.21p for a black page and 6.63p for colour. These are reasonable rates, though not exceptional, and if you feel the service life of your printer will run to more than 120,000 pages, you need to add 1.12p to the cost of both black and colour pages, nearly doubling the black page cost.

Alternatively, Konica Minolta can sell you the BizHub C20, essentially the same machine as the Magicolor 4695MF but on a per-click basis, and this may prove more economic, if the machine will be used heavily.

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Verdict

This is a heavyweight machine, which should be able to handle print, copy, scan and fax functions for a good-sized workgroup. Print and scan quality is good, but print isn’t as fast as the spec sheet figures suggest. TCO is likely to be good, particularly before you reach 120,000 pages, when extra maintenance kicks in.

Resolution: 2,400 x 600dpi Speed: (Manufacturer’s claimed), 24ppm A4 duplex colour printer Paper handling: 250 + 100 sheet paper trays Duty Cycle: 120,000 page one-off monthly duty cycle Connectivity: USB 2.0 and gigabit Ethernet ports Languages: PCL6 and PostScript L3 emulation drivers

A fully networked, departmental multifunction colour laser is a very useful thing. Sharp has sold a lot of them and its latest generation includes several innovations, which could simplify office printing, scanning and copying.

This substantial machine is available in two models, the MX-2600N and the MX-3100N, which are identical apart from their speeds: 26ppm and 31ppm, respectively. Both devices can take paper up to wide A3 in their 50-sheet Auto Document Feeders (ADFs), in their 100-sheet multi-purpose feeds and in the two, 500-sheet, universal paper trays that come as standard.

When you pull down the front panel, attractively finished in a textured light grey, you can see the machine comes from the photocopier design school, rather than the laser printer. The four toner cartridges and waste bottles slide in next to each other from the front and the drum and transfer belt are easily accessible from a slide-out panel on the right-hand end.

Sharp claims that 99 per cent of these printers are sold on lease contract, where service support and consumables are included in the deal, again more like photocopier sales, but the toners should last for 18,000 pages (black) and 15,000 pages (colours). Sharp, therefore, claims a cost per page of 0.5p for black and 5p for colour. These costs are good, but are difficult to compare with something like the HP LaserJet CM6030/6040, which on paper looks a lot cheaper. The HP price doesn't include a service contract or consumables, though.

Walk-up functions include the ability to print xps, pdf, jpeg and tif files directly from a memory stick and to scan from flatbed or ADF to one, too. A job can also be sent to the printer's hard drive, encrypted if necessary, and printed only when you've typed in an access code at the device's touch-screen. Templates for letterheads and the like can also be stored on the internal hard drive to save storage and help encourage use of a house style.

The 8.5-inch touch-screen shows the main features of the machine's set up in full colour and, according to Sharp, this layout will eventually be common to all machine's in the new range learn one and you can use them all. It's very easy to use and the only physical buttons on the control panel are to start black and colour jobs, to cancel a job, to switch to sleep mode (the printers time out to sleep mode, automatically, too) and to dial fax numbers, if the fax option's installed.

One aspect of the machine Sharp is keen to show is the remote access via a VCN application, which mimics the touch panel. This isn't primarily so you can start a print job remotely, which would be of little value, as somebody has to collect it from the output bin, but rather so a service engineer can diagnose and possibly fix problems without having to delay use of the machine while he drives to site. Though physical problems, like the repeated transfer belt cleaning we experienced during testing, would require a visit, we can see how settings problems could be conveniently solved remotely.

The company also mentioned its tandem print feature, where if you have two MX-3100Ns or MX-2600Ns, or even one of each, a print job sent to them can be automatically split between the two, finishing in roughly half the time.

There's a wide range of options for these machines, including extra paper trays and finishers which can collate, fold, hole-punch, staple and saddle-stitch. Fax functions are extra, as is the slide-out keyboard, very handy for typing faxes or emails from the scanner.

The quoted print speeds are quick, but as usual the manufacturer has quoted a page on page speed. Testing on the 31ppm MX-3100N, we timed a 20-page black text document, from start of job to last page printed, to a speed of 21ppm. A 20x copy of our text and graphics page took 51 seconds, giving a colour print speed of 23.5ppm.

Text print quality is very good, with sharp (sic), precise, black text and bright, clear colours. We noticed some registration problems with black text over colour, with white halos showing, but photo colour was generally good and certainly not over saturated, as is often the case with colour lasers. Some shadow detail was lost in our test photo, but generally colour print was acceptable.

Print jobs can be allocated to individuals for budgeting and there seem to be few functions Sharp hasn't thought of, though quite a few of them are options and not included in the standard printer. Even so, for general office duties, this is a heavyweight player with a lot of room for expansion.

