If you need another reason to hate printers, you can add 'security risk' to the list.

A new study from HP Wolf Security reveals that printer security is routinely neglected, with businesses failing to carry out firmware upgrades.

Only 36% of IT and security decision-makers apply printer firmware updates promptly, even though IT teams spend an average of 3.5 hours per printer, per month managing security issues.

Steve Inch, global senior print security strategist at HP, said an often overlooked aspect of printer security is the fact they’re no longer just “harmless office fixtures”.

“They’re smart, connected devices storing sensitive data,” he said. “With multi-year refresh cycles, unsecured printers create long-term vulnerabilities.”

"If compromised, attackers can harvest confidential information for extortion or sale,” Inch added. “The wrong choice can leave organizations blind to firmware attacks, tampering or intrusions, effectively laying out the welcome mat for attackers to access the wider network.”

Printer security is becoming a nightmare

Security gaps are appearing at every stage of the product lifecycle, researchers found, with only 38% of respondents saying procurement, IT, and security teams collaborate to define printer security standards.

Six-in-ten believe this lack of cross-functional collaboration puts their organization at risk.

Meanwhile, 42% said they don't involve IT or security teams in vendor presentations, with 54% failing to request technical documentation to validate security claims, and 55% failing to submit vendor responses to security teams for review.

Nor do they check the printer’s integrity, with more than half saying they can't confirm whether the printer has been tampered with in the factory or in transit.

Moreover, once the printer does arrive, only 35% of IT decision makers said they could identify whether it was vulnerable based on newly published hardware or firmware vulnerabilities.

Only 34% can track unauthorized hardware changes made by users or support teams while just 32% can detect security events linked to hardware-level attacks.

Another key security risk highlighted by the study centers around when printers reach end of life. A majority (86%) of respondents said data security is a barrier to reuse, resale, or recycling.

More than a third said they were uncertain whether printers can be fully and safely wiped.

Notably, a quarter of respondents said they play it safe by physically destroying printer storage drives, and one-in-ten destroy both the storage drives and the device itself.

Enterprises need to get their act in order

HP Wolf Security said organisations need to foster closer collaborative ties between IT, security, and procurement teams on this front to bolster security and resilience.

This includes making sure they get security certificates for products and supply chain processes, the report noted.

Similarly, they should apply firmware updates promptly, use tools to streamline printer policy-based configuration compliance, and select printers with built-in secure erasure capabilities to enable safe recycling.

"By considering security at each stage of a printer’s lifecycle, organizations will not only improve the security and resilience of their endpoint infrastructure, but also benefit from better reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency over the lifetime of their fleets,” said Boris Balacheff, chief technologist for security research and innovation at HP.

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HP's LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdwe is a fairly compact mono laser multifunction peripheral (MFP), built for use in small and home offices. It's got almost the perfect specification for the role, with a duplex printer, a scanner with an automatic document feeder (ADF), and even support for faxing. Everything's controlled through an intuitive color touchscreen, with a USB port that supports walk-up scans and prints.

This is a rapid and fairly robust printer. HP quotes a 33 pages-per-minute (ppm) maximum speed, with a recommended duty cycle of up to 2,500 pages per month, or a one-time maximum of 50,000. Its paper handling is a little disappointing, though, as its 250-sheet input cassette has no bypass feed, and the 50-sheet ADF is simplex (single-sided) only.

There is, for many users, a bigger issue. The 'e' in MFP 3102fdwe signifies that this is the HP+ version of the otherwise identical LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdw. For a slightly lower purchase price, you get the same multifunction, but in return, you must agree to certain restrictions in the way you can use it. Specifically, you need to create a (free) HP+ account and agree that for the lifetime of the printer, it will be connected to the internet, and you'll only use genuine HP supplies.

We're not that bothered about the latter – our experience suggests that third-party supplies aren't usually worth the trouble – but the permanent internet connection is an imposition. Printers can be problematic enough on their own, without the additional risk that they'll stop working any time your internet connection goes down. This could be a particular headache for firms with home workers using dodgy ADSL connections, for example. HP points to the availability of equivalent, non-HP+ models, but it's important to note that if you buy the 3102fdwe, HP+ and its conditions are mandatory.

HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdwe review: Setting up

There are no physical requirements for setting up the 3102fdwe. It's not especially big or heavy for a laser, and certainly no trouble for one reasonably fit person. There's a single consumable, combining toner with a drum, and it's already fitted and ready to go. This initial supply will only last around 1,000 pages. Standard replacements cover a stingy 1,500 prints, and the high-yield alternative is only rated for 4,000, likely to result in more frequent maintenance than ideal.

Switch the 3120fdwe on, join it to a network and it'll present you with an activation code. This is the first time we've seen this, and initially, it seemed like a further hoop to jump through, but in fact, it helps simplify the driver setup. You simply visit an HP website, enter the code, and then follow through the activation and installation process. We're happy to report that the setup process installs proper PC software including a TWAIN scan interface, rather than the more consumer-focused and limited HP Smart app.

Setup gives you the chance to configure Instant Ink, HP's ink subscription service, which for this printer includes a three-month free trial. There is a range of monthly toner price plans from £1.70 for 50 pages, to 800 pages for £15 (ex VAT). For a color laser, which might otherwise have a cost per page of 10p, these can make printing far cheaper.

They make far less sense for a mono printer like this, though. Even if you use the full monthly allowance, the best value, top-tier plan works out at 1.9p per page. That's only about 0.2p per page cheaper than buying high-capacity toners yourself.

HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdwe review: Printing, scanning and copying

If it sounds like we don't love the MFP 3102fdwe so far, things are about to get a lot better. In use, it has a great many strengths. For a start, it's quick. Like other HP lasers, there's no warm-up time for the fuser, so the first page appears in a brilliant nine seconds whether it's the first job of the day, or immediately after a previous print. It went on to hit 27.8ppm in our 25-page text test which, given it includes the time taken to spool the job, is very close to HP's stated 33ppm.

Like all printers, the MFP 3102fdwe was significantly slower to spool and print our complex graphics test. It reached a slightly disappointing 16ppm here, but made up for it with fast duplexing, hitting an impressive 8.6 images per minute on our graphics-heavy 10-side, five-page test. This MFP is a ludicrously quick copier, managing a single A4 page in 16 seconds, and 10 pages in just 37 seconds.

We had no complaints about the MFP 3102fdwe's scan speeds, either. It completed an A4 preview in just nine seconds and took the same time to scan a page at 150 dots per inch (dpi). Upping the resolution to 300dpi more than doubled this to 20 seconds, but that's still quite acceptable. We timed a 600dpi scan of a 6x4" (15x10cm) photo at 25 seconds. Only at its maximum 1,200dpi was the scanner particularly slow, needing a minute and 40 seconds to finish a photo scan.

We generally expect mono lasers to be quick, but this can come at the cost of print quality. Particularly, it's common to see a degree of banding, and some printers are hopeless at half-toning without creating a bunch of obvious and intrusive dithering patterns.

Not so the MFP 3102fdwe, which delivered among the best graphics we've seen from a mono laser. While prints didn't have a particularly strong sheen, they were free of vices like banding. More impressively, this printer created smooth greyscale shades without obvious patterns or step changes. This led to excellent photos in particular but was also noticeable on presentation slides and other graphics with smooth shade progressions.

Document scans were also excellent, with good exposure, so it's perhaps no surprise that the MFP 3102fdwe turned out to be a good photocopier, quickly producing high-quality copies. Here, the lack of flexibility offered by a duplex ADF was our only criticism.

This MFP is unlikely to spend much time scanning photos, but it can do a decent job if it's ever called for. We found that selecting Auto Exposure tended to wash out lighter shades. Keep it off and the results are fine, bar some digital sharpening that's only really visible once you zoom in to 100%.

HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdwe review: Is it worth it? 

Set aside HP+ for a moment, and the HP LaserJet MFP 3102fdwe has manifold strengths and only one real weakness. It's an attractive, compact, and fast MFP that produces strong results across the board. It could be improved with a second paper input and a duplex ADF, but otherwise, it's an excellent device. What a shame, then, that it costs around 2p a page to run – that's just too much in this class.

We don't see the value in signing up to the additional restrictions imposed by HP+. It's not mandatory on the LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdw, which costs only another £20 or so. We'd choose that. Better yet, we'd go for a competitor that's as fast and capable, yet significantly cheaper to run: Xerox's B305DN.

HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdwe specifications 

A lawsuit against HP alleging the company defrauded investors is set to continue after a US appeals court reversed a ruling which dismissed the case. 

The case was previously dismissed amid claims that complainants had filed a legal challenge too late. 

However, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision on Tuesday, potentially paving the way for a renewed challenge. 

Complainants in the case argue that HP misled shareholders by making “fraudulent statements” about its printing supplies business in 2015 and 2016. 

A key element in the case is that HP unveiled plans to reduce product inventories across distribution channels in June 2016. 

The firm said at the time that this move would reduce revenue from printing supplies by nearly $450 million across two quarters in that year. 

However, in September 2020 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued HP with a $6 million fine over these sales practices. 

 The SEC said at the time that regional managers had incentivized staff to “accelerate sales” and offer discounted supplies to HP-linked resellers, meaning that the company cannibalized sales from affiliate distributors. 

“During the period relevant to this case, HP sold its supplies through a ‘push model’. Under this model, HP offered incentives to ‘Tier 1’ distributors to purchase printing supplies,” legal documents read. 

“Those Tier 1 distributors, in turn, sold to ‘Tier 2’ distributors who sold HP products to other resellers or to end users,” read the court documents.

“These sales, offered at a discount, “[cannibalized]” sales from local distributors, who would have to lower prices to compete with marked-down goods from other territories.”

HP investors were not informed of these practices, the SEC noted, which prompted a swift legal challenge just weeks after the SEC settlement agreement. 

In March 2022, a California court dismissed the case, claiming that investors should have lodged a complaint within a two-year time frame of the ‘discovery’ of fraudulent activities. 

However, it was argued that investors could not have known of such activities prior to the SEC ruling.  

“Lead plaintiff Maryland Electrical Industry Pension Fund alleged that HP and individual defendants made fraudulent statements about HP’s printing supplies business,” court documents read.

“The district court concluded that the complaint, filed in 2020, was barred by the two-year statute of limitations, 28 U.S.C. § 1658(b)(1), because the public statements, loss in profits, and reductions in channel inventory at the heart of Maryland Electrical’s claims had all taken place by 2016.”

The successful appeal means that investors could pursue compensation against the California-based firm. 

Darren Robbins, an attorney for the Maryland-based pension fund leading the lawsuit, told Reuters that the decision will help investors seeking a resolution to the dispute. 

ITPro has approached HP for comment. 

You can learn a lot from the manufacturers’ specifications, but there’s no substitute for hands-on testing. In all our printer and scanner reviews, we tease out devices true strengths and weaknesses through a battery of tests designed to mimic real-world print, scan and copy jobs.

We’ll also make more subjective assessments of elements such as the design, appearance and build quality, as well as the additional quality-of-life features it offers, and the value for money.

Print quality

We start with untimed print tests across a variety of print types, including black and white text, colour photos and greyscale images. We use these to check the output quality of the printer, looking for factors such as colour banding, text sharpness, image definition and whether there’s any run between ink colours.

Print speeds

To measure print speeds, we time how quickly a printer delivers a first page of black text, and a full 25-page mono job. Because we include all the time taken from clicking Print to the last page dropping into the output tray, our page-per-minute (ppm) speeds are always somewhat lower than the manufacturers’. On inkjets, we repeat this test at draft quality, which usually produces a faster result.

Our next test uses a 24-page document comprising web pages, presentation slides and magazine pages to measure colour speed. It’s a challenging test, so colour printers usually fall well behind their rated speed - mono printers typically get closer. Where there’s duplex, we print the first 10 pages onto five sheets, quoting the speed as images (sides) per minute. On laser printers we use a page from this document to time how long a first colour page takes. We repeat the mono and colour time-to-first-page tests from cold.

On inkjets we print two 10 x 8in photos onto A4 photo paper, then six borderless 6x4” photos. With lasers we print the latter test onto three A4 sheets. We do all our photo tests at the highest available quality settings.

Copy speeds

On an MFP we time a single photocopy and, where there’s an ADF, a 10-page copy, repeating this test in colour where available. If both the printer and ADF support duplexing, we time a 10-page, 20-sided colour copy. While we’re at it, we check the menu system’s usability, particularly when it comes to direct print and scan features.

Scan speeds

We test scanners with an office document, a 6 x 4in colour photo and a Kodak Q-60 colour input target. We time how long it takes to obtain a preview image, and create A4 scans at 150 and 300 dots per inch (dpi). We also time 600dpi and 1,200dpi scans of the photograph. The target helps reveal limitations in a scanner’s dynamic range, most commonly manifested as poorly distinguished dark shades.

Power consumption

Finally, we measure each printer’s power use in sleep and standby modes. We also measure peak consumption, usually during mono photocopying. It’s worth noting that, for laser printers in particular, our peak measurements are usually far higher than the typical power consumption.

After watching too many sci-fi films, the last place you might expect to encounter lasers is in a simple piece of office equipment: the printer. There’s no need to worry, as this doesn’t mean your reliable piece of hardware is going to start blasting red flashes of light at you anytime soon.

Instead, lasers are used in an intricate process which ends up with a piece of paper with exactly what you wanted printed on it. For users, all you do is hit print and send your document or image to be printed. However, once you know what goes on in the belly of your beast, the laser printing process is actually very interesting.

If you’re trying to work out which kind of printer is the best for you, you’re simply curious about how these devices function, or you’re trying to see which is best for the workplace or your small business, simply read on to find out how this piece of equipment works.

How laser printers work

Laser printers use a heated wire to positively charge a drum. Then, a laser passes over it which reverses the charge in the parts that it covers. You end up with a negatively charged area of the drum which becomes the text or image that needs to be printed.

A toner roller is passed over the drum, causing toner particles to stick to the areas which are negatively charged. Toner is made up of microscopic ink particles which will stick to these negatively charged areas of the drum.

Then, a sheet of paper is slotted underneath the toner-coated drum which spreads the toner onto its surface. This ends up creating a printer copy of the digital image or document that a user sent to be printed.

If that’s too much to take in, we’ve summarised the process below:

1. The printer needs to warm up and reached a specific temperature in order to heat the wire
2. The wire is heated and passes an electrical charge to the drum unit. This causes the drum unit to be positively charged
3. The laser is activated, beamed to various mirrors and reflected across the drum’s surface. Where it hits the drum, the positive charge changes to negative. This creates an outline of what you’re printing
4. The negatively charged areas are where the toner particles stick to the drum to then be transferred onto paper
5. An ink roller coats the drum with toner which begins sticking to the drum
6. Paper passes near the drum, causing the negatively charged toner particles to be attracted onto the page
7. The particles are then fused to the paper and the page is spat out of the printer

Do laser printers use ink?

Unlike inkjet printers, laser printers don’t use traditional ink. Instead they tend to use toner which is a fine, dry powder. It’s essentially a mixture of plastic, carbon, or polyester particles, combined with colouring agents, which comes in cylinders. Thanks to the fact that it’s powder based, it’s normally cheap to ship, store, and use.

Are laser printers faster at printing?

Since lasers can move extremely quickly, they’re usually faster at moving than an inkjet printer. The laser beam is also able to draw more precisely without spilling excess ink. Although these devices might be more expensive than inkjets, it usually costs less to fuel them since toner powder is cheaper and lasts longer too.

When it comes time to purchase a printer, all IT leaders want to make the right decision. Much like refreshing user devices, this is a purchase that only comes around every few years – or longer, depending on organizational strategy – and one that must be based on careful consideration of costs, longevity, and print quality.

Two of the most popular printer types for business are LED and laser printers. Both use toner instead of ink, unlike inkjet printers.

Overall, LED and laser printers tend to remain a more common feature in your office setting

Of course, there’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all hardware and whether LED or laser printers are perfect for your business will largely depend on your unique organizational needs. To get a better idea of which could be best, we’ve listed the key differences between the two printing technologies.

Are laser printers best?

Laser printers have become the go-to choice for enterprise printing for a few, key reasons.

First and foremost, laser printers reproduce graphics and the printed word with incredibly sharp detail. Businesses looking for the top quality in printing could do worse than investing in a range of new laser printers.

Laser printers also come with a lower price tag than some alternatives, such as inkjet printers, as they use powdered toner which is cheaper in bulk. Laser printers work by beaming patterns onto a positively-charged drum, leaving behind a negative charge in the shape of what is being printed. This attracts the toner, which sticks to the drum that is then rolled over the paper itself.

Crucially, the laser is directed by a moving mirror, which spins to direct the laser onto different sections of the moving drum to control where on the page toner is placed.

However, leaders should note that the initial cost of laser printers can be higher than LED printers, even though the cost disparity is narrowing. If you’re comparing LED printers to inkjet printers in an environment where hundreds of sheets of paper are printed per week, the up-front investment could be outweighed by savings in the long run. But in comparison to LED, the math is harder to figure.

With our best practice guide on reducing print costs, a laser printer can still be a very shrewd investment.

It’s worth noting that size can be an issue with laser printers, largely due to the drum and laser setup, unlike LED printers which have fewer moving parts and are therefore comparatively compact. If you’re short on space in your office, you’re best advised to seek out a more compact printer.

Are LED printers best?

LED printers also use a drum and mirror to transfer toner to a page using electrophotography. The key difference is they use an array of LEDs instead of a laser, which strobe an image onto a positively-charged drum – creating a focused, negative charge that attracts toner in a specific shape to reproduce the user’s words and images.

Because LED printers don’t use a laser, they don’t require a spinning mirror. Instead, the LED array spans the full width of the drum, with individual LEDs activating when required to determine where toner is placed on the page. This makes them more compact, quieter, and easier to maintain as they contain fewer moving parts. This means there are also fewer printer problems to troubleshoot with LED printers.

All of this is to say that LED printers come with some significant benefits over laser printers.

But be in no doubt: there are some downsides to LED printers. Because they also rely on internally producing intense light to attract toner to the paper, they draw a significant amount of energy. Businesses looking to roll out many LED printers will see their bills rise as a result. That said, LED printers are still more energy efficient than laser printers.

What LED printers struggle to compete with laser printers on is quality. Indeed, they can be less dependable overall for detail and consistent print results, as the quality of LEDs varies slightly within the array producing uneven light distribution across the drum. Laser printers produce sharper text and graphics overall.

Which produces higher quality prints?

Enterprises that print a lot of client-facing materials may be particularly concerned about the quality of work produced by their printers.

Top of the range laser and LED printers are both capable of rendering images at up to 1,200 dots per inch (DPI).

This is what makes it a very difficult decision when choosing between an LED or laser printer: there’s no clear winner in terms of image quality. From a customization and flexibility perspective, however, LEDs use a fixed drum, meaning they cannot vary in resolution.

Conversely, laser printers have resolutions that can be changed based on your individual needs. If it’s flexibility that you’re seeking, even on a minute level, then our recommendation is to choose a laser printer on this occasion.

Paper quality is also a consideration here. Ultimately, the quality of paper you’re using has a tangible impact on the quality of prints. Both of these devices work best with heat-resistant paper and there are a range of options here for businesses.

Similarly, paper also comes in a range of grams per square meter (GSM) and so anything above a certain thickness is likely incompatible with either.

Is an LED printer better than a laser printer?

Both LED printers and laser printers have their clear pros and cons. As we’ve covered throughout this article, both kinds of printer can deliver at the enterprise level.

What’s clear is that for enterprises looking to complete regular, large print jobs to a high standard, these are the kinds of printer to go for, certainly compared to inkjet devices.

Over the long term, LED printers have a slightly longer shelf life. This is purely because they have fewer moving parts – so if you’re looking to cut down on replacement costs, LED printers may be right for you. On the other hand, if you want the best detail possible, laser printers are the ideal choice.

Troubleshooting printers can be an immensely frustrating task. There’s a good reason why the classic scene from 1999’s Office Space - where a group of workers beat a printer to death with a baseball bat - is still a regular reference more than twenty years later. Printers are one of the last pieces of office equipment that still include moving parts, and are therefore more prone to failure than most other devices.

When your carefully crafted creativeness fails to rattle onto your printer’s output tray, the cause of the fault may not be obvious. However, while diagnosing printer issues can be a somewhat arcane task, there are a few likely places to start. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the most common printing errors and their causes, as well as how to fix them, but there are also some general-purpose tips which can be handy for keeping printer induced panic attacks to a minimum.

Top tips for printer maintenance

First, keep a USB cable handy for emergencies. Wireless printing is convenient most of the time, but if your connection fails when you’re on a tight deadline, it’s easier to print first and resolve the connectivity issue later.

Next, while it may be tempting to bulk-buy consumables hoping to save money, don’t mistake a saving for a bargain. There’s no point having 1,000 sheets worth of ink in reserve if you only print 50 sheets a month, and if your printer needs to be replaced before you use it all, that ink investment will end up as a waste of money. You should aim to have around a month’s worth of consumables in stock - which will vary depending on your usage.

Finally, make sure you’re using your printer on a regular basis. Similar to how cars need to be turned over on a regular basis to stop the engine seizing up, you should try to pass something through your printer at least once a week to prevent blockages. Remember: a happy printer is a working printer.

Improving print quality

The most common issue you’re likely to encounter is documents coming out either poorly printed or completely blank. Before you go any further, begin with the fundamentals and check there’s something usable inside the cartridges. You’d be amazed how many ‘broken printers’ are nothing more than ‘empty printers’. If you’ve been dismissing the low-toner warnings for weeks by vigorously shaking the cartridge, there’s a good chance that it may have finally run dry.

If your tanks are still bountiful, then it’s likely that a blockage has occurred. Inkjets have head cleaning functions hidden within their software packages (or sometimes via the devices’ LCD screen) which will fix basic obstructions, and some models - including many of Epson’s Eco-Tank devices - have an intensive cleaning function. Check the manufacturer’s documentation on how to activate yours.

If output remains smeary after a full cycle, then cleaning kits are available from specialist vendors such as Printhead Hospital to pump chemicals directly into the head unit. If your inkjet has a removable print head (a rare thing these days) then you can also give it a soak in a shallow bath of Isopropyl alcohol to clean it . Let it dry thoroughly before replacing and restarting the head-clean process.

For laser printers, meanwhile, poor output is usually caused by dust and dirt clinging to the drum mechanism. Before cleaning a drum - which could be part of a toner cartridge, depending on the model - ensure the printer has been powered off to let it cool, then use some isopropyl alcohol on a lint-free cloth to clean things up.