Verdict

The MX-3100N and MX-2600N – the only difference is the speed – are well thought-out multifunction machines for the large workgroup or small department. With secure file-handling and versatile walk-up scanning and printing, along with A3 handling and duplex as standard, they're flexible in what they can do and remote operation via network and internet should ease service support.

Dimensions: Base machine 620 x 695 x 950mm Dpi: 1,200dpi, 26/31ppm A4 colour multifunction Paper handling: 2 x 500-sheet paper universal paper trays + 100-sheet multi-purpose feed, up to A3 Duty Cycle: 30,000 page monthly duty cycle, based on five year life Connectivity: USB 2, gigabit Ethernet Extras: 8.5-inch touch-screen control panel

Ink-jet all-in-ones are rapidly making the transition from home-centred, consumer devices to business machines for SOHO and even SME use.

One of the moves which is easier, and a lot cheaper, for inkjets to make than lasers is to larger print sizes. Wider carriage and bigger paper trays are about all it takes to go from A4 to A3 print and Brother reckons there could be a market for an A3 all-in-one at a good price. This is the reasoning behind the MFC-6490CW.

By a good price, the company means just over 200 and by A3 it means twin A3 paper trays as well as an A3 Auto Document Feeder (ADF) for copying and faxing. Although the paper it's handling has twice the area of A4, the machine isn't twice as big as an A4 all-in-one, but the extra width is well used to provide more space in the control panel. Brother has taken the opportunity to include two paper trays, both of which can take A4 or A3 paper, but the top, 150-sheet multi-purpose tray can also take paper down to 15 x 10cm, making it suitable for standard photo prints, too.

What the trays can't do, though, is auto-detect the size of paper within them, which makes it awkward to send documents of either size, particularly over a network. To print correctly, you need to know which tray contains which size of paper, even though it may not be your job to set up and maintain the all-in-one. This wouldn't matter if each tray were dedicated to a particular paper size, but since both are flexible, it would be a big advantage to be able to print at least A4 and A3 documents and trust the printer to sort out which tray to feed from.

The control panel includes a double-width, four-colour LCD display, as on some of Brother's cheaper, A4 machines. This enables the printer to display, for example, a thumbnail photograph from a memory card with print or effects options next to it, rather than overlaying them on the image itself. The control panel has a fairly logical array of buttons, though some of the allocations are a little suspect and its operation may take a bit of learning.

There are three ways of connecting up the Brother MFC-6490CW: USB 2.0 cable, Ethernet network connection or 802.11g wireless. All three methods are straightforward, with wireless setup handled by three different auto protocols: Secure Easy Setup, ADSS and Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), which may well make it easy to set up encrypted connections, depending on the make and technology of your router.

The 50-sheet ADF, which is available once you've folded out its top cover, enables you to copy and fax A3 documents, assuming the receiving fax can handle this size, too. If you have bound documents to scan, you can hinge the ADF back to reveal the flatbed, but only to around 45 degrees, which can make access to the flatbed awkward.

Brother claims the machine can hit 28ppm when printing A4 pages in colour and 33ppm when printing in black. With average office document sizes of around four or five pages, we don't think you'll see anything like these speeds. A five-page test document took 1:12, giving a real-world speed of just over 4ppm and an equivalent five-page text and colour graphics test took 1:52, or 2.7ppm. A five-page A3 black text print competed in 1:53, so again just over 2.6ppm.

Copying isn't much quicker, with a single page, A4 copy taking around 45 seconds and an A3 one about 15 seconds less, not what we expected, at 30 seconds. Copies from the flatbed and from the ADF took very similar times.

Text print quality is pretty good, not up to the best laser printers but well up with the top contenders in business inkjets. Colour graphics look a little insipid, all coming out a deal paler than the original documents and colour copies exhibit an even paler pallor and some change of hue, in comparison with what was being copied. Photo prints, on Brother's recommended gloss paper, look clean and reasonably bright, though some darker shadow details can get lost.

Print comes from the four Brother ink cartridges which plug in behind a drop-down cover at the front of the MFC-6490CW. They come in two capacities and the higher yield versions produce black and colour page costs of 3.3p and 8.2p, respectively. The black print cost is a little on the high side, though colour is reasonable for a machine in this price bracket. This is not a particularly expensive printer to run.

Verdict

We suspect this is the first of several A3 all-in-one printers to be released by the major manufacturers over the next year. While it's well-specified and does its job reasonably well, there are some design flaws in the menu system and it would benefit from auto-size detection in its two paper trays.