You can also use activated toner cloth, which is a treated cleaning fabric, ideal for collecting toner particles. Check the manufacturer’s documentation as some devices have automatic drum cleaning facilities as well as ways of cleaning the corona wires (or charge rollers), which will also improve output quality.

If the inside of your aged printer resembles an explosion in a paint factory, it’s possible that some of the residue from the consumables may be preventing your machine from correctly picking them up. If you’re getting errors indicating that your consumables can’t be found, a few drops of Isopropyl alcohol to clean the cartridge/toner chips may do the job.

Fixing a blocked printer

Torn paper, wonky feeds and erroneous ‘out of paper’ messages are all symptomatic of a physical blockage, so grab a torch and go hunting. Removing paper trays and duplex units will reveal major blockages, but smaller ones can be well hidden.

If possible, remove inks and toners whilst searching for paper fragments crammed into dark corners. Inkjets can harbour paper scraps near the waste pads which absorb ink, becoming invisible, so a pair of tweezers are really useful. Top-loaders are susceptible to foreign bodies dropping into the paper feed and often the easiest way to loosen them is by upending the unit and giving it a firm shake.

You can expose hidden paper fragments blocking the feeder by passing thicker paper stock (or thin cardboard) through the system with a simple test print. Use tweezers to pluck out anything that shouldn’t be there. Toner dust is a major contributor to laser blockages, so remove the cartridges, drums and trays then give it a thorough blast with some compressed air - just remember to do this outside and not whilst wearing your best tweeds. Most printers have a scanner unit too, so remember to clean the ADF, as these can also trigger warnings about blockages which won’t be resolved by rummaging around inside the printer.

Not all blockages are physical though, and hidden firmware counters can also ruin your day. Sensors on some machines detect when a waste tank is full, whereas others use page count to make an educated guess. Either way, once the flag is raised, the printer will refuse to work. Rarely does manufacturer’s documentation explain how to clear the error, but a quick search will reveal reset codes and procedures posted by other disgruntled printer owners.

A couple of taps on the LCD clears most errors but some Canon and Epson printers require a software fix to reset the counters. For around £7.50, the WIC Reset Utility will talk to your device, reset the counters and get the ink flowing again. If the error returns quickly, then it’s likely that the waste tank requires replacement, but a vast number of devices will let you get away with one or two software resets before this point.

Connecting to wireless printers

Printers failing to be detected remains as problematic for users today as it did in the 90s, but wireless connection errors are harder to pinpoint than a missing USB cable. Again, start with the basics to solve this problem: check you and the printer are on the same network, and make sure any recent network changes don’t require the printer’s configuration to be updated. Tapping the router’s IP address into a browser should give you access to a ‘connected devices’ list; you may need an admin password to access this, which is probably printed on the underside of the router.

This will help determine if the router can detect the printer. If it’s missing, go through a re-connection process (usually via the device’s LCD panel) to bring it back on-line. Printers which have their IP addresses allocated by the router via DHCP can often go on an IP address walkabout and many computers seem incapable of locating them.

A useful tip is to assign the printer to a static (or reserved) IP address via the router’s management console so that it can easily be discovered. If your printer is accessible via a browser, using the IP address to launch the web interface, then a driver and/or software re-installation will resolve most issues.

For USB connections, misconfigured printers often show in Windows’ Device Manager alongside exclamation marks, indicating trouble. Right-click to remove the entries, then disconnect the USB cable. Even in 2022, USB installations are still easily derailed, so the best advice remains to avoid inserting the USB cable until the setup software tells you.

While it’s not quite the cheapest option in Kyocera’s range of laser printers, the FS-1061DN is nevertheless one of the more affordable mono lasers we’ve seen. Despite falling more towards the entry level, it’s also reasonably well specified, with a claimed 25ppm print speed, duplex printing and an ethernet interface. While its paper tray juts out the front, it comes with a substantial lid that keeps dust off, and doubles as part of the multi-purpose feed.

In common with other Kyocera printers, the FS-1061DN has a ceramic drum that’s expected to last for the printer’s life in normal use. This means you only need buy toner, which helps cut down on plastic waste, but it’s disappointing that the printer arrives with a modest 1,500-page consumable, and replacements last for only 2,100 pages.

Ongoing print costs work out at 2.4p per page; these running costs are reasonable, but they’re not great, especially for a mono machine, and spending a bit more on the likes of the Oki B432dn will net you better long-term value if your print needs are heavy.

This compact printer is fairly light and easy to set up. Get it up and running and you’ll find it’s not too loud in use, with fans that power down almost the moment printing stops. Unfortunately, about every other page there’s a thud from deep in the printer’s workings, which might be annoying if you’re sharing a desk. There’s also no display, so all operations will need to be done via the connected device.

The FS-1061DN managed to beat Kyocera’s stated speed, hitting 26.3ppm over our 25-page text test. Given that this includes the time taken to prepare and spool the job, it’s potentially quicker still. That is, until you throw some graphics its way. This mono printer could only reach a disappointing 9.1ppm when delivering complex greyscale graphics.

This unusually slow result wouldn’t be so bad if the printer’s graphical results were exceptional, but unfortunately they fall below average. Photos and shade graduations in graphics showed up distinct and obvious halftoning patterns, which reduced the smoothness of shade progressions. Unusually for a laser, even black text was a little soft, although to be fair this was only really visible under magnification.

The Kyocera Ecosys FS-1061DN’s affordable price tag may be initially appealing, but without any other massive strengths, it’s hard to recommend this printer. Graphical prints were both slow and underwhelming, and the consumables may prove a headache for those with more than basic needs. If you’re seeking a budget mono laser printer, you’re better off considering Xerox’s superb B230, which is cheaper, faster - and includes Wi-Fi to boot.

Kyocera Ecosys FS-1061DN specifications

Let’s be honest, it’s hard to love a mono laser printer. Big, noisy and only good for one thing, nobody spares a thought for them until they’re out of toner or tangled in a paper jam. But if the best thing they can hope for is being good enough to forget about, Oki’s B432dn is in with a shout. It’s a compact workgroup printer, equipped with a Gigabit Ethernet port and capable of a claimed 40ppm.

Usually, we end up writing the longest notes for the printers that give us the most trouble. It’s telling, then, that our notes for setting up and using the B432dn ran to just 82 words. It’s child’s play to unpack this printer, remove a few bits of packing material, plug in a network cable and install its Windows drivers. After that, it worked faultlessly throughout our tests.

In use, the B432dn is as rapid as its 40ppm engine speed suggests. Even so, it’s not gratingly loud, with no big clunks or strong vibrations that would make it especially difficult to share desk space with. Its fans cut out quickly at the end of each print job, too, although one continues at reduced speed for a little longer. You’ll want to flip up the extra stop at the end of the output tray, however; otherwise, printed pages begin to spill over and get out of sequence.

As a serious mono laser, the B432dn may seem out of place in most home offices, but if you do a lot of printing it could be ideal. For a start, it’s fast, dispatching our 25-page text test at a rate of 31.3ppm, which includes the time taken to prepare and spool the job. We challenge the fastest printers with an additional, 50-page text job. The B432dn tossed it out at 35.3ppm, again including job preparation time.

Many printers struggle with the extra processing involved in printing our complex graphical test, but not the B432dn. It produced 24 pages of magazine articles, presentation slides and web pages at 30.6ppm. It even duplex printed ten pages of graphics on five sheets of paper in just 43 seconds, a rate of 14 images per minute (ipm).

All this would be for nought if the B432dn couldn’t deliver decent print quality, but it’s among the better mono lasers we’ve tested. Graphics were crisp and detailed, without obvious dots where halftones are used, although shade progressions in our slides weren’t perfect. Photos showed up more obvious halftoning, but they were free of banding and other common mono laser quirks.

This printer produced some of the sharpest, smoothest black text we’ve seen. Even under magnification, text down to 5pt was crisp and free of jaggedness. To the naked eye, formal letters and other prints looked simply perfect.

This is often the point in a review where we have to drop a print costs bombshell, but again the B432dn manages to swerve it. The printer shows up with a starter toner good for 2,000 pages, while its drum is rated for 25,000. In smaller offices there’s a fair chance you might never need to replace that drum. Opt for the 12,000-page ultra-high capacity toner and that gives you running costs of just 1.2p per page. Factor in drums, and ongoing running costs are still a very reasonable 1.6p per page.

With good quality, fast speeds and low print costs, you might want to hold onto the B432dn for some time. Happily, there’s some scope to enhance it to cope with heavier duties in a growing business. You can add wireless networking for around £40 with Oki’s aftermarket adapter, and if you need a serious paper-handling upgrade, a 530-sheet paper tray can be had for around £120.

This printer isn’t perfect. It looks old-fashioned, bordering on ugly, and if you need to get stuck into more advanced configuration its simple control panel is fiddlier than a good touchscreen. And while we’re nitpicking, we’d also flag up that it consumes 3W in sleep mode – not a lot, but more than the 1W or so that’s more typical these days. Typically for a modern printer it has a “soft” power button, rather than a physical switch, but we measured 1W of consumption even when it was supposedly off.

That’s it, though: that’s the most negative thing we can find to say about this printer. In every other respect it’s great, making it a brilliant choice if you want a strong mono laser.

Oki B432dn specifications

Anyone setting up an office or a business on a budget has probably found themselves asking "What are the best cheap printers?", along with its inevitable follow up "and are they any good?". The happy news is that many budget printers and multifunctions deliver the features a business needs – we discover plenty of them in our regular testing.

For this list, we've collected six of the best cheap business printers. They're a varied group, ranging from a bargain home MFP through to a fast, refillable color inkjet. They may be suited for different jobs in different businesses, but they share a common ability to deliver a high amount of bang for your buck. With the cheapest squeaking in at less than £60, and the most expensive just a little more than £300, we've got something for every business – find your next cheap office printer here.

How to choose the best cheap office printers

We can't pretend that every cheap printer will tick all your boxes, so it's best to start with an idea of what's essential, and what you can live without. Cheap printers generally compromise on speed, features, or running costs – work out which ones are critical for you.

Single-function printers are always cheaper than their all-in-one equivalents, so if you don't need to scan, copy, or fax, aim for a simple device. Consider, too, whether you need useful features like multiple paper trays, or (on a multifunction) an automatic document feeder (ADF) – going without may leave more budget for other areas. If you're buying for a quieter office, you can probably forgo high-speed prints and scans. But if you need a workhorse for a busy team, don't compromise on speed or running costs.

Whatever your needs, don't be tempted to scrimp on your budget office printer. Going too cheap could land you with a device that simply isn't up to the job, and you'll end up spending more to replace it. And in all cases, it's vital to look at the total cost of ownership – many printers that look expensive have cheap ink or toner, and could cost you far less to own over 3-5 years of daily printing.

Whatever printer you buy, it pays to keep it in business as cheaply as possible. If there's a choice, always buy the highest capacity supplies unless you print extremely rarely – they're more expensive, but they invariably cost less per page. Investigate ink and toner subscriptions, too, particularly if you print a fairly constant and predictable amount each month. We've seen options that, in ideal circumstances, could reduce what you pay by two-thirds or more. You could also consider third-party inks and toners, although in our experience these tend to be inferior to OEM supplies, and they don't always deliver the savings you'd expect.

The best cheap printers

Reasons to buy

• Good specs at this price
• Supports PIXMA Print Plan subscriptions
• Strong quality on plain paper

Reasons to avoid

• Quite slow

We don't generally recommend home devices for business users, but the Canon PIXMA TS5350i is a compact inkjet MFP for under £85 – that's very keen pricing. It's missing an ADF, and it can't send or receive faxes, but if you just need a basic device to make prints, scans, and single-page copies, the TS5350i more than has you covered. Helpfully, it has two paper inputs, so you could load one with plain paper and use the other for headed sheets or photo media.

This isn't the best photo printer, but on plain paper it's surprisingly capable, turning out excellent prints and copies. It's not especially fast, however, so it's definitely not suitable if you have more than a couple of users or you often need to reel off long print jobs. The TS5350i has an excellent scanner, so it's a shame it isn't equipped with an ADF.

Buy your own cartridges, and this MFP works out at more than 11p per full color page, but you can bring this down by subscribing to one of Canon's PIXMA Print Plans. The most generous of these gets costs down to 4.5p per page, although it only allows 200 pages per month. That, and its slow speeds, mean the TS5350i is really only suitable for very light use, but if your priority is a low up-front cost, this attractive MFP is a good choice.

Price when reviewed: £58 exc. VAT

Reasons to buy

• Great performance
• Fair value
• Strong results

Reasons to avoid

• Running costs a touch high

HP has a knack for building good small office inkjets, and the OfficeJet Pro 9135e is the perfect example. This four-in-one doesn't just address the basics: both its printer and 35-sheet automatic document feeder support automatic double-sided (duplex) operation, so you can set up a single or double-sided scan, fax, or copy, then go and make yourself a cup of tea while it finishes.

This MFP has an impressive specification for the price, but what makes it great is the way it performs. It's much faster than you'd expect an affordable printer to be, hitting 22.1 pages per minute (ppm) on black text. Copies and scans were very quick, too. Despite this, the results are excellent – we couldn't fault anything except some over-processed photo scans. The OfficeJet Pro 9135e excels across all the jobs that are important to everyday office life. That makes it a great budget choice.

Price when reviewed: £161 exc. VAT

Read our full HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e review for more information.

Reasons to buy

• Great plain paper prints
• Fantastic low running costs
• A good all-rounder

Reasons to avoid

• Expensive to buy

At more than £400, this color inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP) doesn't look cheap at all, but don't scroll down. It comes with enough ink in the box to print 6,000 black or 14,000 color pages, a cost per page of 7.3p with a printer thrown in. Ongoing supplies work out at just 0.6p per full-color page – far below what you'd pay to run a cartridge inkjet or laser competitor. That makes the Canon MAXIFY GX7150 cheaper to own than most other business printers, so it's a good thing it's an impressive device.

This MFP has excellent paper handling, with two 250-sheet inputs plus a 100-sheet feed. Its printer and 50-sheet automatic document feeder between them support dual-sided prints, scans, copies, and faxes. It's a fast text printer, reaching 20.8ppm, but its 5.7ppm color speed was a little more relaxed. Prints and scans were generally excellent, although this isn't a great photo printer, and copies were just a touch too dark by default. If you're after an office MFP with low running costs for moderately heavy use, this is a brilliant choice – especially as it comes with a three-year warranty.

Price when reviewed: £439 exc. VAT

Reasons to buy

• Decent specifications and performance
• Cheap to run
• Very compact

Reasons to avoid

• Not the best print quality

The DCP-T780DW is Brother's first stab at a refillable inkjet for the UK market, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it had been making them for years. Aside from a couple spilled drops when first filling up, its ink tank system works well, and keeps running costs down to around 0.5p for a full-color page. That's impressive, particularly when this MFP only costs around £250 to buy.

You can't use this three-in-one to send faxes, and it doesn't quite have a top-line specification elsewhere: the printer has just one paper tray, and while it does support automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, the ADF doesn't. Still, overall it feels exactly like a refillable version of a typical Brother home office inkjet – compact and competent, if not quite excellent. Perhaps the DCP-T780DW isn't the best multifunction we've tested, but its refillable tanks help make it a strong option for home workers or micro offices who want to minimize the cost and hassle of regular printing. If you're looking for low ownership costs over a fleet of home workers, this is a very strong choice.

Price when reviewed: £250 exc. VAT

Read our full Brother DCP-T780DW review for more information.

Reasons to buy

• Good value
• Few extra features
• Compact

Reasons to avoid

• Middling mono speeds
• High quality photo prints
• Underwhelming mixed graphics performance

A3 printing capability doesn't usually come cheap, but Epson's Expression Photo HD XP-15000 is one of the more affordable examples. It's a single-function inkjet and, as the name suggests, it's targeted more at photo and creative prints than at churning out plain-paper reports and letters. This printer's six-ink setup helps it deliver deep blacks and rich, bright colors. It's an accomplished device on coated photo papers, if not quite up to the standards of the best photo inkjets.

Inevitably, the XP-15000 is comparatively disappointing on plain paper. There's not much wrong with the quality, but at 8ppm on black text you wouldn't want to rely on it for long documents. It's a bit more impressive in color, reaching 5ppm on our more challenging test.

However, consider value, and the XP-15000 makes a strong case for itself. It's much cheaper to buy than Canon's (admittedly brilliant) PIXMA Pro-200, and delivers pages of black text at 3.5p – that's not bad for a photo-focused printer. If you need A3 but you can't pay much upfront, the Expression Photo HD XP-15000 is ideal. However, if total cost of ownership is more important, consider Epson's EcoTank ET-18100 instead – it's much more expensive, but it should prove much cheaper to own if you often print in high-quality color.

Price when reviewed: £235 exc. VAT

Read our full Epson Photo HD XP-15000 review for more for more information.

FAQs

ARE CHEAP PRINTERS WORTH IT?

Not always, no. If you buy a printer without the features you need, or one that's too slow or expensive to run, you might find yourself paying more later to get something more suitable. However, there are many excellent, very affordable printers -- buy one that's well matched to your priorities, and you should still get many years of good service from it.

ARE CHEAP PRINTERS ANY GOOD?

Some are excellent. While you may need to compromise on your ideal features, speed or running costs, there are plenty of affordable business printers that deliver print quality and value in spades.

ARE MONO PRINTERS CHEAPER THAN COLOR?

Almost all inkjets will print in color, but with lasers there's more of an even split. If you don't need color printing, a mono machine can actually offer some notable savings. Mono printers are often cheaper to buy than equivalent color models, and they're usually cheaper to run, with fewer consumables. That in turn could save space in the consumables cupboard, and save you time in maintenance and servicing.

ARE MANAGED PRINT SERVICES CHEAPER?

Managed print services consolidate your printers, maintenance and supplies under a single contract. That can produce huge savings, but you need to make sure you're with the right provider, and on the best deal. When evaluating against self-management, or against another supplier, conduct a cost analysis. Make sure you consider managed refresh cycles of your equipment against the costs of upgrading your own.

The chances are that the more you print as an organisation, the more you could save via a managed provider. However, small businesses printing just a couple of hundred pages a month may do better to buy their own printers, and look at cost reduction through ink tanks or ink subscription services.

WHAT IS CHEAP FOR A PRINTER?

You can define cheap in one of several ways. In absolute terms, anything below about £100 (£150 for a multifunction) is quite cheap for a printer, with the very cheapest products coming in at around £30-40. If you're going to print a lot, it's best to define cheap as a low total cost of ownership -- you'll usually need to pay a little more up-front for lower ink costs, which will save you money in the long term.

How we test cheap printers

When we review printers, we test a number of elements to measure their technical aptitude. First and foremost is the quality of the prints themselves, which we gauge by analysing a series of photographs and plain paper documents representing a mix of color and black-only printing. Here we're looking for any evidence of fuzzy text, color banding, or other imperfections.

We also test color and mono print speeds; the latter uses a 25-page text batch, while the former is tested with 24 pages of mixed presentation slides, web pages and magazine pages. We time how quickly each batch completes, as well as how long the printer takes to deliver the first page once the job is initialised. Where available, duplex print speeds are measured by running the first 10 pages of the mixed color batch. For inkjet printers, we'll also repeat the mono tests in draft mode.

Where scan functionality is included, we gauge image quality by looking at scans of a color photo, a color input target chart, and an office document. We measure how fast the device can create a single photocopy, as well as measuring the scan speeds at different resolutions, and how quickly preview images are displayed.

The cheapest printers don't tend to have ADFs, but when they do, we'll use a 10-sheet copy operation to test their speeds, in color as well as mono where we can. In the event that both printer and ADF are duplex units, we'll time a 10-page double-sided job as well.

The best all-in-one printers combine print, scan, copy, and even fax capabilities all in one do-it-all device. They’re a fantastic space saver, multi-tasker, and the quintessential office essential to help businesses stay ahead of the mountain of paperwork they go through each week.

Take an office multifunction peripheral (MFP), for example. These are vital in helping to stay in touch with customers, producing professional reports, and even cutting down on your paper use.

An MFP isn't just a great way to save space. By combining several functions, they make it easier to get things done. This group can tackle any office job with aplomb, offering a combination of speed, flexibility, and decent running costs.

In this feature, we’ve rounded up the best office all-in-ones based on extensive reviews of industry-leading options. We've put every device through our rigorous range of tests which, for an MFP, can cover a daunting range of features.

Similarly, we've done the legwork to find out how fast they go, how well they perform, and what they'll cost you to run. If you want the best business all-in-one, you'll find it here.

How to look for the best all-in-one printers

All-in-one printers combine an array of features, but not necessarily the same ones. Home-focused devices, for example, tend to favor good photo prints over office-friendly paper handling, and they usually aren't built to take the same punishing workloads.

That said, if you’re looking for something cheap and compact for a micro office, a good home MFP can fit the bill.

Conversely, if you’re working out of a bustling office space, or you just want to be covered for everything, there’s truly no better option than an office-focused MFP.

Telltale signs that you’re onto a winner in this regard include features such as an automatic document feeder (ADF), which typically means you’ll also get modern fax capabilities. Even if you don’t need to send a fax, the ADF will still help any time you’ve got a stack of paper to be scanned and copied.

This is a huge time saver and ultimately helps reduce workloads for staff and the broader business. If you use this frequently, we’d also recommend considering a duplex (double-sided) ADF, which can capture both sides of each paper autonomously. Once again, this can be a huge time-saver.

We typically recommend that the printer should also be duplex. Paired with a duplex ADF, this lets you make double-sided prints, scans, faxes, or copies – perfect for professional results, and a great way to save paper.

Talking of which, all-in-ones with more than one paper tray let you keep a stock of plain and headed paper, which helps save you from lots of manual shuffling of pages.

Office-based MFPs are often shared between several people working out of the same workspace, so it’s crucial that you buy one that supports Wi-Fi or a wired Ethernet connection.

Networked models with color touchscreens tend to support more advanced features, such as scanning to, or printing directly from, SharePoint or other cloud-based storage solutions.

When it comes to deciding between inkjet and laser, the choice may not be as straightforward as you think. Office inkjets have always been a bit quicker to wake up and start printing than a laser, which helps if you tend to send multiple short jobs, rather than one or two long ones.

In recent years, inkjet devices have become more robust and cheaper to run, making them much more suited to business use than they were. They also use less electricity than a laser equivalent, so they're a no-brainer for cost-conscious enterprises.

That said, few inkjets can rival a laser printer when it comes to outright pages per minute, while laser-sharp text prints are hard to beat. As a general rule, laser MFPs may be best if you'll print a lot, and you favor speed and text quality over cost. If your priority is low running costs, an inkjet may be better – particularly if it has refillable ink tanks.