Resolution: 6,000 x 1,200dpi Speed: 33ppm (28ppm black) A3 multifunction printer Paper handling: 250-sheet paper tray plus 150-sheet multi-purpose Document handling: 50-sheet ADF for colour scans and copies Duty cycle: 5,000 page monthly duty cycle Connectivity: USB 2.0, Ethernet and 802.11g WiFi Software: Brother ControlCenter3, PhotoCapture Center, driver

Kyocera, the printer maker, married Mita, the copier company, eight years ago and, although all its high-end printers are sold under the Kyocera brand, there's more than a little of the departmental photocopier about the KM-8030. Given the facilities of this multifunction machine, its basic size seems quite modest. It can handle A3 sheets with ease - both printing and scanning - and prints A4 pages in landscape mode for increased throughput.

The machine comes as standard with five paper trays: two 1,500-sheet A4 trays sit side by side under the printer engine, with two 'universal' trays, capable of taking paper up to A3, below those. There's a multi-purpose tray at the side of the device, which can take a further 100 sheets of paper or card up to 200gsm.

On top of the printer section is a flatbed scanner, which can take A3 sheets, too. The Auto Document Feeder (ADF) takes up to 200-sheets and can scan both sides of each sheet in a single pass, with it duplex scanning heads.

This is as much a standalone copier as it is a printer or scanner and scan and copy jobs are controlled by a large, blue and white touchscreen, which can be tilted back and forward for optimum viewing. Kyocera Mita has made a good job of the screen design, with plenty of well-drawn icons and animation. Open the front cover of the machine, for example, and you're given instructions on clearing paper jams - though we didn't have occasion to clear any while testing the KM-8030.

As well as choosing common job types from touch menus, such as printing two pages on one sheet or producing duplex documents from single-sided originals, you can define your own special tasks, which can be saved on the machine and recalled each time you want to use them. Although there's no facility for secure 'walk-up' printing from a flash drive, you can direct a job to the printer and hold it until you're at the control panel and have entered a password, before printing. This is useful for printing confidential documents in a departmental setting.

Despite its functionality and price, the printer can be connected via ubiquitous USB 2.0 or parallel cables, as well as to a 10/100 Ethernet network. Kyocera's drivers are straightforward to install and give full functionality. There's also a network device monitor supplied, so IT staff can check the machine's status from any networked PC.

It's hard to believe the 80ppm speed quoted by Kyocera Mita, but under test, we saw it complete a 60-page, single-sided job in 62 seconds, which gives three quarters of this. Duplex print takes very little longer, and our 60-side job took just 69 seconds. Moving to A3 paper saw a 20-side job finish in 50 seconds, again a fairly spectacular speed. Copy speeds are also good, with a 20-page, A4 print taking 22 seconds and a 20-side duplex one completing in just three seconds longer.

The quality of prints from the machine is fair. Text prints are dense and well-formed, with even small point sizes coming through clearly. Business graphics are OK, though there's a degree of graininess in areas of greyscale and some banding, particularly where there are varying greyscale tints.

This is emphasised in the photo prints we produced, where detail was generally good, even in areas of dark shadow, but where the variegated sky is full of light and dark bands. Kyocera claimed the test machine might have needed adjusting and that they would have expected less banding than we saw.

Like many Kyocera Mita printers, the KM-8030 has a lifetime drum, good for over a million copies or prints. This means the only consumables are a toner cartridge - rated at 47,000 pages - and a preventive maintenance kit, which is needed every 500,000 pages. The best prices we could find for these, result in a cost per page of 0.175p, with bulk costs (on contract) even lower, at 0.149p. This is a very good page cost and maintains the company's reputation for low overall cost of ownership.

Although the KM-8030 is well equipped from the off, there are numerous options to expand its paper handling and collation facilities. These range from a six-bin output sorter, to a stapler and hole punch, to a 1,000 sheet feeder, for those with very heavy usage. The machine has a maximum duty cycle of 400,000 pages per month, but a usage figure of 80,000 is more typical. With these options installed, it's quite possible to print stapled booklets with separate coloured covers and flyleaves in a single job.

Verdict

This is more than just a printer; it's a document management system. Thanks to its versatile scanning and copying facilities, its extensive collation and finishing options and its impressive speed and flexibility it will certainly improve in-house document production in a busy corporate department or reprographics business.

DPI: 600dpi, 80ppm A3 document manager Paper handling: 2 x 1,500 + 2 x 500-sheet paper trays + 150-sheet multi-purpose Duty cycle: 400,000 page monthly duty cycle Scanner: 200-sheet, duplex ADF scanner Connectivity: USB 2.0, Ethernet and parallel ports Drivers: Prescribe driver plus PCL6 and PostScript L3 emulation Extra: Extensive paper-handling options

Medium sized business and enterprises looking for top colour and mono print speeds plus multi-function capabilities have traditionally had no option but to go for a laser printer. With its new Edgeline technology, HP has turned this notion on its head as its latest CM8000 family delivers up to 60ppm mono and 50ppm colour but are essentially inkjet printers.