On that note, expect to pay around 8-12p per full color page if you buy an affordable inkjet or laser MFP. That's fine for occasional prints, but aim for a lower cost per page if you expect to print in higher volumes. And if you're buying an MFP for a busy office, aim to spend a little more up front in return for lower ongoing costs – you'll make savings overall.

The best all-in-one printers

Brother MFC-J1300DW All in Box

Best printer for instant value

The MFC-J1300DW isn’t exactly the cheapest printer upfront, but it's still extremely good value thanks to the generous quantities of ink that Brother has it shipped with.

There's more than enough for 7,200 full-color prints, which equates to around three years' worth according to the company's estimates. That means you're getting around 4p per page for color sheets, and even less for mono documents.

Better still, when that's completed, the price of XL cartridges means your costs could come down to as little as 2.3p per color page. All that equates to significant long-term cost savings.

There’s more to the printer than just value, however. First and foremost, it’s easy to use, provides decent quality and is capable of delivering 12 pages of black text per minute. Admittedly, the only downside is its lack of duplex scanning, copying or faxing, but if that’s not a deal breaker for you, this is a tremendous all-rounder that’s well worth the cost of entry.

Read our full Brother MFC-J1300DW All in Box review for more information.

HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e

Best all-in-one printer

If you were to envisage the perfect small office inkjet multifunction, we're betting it would probably look a lot like HP's OfficeJet Pro 9135e. This four-in-one covers all the key office requirements, adding handy business features like two generous paper trays and full duplex operation.

Need to make a double-sided copy of a double-sided original? The 9135e can handle it while you put the kettle on or catch up with a colleague. It also has support for wired and wireless networking, as well as a big color touchscreen.

All this would be for nothing if the OfficeJet Pro 9135e couldn't perform though. Luckily, it's a very solid all-rounder. It's very fast for a relatively affordable inkjet, delivering 22.1 pages per minute (ppm) of text, and color graphics at a brilliant 8ppm. Copies and scans were quick, too. Happily, this MFP's quality is mostly a match for its speed – only its high-resolution photo scans were disappointing, and that's not usually an issue for the office.

This MFP would benefit from lower running costs. We also found its installation process a tad annoying. Other than that, it's almost impossible to fault – a superb small office all-rounder.

Read our full HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e review for more information.

Canon MAXIFY GX7150

A solid color printer, but rather pricey

Canon MAXIFY GX7150 is a seriously powerful bit of kit for any small business or home user. While it’s pricey, it more than makes up for it in terms of convenience, capability, and is jam-packed with handy features.

One of the newest refillable inkjet printers from the manufacturer, it’s a four-in-one, combining printing, scanning, copying, and fax capabilities.

You’re also treated to an automatic document feeder (ADF) capable of juggling up to 50 sheets of paper at one time – and that’s in addition to a 100-sheet multipurpose paper tray.

Notably, the printer and ADF offer duplex operation support, meaning you’re able to produce double-sided prints, copies, scans, and faxes. It’s a great feature that will help you save paper in the long run while still delivering professional-looking prints.

The device can be connected via USB, wired Ethernet, or Wi-Fi. However, it’s worth noting that the latter only supports the 2.4GHz band.

In terms of interactivity, the MAXIFY GX7150 has an easy-to-use 2.7” tiltable color touchscreen alongside a few dedicated buttons.

As noted, price might be a hurdle for some – particularly home users or small businesses working on a budget. Elsewhere, it also lacks a USB host port, meaning walkup scans and prints aren’t an option.

Read our full review of the Canon MAXIFY GX7150 for more information.

Canon Pixma TS6250

Best printer for minimal outlay

The cheapest all-in-one printer on this list, the Canon Pixma TS6250 punches well above its weight, with superb print quality and decent speeds of 12.7ppm for mono prints and 3.9ppm for more complex colour graphics.

It uses five inks, with the usual cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges supplemented by two kinds of black ink — one for plain paper, and a dye-based one for photo prints. Despite this extra ink to worry about, using the XXL cartridges means that printing costs come down to as little as 2.8p per mono page, which isn’t bad at all.

There are drawbacks, of course: there’s no fax functionality, and it’s not the quietest with a mildly irritating wheezing noise, but most people will certainly be able to live with both considering the sheer affordability of the thing.

Price when reviewed: £67 exc. VAT

Read our full Canon Pixma TS6250 review for more information.

HP Smart Tank 7005

The cheapest all-in-one printer to own

If you want an all-in-one printer with low running costs, there's no better choice than a refillable inkjet. HP's Smart Tank 7005 is a strong example, arriving with enough ink to cover around 12,000 black, or 8,000 color pages. That's incredible value, equating to around 2.3p per page with a free printer thrown in. Once you finish the supplied ink, you'll pay around 0.4p per full-color page, which is almost unbeatable.

It's a good thing, then, that this MFP is competent elsewhere. At 13 pages per minute it's a fast enough text printer for most micro businesses. That's pretty much the story for its color printing, scans, and copies, which are all fast enough for light office use among a few people.

Print and copy quality are generally good, but this MFP's weaknesses in our tests were underwhelming photo prints, and blocky document scans. Still, if you're after a smart MFP with ultra-low running costs, and you'll only scan occasionally, the Smart Tank 7005 remains a good choice for micro offices.

Read our full HP Smart Tank 7005 review for more information.

Brother DCP-T780DW

An honorary mention for a cheap-to-run option

With the release of the DCP-T780DW, Brother became the last major printer manufacturer to enter the refillable ink tank market – and all things considered it was a strong debut for the manufacturer.

Similar to other Brother inject multifunction peripherals (MFP), it’s a great option for businesses, offering up to 15,000 pages’ printing and a single set of color inks rated for up to 5,000 pages.

In our review of the device, it performed fantastic in terms of speed. The DCP-T780DW certainly is a swift printer, delivering a first page of text in a whopping seven seconds.

It did require a few minutes to clean itself having been left unplugged overnight, but regardless it went on to produce 16 pages of paper per minute of black text.

Color printing wasn’t quite so swift, however, but still performed well given it’s a compact home inkjet.

All told, we rate this as a highly competent and powerful home office MFP. When combined with low printing costs and its bottle-based refillable setup, it certainly takes the hassle out of printing compared to competitors on the market.

Read our full review of the Brother DCP-T780DW for more information.

FAQs

How we test all-in-one printers

All our printer reviews include a series of tests to check various aspects of standard operations. The first set is designed to test overall print quality and identify any issues such as colour banding or fuzzy text output. This involves printing a number of mono documents, greyscale images, and colour pictures.

This is followed by speed tests for black and white text prints, timing how long a machine takes to produce a 25-page job, as well as how quickly the first sheet is delivered after hitting print. We also repeat this test at draft quality when testing inkjet printers. To measure colour print speeds, these tests are repeated with a 24-sheet batch of magazine pages, web pages and presentation slides. The first ten pages of this colour batch is also used to test duplex print speeds, measured in images per minute.

Scan functionality is a key component of all-in-one printers, and scan speeds are tested by timing how quickly it can produce a single photocopy, as well as a ten-page copy job for those models which also feature an ADF. We’ll run this test in both mono and colour where possible, and if both printer and ADF are duplex, then we’ll also time a ten-page double-sided batch.

To assess the image quality of scans, we’ll use a colour input target chart, an office document and a colour photo. Finally, we’ll look at how quickly the scanner produces results at various resolutions, as well as the speed with which it displays a preview image.

If you’re setting up a home or small office, you’ll need a printer or MFP that handles everything you can throw at it. Provided that doesn’t include faxing, Xerox’s C235dw fits the bill. It’s a compact colour laser multifunction capable of 22ppm printing in black or colour.

This is a well-specified MFP. In its base there’s a 250-sheet cassette, supplemented by a single-page bypass slot. On top you’ll find a 50-sheet ADF - although this doesn’t support duplex scans - and at the back you’ll find a Gigabit Ethernet port. There’s Wi-Fi connectivity, too, so it’s easy to share among users. A large 7.1cm colour touchscreen makes it simple to configure and control, and there’s a USB host port supporting both printing and scanning.

It’s a simple device to set up, although it’s not without its foibles. As with Xerox’s B230, the setup program couldn’t install the Type 4 Print System driver, but we happily settled for the Type 3 Print System without issues. Red tape alerts you to a large plastic sheet you need to remove before printing, but it’s easy to miss the four plastic ring pulls on the print cartridges themselves.

The C235dw delivered black text at 19.2ppm which, as our test includes the time taken to spool and send the job, is pretty close to the claimed 22ppm. That’s not particularly quick by laser printer standards, but fast enough for a small office with moderate printing needs. We can’t be quite as forgiving about the printer’s 13.1ppm in our mixed colour graphics test: while this is a demanding job, comprising a mix of magazine graphics, presentation slides and web pages, we’d expect slightly faster performance at this price. The same goes for this printer’s 7.4 images per minute (ipm) on our colour graphics duplex test: decent, but not great.

It’s hard to find fault with the quality of the output, though. Text was as bold and faultless as we’d expect from a decent laser printer, but colour prints were far better than the average. Unlike Lexmark’s CS431dw – which appears to be based on the same internals – the C235dw delivered punchy, accurate colours across a range of jobs. And it’s quite a range, stretching from magazine pages to photographs covering landscapes, still-lifes and moon landings. Shade transitions were generally seamless, without showing up bands of distinct halftoning.

This printer’s quality isn’t quite beyond criticism, however. Skin tones in photos appeared slightly too warm, while mono photocopies were too dark at the default setting, leading to a loss of detail in some areas. Conversely, the C235dw struggled with some mid-tones in colour photocopies, failing to reproduce a full range of shades. Copies were fine for everyday use, though, and they appeared quickly. We timed a single mono A4 copy at 13 seconds, while ten sheets took 40 seconds using the ADF. In colour, the same tests took just 16 seconds and 45 seconds respectively.

This MFP’s scanner is limited to 600dpi, but that’s more than enough for the office-orientated work it’s designed for. Even over Wi-Fi it was about as fast as they come, capturing an A4 document at 150dpi in just six seconds. Scanning A4 at 300dpi only took a further second, while it captured a 6 x 4in photo at 600dpi in a mere 11 seconds.

Whether from the ADF or platen, documents were sharp and accurately exposed. The scanner struggled with darker areas, failing to distinguish the darkest six shades in our test pattern. Despite this, most photo scans were accurately exposed, with the scanner certainly good enough for occasional creative use. However, while Xerox’s TWAIN scan interface is easy to use, it doesn’t let you manually crop preview images. The preset list of scan areas includes all common paper sizes, but not 5 x 7in photo paper.

Our strongest criticism of the C235dw is that it arrives with paltry 500-page consumables. Replace them with 2,500-page “high-capacity” supplies and you’ll pay 2.4p per black page, and 9.4p in colour. That’s on the high side of average, but only becomes unreasonable if you print in high volume.

While these running costs dull its shine, the C235dw is still as good as colour laser MFPs get at this price. It will cost more to run than the most economical office inkjets, but it’s likely to make up for it with faster speeds and more professional-looking results. If you want laser quality and don’t mind paying for it, this is a great choice.

Xerox C235dw specifications

If you’re looking for a compact mono laser to serve a home office or small workgroup, you may want to add Xerox’s B230 to your shopping list. While it’s still big and bulky compared to sleeker inkjet models like the Canon Pixma TS6250, this machine is actually reasonably petite for a laser printer, weighing in at just 6.8kg with a 355 x 333mm footprint. As with almost all lasers, however, the design is uninspiring to say the least.

Rated at 34 pages per minute (ppm), the device is well equipped: it includes wired and wireless networking as standard, plus a useful two-line mono display. This isn’t as versatile as the large, full-colour touchscreens used by the likes of the Canon MAXIFY GX70505 - but then again, that’s less of an issue considering there aren’t as many features to manage. As a mono laser, the B230 is very much a one-trick pony; there’s no scanning or copying facility, no fax, and no colour graphics or photos.

This printer’s 250-sheet cassette is supplemented by a single-sheet slot. Once loaded with A4 paper, the tray pokes slightly out of its rear panel, but fortunately there’s a flap to keep dust off. During setup, Xerox’s software failed if we chose the recommended Type 4 Print System. We couldn’t divine why this might be, but fortunately it wasn’t a significant issue, as the alternative Type 3 Print System worked perfectly adequately.

It’s clear from the minute or so it takes to boot that this printer has reasonable brains behind it – it’s loading a full-on operating system, rather than relying on simple logic - but our results suggest it would benefit from a faster processor. While it danced through our 25-page text test at a sprightly 27.3ppm, it hesitated between some pages in our graphical test, slowing it down to a less impressive 20.6ppm. At 11.8 images per minute (ipm) it was fast enough at duplex-printing graphics.

While this printer is quick for a typical small or home office, you might be more put off by the B230’s slight clatter during printing and its underwhelming print quality. Black text was near perfect, but mono graphics suffered from more banding than we’d expect at this price. It’s also a shame that the B230 has no front USB port to support direct printing.

The B230 arrives with a 1,200-page starter toner and a drum rated for 12,000 pages. If you never need to replace the latter, you’ll pay 2p per page to keep printing. Factor in the drum, and ongoing print costs rise to 2.4p per page which, while hardly excessive, are a penny or more off the best.

If you can live without Wi-Fi, we’d recommend paying a little more for the £200 exc VAT Oki B432dn, which includes a three-year warranty (as opposed to Xerox’s one-year onsite warranty), faster speeds, better print quality and lower running costs. With that being said, however, the Xerox B230 is one of the most affordable lasers out there - and if all you need is a workhorse to chew through reams of black-and-white text documents, it’s an excellent value option.

Xerox B230 specifications

If you're running a small business, you've got enough on your plate without worrying about printers that can't keep up with your workflow. We've gathered together the six best small business printers – each of them has something to offer every small and medium business.

Whether you're looking to spend tens or hundreds of pounds on your next small business printer, these devices all provide the essentials. We've hand-picked the best single-function business printers, added some multifunction peripherals (MFPs), and rounded everything off with a choice of photo printers for business.

We've subjected every printer in this list to a battery of tests, assessing their speed, quality, running costs, and general ease-of-use. In every case, we'll let you know how fast they performed, how good the results were, and headline features such as their paper handling and technology. If you want to find out more, check out the links to our full small business printer reviews.

How to choose a small business printer

When it comes to printing, a small business has different needs to home users. Business users are usually most interested in speed and reliability -- and if you're buying for remote users, easy deployment and long-lasting consumables are a bonus, too. It's therefore important to really consider what type of printer your business needs.

For starters, small businesses need a printer that can service multiple users, which means network connectivity is a must – most of today's business printers have Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and often both. Support for cloud printing and scanning will also be handy.

If you're looking for a single printer to do everything, a multifunction peripheral (MFP) offers printing, scanning, and copying in a single compact device. It's unlikely you'll need a fax these days, but many business MFPs still have one, and it adds little to the price. We recommend it for certain industries, including hospitality and medicine.

Small businesses can ask a lot of a printer, especially if it's their only one, so it's good to choose a well-featured device. We generally recommend duplex (double-sided) printing and, on MFPs, a scanner with a duplex automatic document feeder (ADF). That setup lets you make double-sided prints, scans, faxes, or copies. It's also good to have more than one paper input.

Business printers will see greater print volumes over a longer period of time, so running costs are particularly relevant. If you're printing in high volumes and speed is important, a laser printer can offer a good balance between fast prints and a moderate cost per page. If low page costs are the priority, choose a refillable ink tank business printer.

Serviceability may also be worth considering, depending on the structure of your internal IT operations. Organisations with a robust IT department will likely want printers that can be centrally managed and monitored, as well as something that makes it easy to troubleshoot printer problems and start repairs. Organisations that rely more on MSPs and third-party technicians may not need this as much.

Finally, if your print needs include customer-facing marketing and promotional materials, you may want to invest in a machine that can also handle tasks like larger A3 documents and good-quality photo printing. This will allow you to quickly generate impressive-looking marketing documents without needing to outsource them to a third party.

FAQs for the best small business printers

Do I need a colour printer for my small business?

It may seem like getting a color printer for your business is a no-brainer – after all, a color printer can handle black and white documents while still giving you the option of color prints when you need them – but there are actually some good reasons to choose mono only.

For starters, you tend to get more for your money, as there's a dedicated focus on one thing. You're likely to get higher quality and faster print speeds than you would from an equivalently priced color machine, and it can also mean more features like duplexing and ADF that you may not get at a similar price point. Mono printers can offer lower running costs, particularly as some color printers will use a small amount of their color consumables when printing in greyscale.

While having the capability to print color documents is useful for a business, if most of your documents are intended for internal use, consider using mono printers for most of your fleet, with one or two color machines as backup.

How many printers does my small business need?

Digital documents may rule the roost these days, but paper still has a place even in a modern office. Some people simply prefer working with hard-copy documents, but there are also instances where you may need to physically sign and send off a form, or attach a tracking slip to a package. Every workplace should have at least one printer just in case of emergencies, but depending on the size of your organisation, you may need more than one.

How many you’ll need depends on a number of factors, of course, including the number of employees you have and how often they need to print, but you should also think about the physical space they’ll be occupying. If your office includes multiple floors, you may want to have a printer on each one, to minimise the time employees spend travelling to and fro.

Should I buy a laser printer for my small business?

Historically, laser printers have been the go-to machines for businesses wanting a sturdy and reliable option, thanks to lower running costs, faster speeds, and excellent performance with mono documents. Lasers are no longer the unseatable emperors of business printing, thanks to the increasing sophistication of mid-range inkjet devices, but a laser printer may still be the best option for your small business.

Lasers are usually designed for high-volume document printing, so if you're likely to be processing stacks of reports on a regular basis, this will be a faster option. Fewer moving parts can also mean better reliability, although this isn't a given. Historically, laser printers were cheaper to run than an inkjet, but the arrival of inkjet business printers with refillable ink tanks has turned this assumption on its head – a business laser is cheaper to run than a home inkjet, but ink tanks are cheaper still.

The downsides to small business laser printers are that they're generally (although not always) larger, more expensive, and less feature-packed than their inkjet cousins, and aren't as versatile for things like photo or graphics jobs. They also use more power than inkjets, although only when they're actually printing.

The best printers for small business

HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e

Best small business multifunction printer

HP has a knack for building good small office inkjets, and the OfficeJet Pro 9135e is a brilliant example. A four-in-one combining printing, scanning, copying, and fax, the 9135e has some impressive features, including a 35-sheet ADF, and duplex (double-sided) everything. There's also plenty of paper storage, along with a large color touchscreen for control.

We experienced a couple of setup frustrations, but soon forgot about them thanks to this MFP's satisfying all-around performance. It's an excellent text printer, but it does a very decent job of graphics and photos, too. We were also happy with its scan and photocopy quality, while speeds were very strong for this class. That makes it a great overall package, perfect for home and small businesses – although heavy users should consider ink tank alternatives for their lower running costs.

Price when reviewed: £161 exc. VAT

Read our full HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e review for more information.

Epson EcoTank ET-4850

Best small business multifunction printer for overall TCO

This compact inkjet multifunction from Epson offers a decent set of features for a do-everything small inkjet printer. It can print, scan, fax, and copy, and connect to wired or wireless networks. The printer will turn out double-sided prints, although its single-sided ADF rules out automatic double-sided copying.

The ET-4850 has refillable ink tanks, and costs about three times what we'd expect for the equivalent cartridge device. It comes with enough ink for 5,200 black or 14,000 color pages, though, so it's better value out of the box provided you'll print in those kinds of volumes. Print more, and additional ink works out at less than 0.5p per full-color page – you really will struggle to find lower running costs.

Happily, this is quite a decent MFP, too. It produces excellent scans, and surprisingly good color photos on coated papers. The flip-side of its dye inks, however, is that its plain paper prints aren't as authoritative as we'd want – a bit of a shame in an office. This, and slightly slow performance aside, it's hard to criticise this MFP. If you want a single device for a small office, shop, or home office, it offers excellent value, but it's not ideal for bigger or busier scenarios.

Price when reviewed: £311 exc. VAT

Read our full Epson EcoTank ET-4850 review for more information.

Canon MAXIFY GX5550

Best small business color inkjet printer

Canon's MAXIFY GX5550 takes aim at the office color laser printer, and it pretty much finds its mark. It's a refillable inkjet printer, arriving with 6,000 black and 14,000 color pages' worth of ink. Blow through that and you'll pay only around 0.6p per full color page to buy more – that's at least 10 times less to run than an equivalent color laser.

This isn't some flimsy home printer, either. It's engineered with two 250-sheet paper cassettes plus a 100-sheet tray at the rear. It's rated for a maximum 45,000 pages per month, and comes backed up by a three-year warranty. It offers automatic duplex printing, USB, Ethernet, and wireless networking, and control via a user-friendly 6.7cm color touchscreen.

The GX5550 isn't great at photo printing, but it produces excellent text and graphics on plain paper. That said, it's one real weakness is that it's just not as fast as a laser. If you can live with that, this is a highly versatile color printer with long maintenance intervals and ridiculously low running costs. It's ideal if you need a cheap way to print in moderate volumes.

Price when reviewed: £383 exc. VAT

Read our full Canon MAXIFY GX5550 review for more information.

OKI B432DN

Best small business mono laser printer

The Oki B432dn may be a boxy, unassuming-looking printer, but if you're looking for fast, high-volume document printing then this diamond in the rough has you covered. A great example of a printer which does one thing incredibly well, the B432dn is a mono laser that chewed through our speed tests at a rate of knots. There's no color option, but it managed our black-and-white test document at 31.3ppm, and even managed a duplex graphics test at 14 images per minute.

It's undeniably barebones in terms of additional features, with no scanner or fax capacity, but its functionality can be boosted with a £40 network adapter for Wi-Fi if you're unhappy with its gigabit Ethernet connectivity, and with a 530-sheet paper tray if the default 250-sheet tray isn't enough for you. Plus, we found that with the 12,000-page ultra-high capacity toner, running costs came to just 1.2p per page once the initial supply has been exhausted. To cap it all off, print quality is all but perfect.

Price when reviewed: £200 exc. VAT

Read our full OKI B432dn review for more information.

Canon i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw

Best small business color laser printer

Inkjets and small lasers are all very well, but if you'll print off reams of paper and you need them in a hurry, accept no substitute for a big laser printer. Canon's i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw is a great example, aimed at moderate use in small offices and workgroups. This is a big laser, full of useful office features such as a 550-sheet input cassette and a further 100-sheet multipurpose feed. Duplex (double-sided) printing is standard, as is Wi-Fi and gigabit Ethernet support.