The new printers target businesses with a real appetite for paper as they aim to satisfy a monthly volume of 25,000 to 50,000 pages. They're pitched against colour copiers from the likes of Xerox, Canon and Konica and although they provide support for A3 printing are optimized for A4 operations with the bulk of printing comprising text and business graphics with around 40 per cent colour output.

Clearly, standard inkjet technology is totally unsuited to high-volume printing for a number of obvious reasons and Edgeline aims to solve them all. It's been seven years in the making and uses four, water resistant, pigment-based inks which HP claims offers superior contrast and brighter colours to dye-based inks. The biggest problem HP needed to tackle was drying time otherwise you'll end up with a soggy mess in your output tray at these speeds. The printer uses a unique bonding agent which is delivered by a pair of dedicated print heads. The agent is applied first where it grabs the ink and pulls it into the paper and a blower is used for final drying.

The next problem is keeping the print head nozzles clean and the printer uses a series of lasers to measure the droplet sizes. If the droplet gets smaller it indicates that the nozzle is getting blocked so the printer 'spits' ink though the problem nozzle to clear it. Paper is introduced to the print head array by placing it on a large rotating drum which uses a vacuum to hold it in place and is large enough to accommodate three sheets at a time. To stop ink 'spits' ending up on a page the drum has slots between each paper position and cleaning only occurs when these are level with the relevant print head.

The printer is very simple to operate and we found build quality to be exemplary. Opening the side panel reveals the drum with the print heads located above and fitted to assemblies that can be pulled out for easy access. However, the print heads are not consumables and are designed to last the life of the printer. The ink cartridges are located below and are very easy to remove and replace. Printing costs are a little difficult to estimate as the printers are purchased with yearly maintenance contracts which include replacement ink. However, HP claims 30 per cent lower running costs than equivalent toner based lasers with costs of between 2.5p to 4p per colour page.

One feature we really like is the new operator control panel. The print formatter runs XP Embedded allowing HP to provide a higher level of access via a large 10in. touch panel. The menu system is very intuitive and HP had added video clips to show users how to clear paper jams and replace consumables. This ties in with a feature coined 'digital breadcrumbs' where each accessible component has an LED on it. If a jam occurs the panel runs a step by step video and uses the LEDs to show the user where to go. There's also less risk of injury as the printer's blower runs at 30C which is a lot less than a laser fuser unit.

Combine the operator panel with the options available in the bundled drivers and users have a lot of features to play with. From the printer you can access functions such as copying, scan to email, network folder or the internal hard disk and display a job status. The scan function supports a wide range of formats including PDF, JPEG and TIFF whilst OCR comes as standard. This is provided by ReadIris Pro which is installed on the embedded XP and can output to HTML, CSV and XML. From the driver you can select the professional colour mode but the general office mode aims to deliver draft copies that reduce costs by around 30 per cent and are good enough to used as final copies. We compared draft prints from the usual suspects with those from the CM8060 and they are, indeed, much better quality.

During performance testing we found HP's quoted speeds to be somewhat optimistic although speed really will depend on the type of document as pages may require more than one pass. A basic 100-page Word text document was delivered in 143 seconds for an average of 42ppm. Our 120-page DTP test document with its collection of colour graphics and photographs dropped into the output bin in 237 seconds in professional mode and 209 seconds in general mode for speeds of 30.5ppm and 34.5ppm respectively.

The CM8060 may not impress in the speed stakes but it really scores for print quality. Text is razor sharp even down to the smallest font sizes whilst mono photographs also show very good levels of detail. Charts and graphs in our test reports were cleanly produced and colour blocks laid down with no white edging showing placement to be very accurate. The printer isn't aimed at photographic use and we did find that colour pictures lacked a certain vibrancy. However, the characteristic banding often found with many high speed lasers is virtually non-existent for the professional mode. As with mono pictures we also found the printer was capable of resolving a lot of detail in darker areas of colour photographs. With our performance test we could see colour fades with almost no stepping at all and grey shades using different mixes of cyan, magenta and yellow were reproduced faithfully with no colour casts evident.

The CM8060 delivers an innovative colour inkjet technology that looks a very solid alternative to high volume lasers. We couldn't achieve the quoted speeds during testing but quality is undeniably good and the printer design and operator panel makes it extremely user friendly.

Verdict

Lasers beware as HP introduces a new high-speed inkjet printing technology. Print speeds are below par but the CM8060 delivers top output quality, very low running costs and a quite remarkable level of features.

600 x 600dpi A3 colour inkjet Up to 60/50ppm A4 mono/colour 1.6GHz Intel Pentium M-730 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 2 x USB 2.0 2 x EIO slots JetDirect Fast Ethernet print server 80GB hard disk 600 x 600dpi colour copier 3 x 500-sheet input trays 100-sheet ADF tray 80-sheet bypass tray Drivers for Windows 2000 onwards, Linux and Mac OS