The LBP732Cdw is strong on security, offering features including user management, IPSec, and IP and MAC address filtering. Canon is providing security support until January 2031, helping make this printer a good long-term choice. There's also support for Canon's iW Enterprise Management Console, allowing for centralized management of a fleet of printers.

Happily, this is a high-performing printer, with highlights on our tests including a 33 pages per minute (ppm) top speed for text, and 24.8ppm for complex graphics. Print quality was superb all-round, with the exception that some photographs had a slight blue bias. This high quality, along with the standard Wi-Fi interface, gives the LBP732Cdw a slight edge over the Brother HL9430CDN, which is otherwise a similarly strong alternative.

Price when reviewed: £401 exc. VAT

Read our full Canon i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw review for more information.

Epson EcoTank ET-18100

Best small business printer for cheap photos

Epson's EcoTank ET-18100 offers a cheaper alternative for businesses that need to print their own photos and graphics. Yes, it's expensive to buy, but it'll soon make up for it with much lower running costs than competing devices such as the Canon PIXMA Pro-200 (see above). That's because it combines six-ink, A3+ photo printing with refillable ink tanks. You get about 7,200 pages' worth of ink in the box, and when they run out new bottles are less than £9 each.

This isn't an all-rounder. There's no scanner or display, and it's not really optimised for everyday document printing. It does make sense alongside a more everyday office all-rounder, as a second printer for cheap photo prints. We calculated that each borderless postcard-sized photo will cost about 2.4p (excluding paper), rising to 10p for A4 and 25p for A3+. That's a fraction of what you'd pay in a lab, or from rivals like the PIXMA Pro-200.

The flipside is that this is a good, rather than brilliant, photo printer. It did a good job on landscape prints and group photos, with balanced exposures and an impressive amount of detail. However, it tended to lose fine details in light areas such as cloud and sun-bleached wood. It's a great choice if you need cheap and capable photo prints, but if quality is more important, the PIXMA Pro-200 has it well beaten.

Price when reviewed: £542 exc. VAT

Read our full Epson EcoTank ET-18100 review for more information.

How we test small business printers

Like any hardware that we review, printers are put through a number of standardised tests to ensure comparable results across different products. We test black and white print speeds by running a 25-page document through the unit, timing how quickly it produces the first page after hitting print, and how long it takes to deliver the full job. These tests are also repeated at draft quality for inkjets.

For colour machines, we’ll also repeat these tests with 24 sheets of magazine pages, web pages and presentation slides, running the first ten pages again to test duplex printing where available. To test image quality, we look for any evidence of colour banding or fuzzy text in a series of colour photos, greyscale images and mono text documents.

Where printers also include the ability to scan documents, we’ll also test the quality by looking at the results from scanning an office document, a color photo, and a color input target chart. To test the speed of its scanning operations, we’ll time a single photocopy, the speed with which it produces preview images, and how quickly it delivers scans at varying resolutions.

For models with an ADF as well, we’ll copy a ten-page document in both mono and colour (if possible) to test its speeds, and if both printer and ADF functions are duplex-enabled, we’ll time how long it takes to process a ten-page double-sided document batch.

Lexmark’s MC3326i is one of the cheapest colour laser MFPs we’ve seen, yet it offers a great range of features. It brings together print, copy, scan and digital fax services for both wired and wireless networks, and does it all in a desktop-friendly package. It even offers double-sided printing, and the scanner is topped off with a capacious 50-page document feeder.

With a quoted print speed of 24ppm, the MC3326i’s print engine isn’t the fastest around, but it will be fine for small offices. And it delivers on its promises: our mono 24-page test Word document was delivered in 59 seconds, after a wait of 11 seconds for the first page. Switching to colour didn’t slow the printer down, either; our 24-page DTP-style document was dispatched at the same rate, while duplexing dropped speeds to 13ppm.

As for print quality, we’ve no complaints. The driver offers only a single interpolated 2,400 x 600dpi resolution mode, but this delivers outstanding print quality with beautifully sharp text, right down to 6pt, and plenty of detail in black and white photos.

Colour output is satisfactory too, if not quite flawless. Complex colour transitions in our test chart looked ultra-smooth, while photos were bright and vibrant, with just the merest hint of banding in large single blocks of colour.

The catch is the ongoing cost of consumables. Lexmark’s standard toner cartridges are poor value, with mono and colour page costs working out to 4p and 18.5p respectively. Even the high-yield versions only reduce these to 3p and 13.7p. If your requirements grow, the costs could quickly mount up.

Still, you don’t need to worry about staff burning through those consumables on personal print jobs. You can use the MFP’s web console to decide exactly what features are available for public use, and lock all other functions down with local groups and user accounts. The MFP’s touchscreen can be secured too, so if a user wants to print personal photos from a USB flash drive, they will need to enter their account details first.

Scan operations are quite swiftly dispatched: we watched ten single-sided pages trundle through the scanner at an average of 18ppm. Note, though, that the ADF is a simplex model and can’t scan both sides of a page in one pass.

There’s a good choice of destinations too. Documents can be scanned to network folders, FTP servers or local flash drives, and if you provide an SMTP server they can be sent directly to email addresses. You can streamline the scanning process by using the web console to create shortcuts that appear on the touchscreen – which is probably the best way to use it, as its small 7.2cm size can be a little fiddly for anything more than one-touch operations.

Lexmark’s Cloud Connector feature adds further versatility, providing apps for local scanning and printing using OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and Google Drive cloud accounts. It’s easy to set up – you just create a profile from the panel, enter the unique code in Lexmark’s cloud connector portal to allow it to access your account, and protect it at the panel with a PIN.

Be clear, this MFP is best suited to lightweight printing duties –as confirmed by the non-expandable 250-sheet paper tray and relatively small 2,500-page monthly duty cycle. Busy offices would be well advised to invest in an MFP with greater expansion opti0ns and lower running costs. However, for small businesses that only require occasional prints, Lexmark’s MC3326i is a tempting proposition – and as a bonus, registering with Lexmark qualifies you for a generous four-year onsite warranty.

Lexmark MC3326i specifications

Busy workgroups looking for a workhorse laser MFP need look no further. Kyocera’s Ecosys M6235cidn is designed for huge duty cycles, with a quoted maximum of 100,000 pages a month.

It’s cost-effective, too. The ceramic print drum and developer are designed to last the life of the MFP, so toner is the only consumable. You’ll find 6,000-page black and 5,000-page colour cartridges supplied in the box, after which Kyocera’s high-capacity black toner cartridges last 13,000 pages, while colour ones are good for 11,000 pages. That works out to a very reasonable 1p per mono page and 5.4p for colour.

The M6235cidn is a versatile creature, thanks to Kyocera’s HyPAS (Hybrid Platform for Advanced Solutions) app library. There’s a good range to choose from, including apps for access control and document management. Sadly, due to changes in security policies, some cloud apps are being discontinued, including Cloud Direct for Dropbox and Google Drive, so this might not be the ideal MFP for teams that are heavily invested in the cloud.

Happily, mobile devices get a better deal. Kyocera’s Mobile Print app still works with Dropbox, Evernote and OneDrive, while the MyPanel app can remotely send scans straight to email, once you have provided your mail server details in the MFP’s web console.

The web console is also where you’ll find security features, with controls for print, scan and copy operations, colour usage and page limits. Users must enter their ID number in the printer driver to access these functions; they can also set a PIN to hold confidential jobs until they’re manually released, or use the Print and Hold feature to check a single printout before releasing further copies.

Walk-up operations of all types are a pleasure, thanks to the M6235cidn’s big 7in colour touchscreen. The menu layout can be easily customised from the web console, and with room for up to 40 icons, you can easily set up quick shortcuts for virtually any task.

In use, the M6235cidn makes short work of big print jobs. The engine is rated at a speedy 35ppm, and our 35-page Word document indeed took exactly one minute to print at the default 600dpi resolution. The printer also offers a true 1,200dpi mode, but we found this pulled print speed down to 13.5ppm. Similarly, our 24-page colour DTP document emerged at 35ppm at 600dpi, but fell to 10ppm at the higher resolution.

Still, this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker: with default settings, the Kyocera delivered excellent output quality, with pin-sharp text down to 6pt fonts and highly detailed mono photos with bags of detail.

It’s just as good in colour. Our test chart revealed no noticeable stepping across complex colour fades, and composite grey shades looked perfectly clean and neutral. In the real world, this translates to eye-catching photos, reports and marketing material, even on cheap 75gsm copier paper.

If you’re about ready to splash out on the M6235cidn, be aware that you might need to price in some optional extras. The printer comes with only a single 250-page paper tray; up to three extra 500-sheet trays can be added, but these cost £150 each. If you want to connect to a wireless network, you’ll also need Kyocera’s IB-51 802.11n expansion card, which will set you back £250.

Even so, the Ecosys M6235cidn is a very strong contender for SMBs that want fast print speeds and great access security. Its large touchscreen is very user-friendly, print quality is excellent and running costs are among the lowest you’ll find for a business laser MFP.

Kyocera Ecosys M6235cidn specifications

While some printers are better-suited to occasional use, the serious-looking Canon i-Sensys MF744Cdw is aimed at busy workgroups with established workflows. Make no mistake - this MFP is a real office workhorse. That doesn’t mean it’s limited in its flexibility, however: it works with Canon’s Application Library, which provides a range of customisable apps, all easily accessible from the generous 12.7cm colour touchscreen.

The apps include tools for one-touch scanning to particular destinations – such as email addresses and network shares – copying ID cards and scanning directly to a fax destination. If you have standard forms that need to be printed regularly, the Print Template app can churn them out on demand. And best of all, unlike Kyocera’s HyPAS extensions, these apps are all free and preinstalled – you just need to activate and configure them from the MFP’s web console.

The hardware, meanwhile, ticks all the boxes you would expect from a business-class MFP. It supports USB 2, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n wireless and NFC connectivity as standard, and comes with a built-in 50-page duplex ADF above the colour flatbed scanner. The standard 250-sheet paper tray is on the light side for heavy hitters, but you can add an extra 550-sheet cassette for £98.

A full set of toner cartridges is included too: rather than half-empty starter supplies, Canon provides its standard 2,300-page K and 2,100-page C, Y and M cartridges. Once these run out, we recommend replacing them with the high-yield versions, for printing costs of around 2p for mono and 11p per colour page, which is about average for this market sector.

Canon quotes a print speed of 27ppm for the MF744Cdw, and indeed our 27-page test Word document was printed in precisely 60 seconds at both the General and High Definition Text driver settings. Enabling double-sided printing only slowed us down to 21ppm and even on cheap 75gsm paper we saw pin-sharp text and detailed mono photos.

The MF744Cdw wasn’t quite so speedy with our 24-page colour DTP document; this arrived at 23.6ppm in both quality modes. The results were impressive, though, with photos revealing plenty of detail and images looking bright and vibrant with barely any noticeable banding.

When it comes to scanning, the Scan to Preset Destination app adds touchscreen icons for quick scans to network folders pulled from the MFP’s address book; once you have configured an email server, more can be added for scans to single and multiple email addresses.

The Print Template app allows you to upload standard forms as JPEG or PDF files (up to a combined maximum size of 48MB) and give each one a custom icon on the touchscreen. And while the Standby Slide app might not be the most functional, it’s appealing for when the MFP is in a public area, displaying a slide show of images and messages on the touchscreen.

The one thing that’s lacking from the onboard app lineup is cloud support. However, you can connect to all the main services via Canon’s free Print Business mobile apps, and scan to and print from any cloud account that’s set up on your device.

As for management, Canon’s Department ID feature lets you enforce daily page limits and control colour and mono printing. This needs to be enabled for each user in their driver settings and they will also need to enter a valid ID and PIN at the MFP’s control panel when they want to access local copy, scan and fax services.

Canon’s i-Sensys MF744Cdw has everything a busy office needs: plenty of features, good output quality and access controls. Running costs are reasonable too, and Canon’s Application Library turns repetitious jobs into one-touch wonders.

Canon i-Sensys MF744Cdw specifications

Lexmark’s GO Line series of lasers is aimed at businesses with relatively light printing needs, and within that family the C3426dw is the top-end colour model. It delivers good speeds and excellent output quality for a low starting price: the trade-off is running costs, which are a little steeper than you’ll find with other lasers. The starter cartridges supplied with the C3426dw are only rated for 1,500 pages, after which Lexmark’s 4,500-page high-yield replacements work out to 1.9p per mono page and 10.4p for colour.

As long as you can live with that, the C3426dw is a very respectable A4 colour laser, with a swift 26ppm print speed in both colour and mono, and integrated duplex printing. Paper capacity is ample for its intended role, comprising a 250-sheet lower tray (which can be supplemented with one or two extra 250-sheet trays) plus a single-sheet MPT and a 100-sheet output bin. It’s user-friendly too, thanks to a 7.2cm colour touchscreen – a big step up from the little two-line LED displays found on cheaper GO Line models.

As you’d expect, the C3426dw can be used with a direct USB connection, but also supports both Ethernet and 802.11n wireless. We found setting up the latter impressively painless thanks to Lexmark’s Mobile Assistant iOS app, which automatically located the printer and helped us connect and configure it.

Lexmark cagily promises print speeds of “up to” 26ppm, but our tests showed that this is easily attainable once the printer has warmed up: our 26-page test Word document was delivered in 61 seconds, after a wait of around ten seconds for the first page. A graphic-heavy DTP document proved more of a challenge, but print speed dipped only slightly to 24ppm. Double-sided prints from Word came out at 13ppm, cutting performance precisely in half.

These speeds were all achieved using Lexmark’s default 4800CQ resolution – equivalent to 2,400 x 600dpi – and we really can’t fault the quality. Text was perfectly sharp and clean at sizes right down to 6pt, while mono photos revealed high levels of detail even in darker areas, with only a hint of banding. Colour reports were vivid and eye-catching, and our test chart looked superb, with smooth, even transitions across complex fades. The driver offers a standard 600dpi mode as well, but we found this made no noticeable difference to quality or speed.

With such great results, and relatively high running costs, you might need to prevent staff from using the C3426dw for personal prints. This is easily done via the printer’s web console: you can block all public access to mono or colour printing with a click, and set up user accounts to determine what features each person is allowed to use.

Document security, meanwhile, is taken care of by a walk-up-and-print option that holds sensitive jobs until a PIN is entered at the touchscreen; frequently printed documents can be stored on the printer for future use, and when printing multiple copies you can proof one copy before releasing the rest.

Cloud support is strong too. Lexmark’s Cloud Connector portal lets you link Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive accounts to the printer, after which a PIN-protected icon for each one appears on the touchscreen, from which you can browse and print files. We could also use Lexmark’s Mobile Print iOS app on an iPad to print documents, web pages and photos, and share the printer with other installed apps. The printer doesn’t have an NFC sensor for tap-to-print operations, but it does support AirPrint and Wi-Fi Direct.

If you regularly print hundreds of pages per day then there are more economical printers out there, but SMBs with modest printing needs will find the C3426dw a worthy choice. It has enough security features to keep a tight rein on usage plus good cloud support, and output quality is a match for much more expensive lasers.

Lexmark C3426dw specifications

Canon’s i-Sensys LBP664Cx is a tempting option for busy offices. This desktop A4 laser costs a reasonable £253, yet delivers a speedy 27ppm in both colour and mono. A 12.7cm colour touchscreen makes it easy to use, and you can even take some advantage of Canon’s library of downloadable apps.

All the key connections are here: alongside a USB 2 port, the printer offers Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n wireless services, which are easily configured via a touch-driven wizard (although, as usual, both interfaces can’t be active simultaneously). There’s an integrated NFC sensor too, ready for tap-to-print operations.

The printer is supplied with a set of 1,200-page starter cartridges, and the only consumables are replacement toner packs, which come in standard and high-yield variants. Opt for the latter and running costs are very reasonable for a printer in this price range, working out to 1.5p per mono page and 8.6p for colour.

In addition to the touchscreen, the printer also presents a web console, providing details of consumables, paper status, and detected errors. The status monitor page shows job logs and page usage, as well as a view of average monthly energy usage.

You can also use the console to configure security settings, such as locking access to the touchscreen. Department ID settings let you control access to colour or mono printing, or apply daily page limits for each user. A little bit of desktop configuration is needed for this, as these settings also need to be applied at the driver end, but you do get the convenient choice of whether to store each user’s ID and PIN or require them to be provided for each print job.

Although the LBP664Cx can download apps from the Canon Application Library, almost all of the items currently on offer are aimed at MFPs, and only two work on this particular printer. Still, the Standby Slide app could be useful if the printer is in a public area, as it can display a slideshow of images and messages on the touchscreen.

The Print Template app is great if you have standard pages that need to be reprinted regularly: you can use the web console to upload a collection of JPEG or PDF files (up to a total size of 48MB), then assign each one to a button on the touchscreen for instant printing.

Another limitation of the LBP664Cx is cloud access, with only Google Cloud Print natively supported. You can work around this with companion apps, however: after installing the Canon Print Business mobile app, we were able to use our iPad to browse and print items in our Google Drive and Dropbox accounts.

And the LBP644Cx lived up to Canon’s performance promises, delivering our 27-page test Word document in precisely 60 seconds, in both the General and High-Definition driver modes. It struggled a little with our challenging 24-page colour DTP document, which was delivered at 24ppm in both General and Publication modes, but the results were worth the wait: quality was amazing, with photos and graphics revealing plenty of detail with bright, vibrant colour, and only the merest hint of banding.

Printing in duplex mode is pleasingly swift too, with our double-sided test document emerging at 20ppm. Even on cheap 75gsm stock, the printer produces pin-sharp text and detailed mono photos, and you won’t need to be constantly feeding it paper as the 250-sheet lower tray can be boosted with an optional 550-sheet base cassette.

For the price, the LBP664Cx delivers a strong set of print control features, and overall print quality is extremely good. Add in affordable running costs and you have a great choice for small businesses.

Canon i-Sensys LBP664Cx 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

For a small business, a colour laser device offers great speed and print quality, but too often the flip side is high running costs. Kyocera’s Ecosys M5526cdw, on the other hand, aims to balance features, performance and cost. It’s an MFP that scans, copies, faxes, and can print up to 26 black or colour pages per minute.

The M5526cdw is bulkier than an entry-level device and weighs 26kg, so it might be hard to accommodate in smaller offices. It’s a shame that the main paper tray holds only 250 pages, but there’s a 50-sheet multipurpose feed, and you can add another 250-sheet tray as an option. The generous 150-sheet output bin also detects when it’s full.

The 50-sheet ADF supports duplexing, so you can automatically print, scan, fax or copy double-sided documents without lifting a finger. With two sensors, the ADF can duplex scan in a single pass, but at 5.6 images per minute (ipm), our colour duplex copy test wasn’t especially quick. Regular colour copies were on the slow side too, with ten single-sided sheets taking a minute. In black only, the same job took half the time. Interestingly, single page copies took just nine seconds in black or colour, so the ADF may be a bottleneck for multi-page colour copies.

You can connect the M5526cdw via Wi-Fi, USB or Gigabit Ethernet, or use its front-panel USB port to print PDF or image formats from a USB key. You can scan directly to USB in the same formats, although inexplicably the feature is tucked away in the USB menu and called “Store File”. This encapsulates the essence of this MFP’s menu, which isn’t as intuitive as the more consumer-focused touchscreen on HP’s LaserJet Pro M283fdw.

We experienced similar issues when scanning as we did with Kyocera’s Ecosys M2735dw. While Kyocera’s TWAIN interface returned a normal preview, the captured image was corrupted. Scans worked perfectly with the included Quick Scan app, however, and from an Android phone. After reproducing the issue on a second PC, we downloaded the most recent version of the scan driver available on Kyocera’s support site. Although this was older than the driver on our disc, with an older style interface, it worked perfectly.

This is a swift printer, particularly in black. It reached 23.1ppm on our letter test, and managed a strong 18.5ppm on our more complex colour graphics test, which often takes the shine off fast colour devices. It was reasonably fast when duplexing in colour, printing ten sides of five sheets in 64 seconds – a rate of 9.4ipm.

Selecting the maximum 1,200dpi resolution halves the print engine’s speed, but photos were fairly quick, with two 10 x 8in images completing in 34 seconds. Scans also proved fast, with a preview completing in just ten seconds. At 300dpi we captured an A4 page in 14 seconds, and only needed 18 for a postcard-sized photo at 600dpi.

The Kyocera produced good results across the board, with no big missteps. Black text quality was very high, with sharp outlines and consistent characters right down to 5pt sizes. Colour graphics were strong, with authoritative if slightly under-saturated colours. This sombre bias was more evident in colour photos, which had a slight magenta cast and were a shade too dark. It’s hard to fault the scanner: at lower resolutions, office documents were sharp and well exposed, while higher resolution scans captured plenty of sharp detail.

Kyocera guarantees the M5526cdw for two years, but its drum is covered for three years or 100,000 pages. It’s intended to last the lifetime of the MFP, helping reduce maintenance and running costs. Replacement toner lasts for 4,000 black pages, or 3,000 each of cyan, magenta and yellow, giving running costs of 8.9p per full-colour page. That’s not bad for colour, but at 1.3p per page, black costs are a lot lower than many rival lasers.

The M5526cdw is a sensible choice for more demanding small office roles. It’s particularly suitable if you expect to print lots of black text, but want the option of decent colour graphics. Yet we wouldn’t overlook a strong inkjet option such as HP’s PageWide 477dw.

Kyocera Ecosys M5526cdw specifications

While tank-based printers now have a significant presence in the inkjet market, so-called “refillables” have yet to make much of a splash amongst lasers. The HP Neverstop Laser 1202nw is one of the few, with toner that’s refilled from a bottle, much like the Epson EcoTank ET-3850 and Canon Pixma G7050 ink tank printers.

The main downside is that, for the moment at least, this bottle-based approach is only available on a mono printer. Its prints work out to around 0.7p each, meaning it doesn’t match the phenomenally cheap printing of the inkjet models, but at less than a penny per page it significantly undercuts its laser rivals.

It’s a good thing it does, because the Neverstop Laser 1202nw seems expensive for what you’re getting. To be fair, it’s a multifunction device, so it can also copy and scan, but spending this much elsewhere would buy you a colour printer.

It also lacks some key functions, the most inconvenient of which is double-sided printing. It can only scan up to 600dpi and the control panel is back to basics: it offers a copy button and a mono 1.8in LCD display. As the “nw” suffix indicates, however, the 1202nw includes both an Ethernet port and Wi-Fi (along with the usual USB).

The paper tray looks like it should pull right out but it’s actually just a cover. You remove this to access the paper tray, which is a cavity in the bottom of the printer you can slide paper into. This isn’t as convenient to refill as a tray that can be pulled right out, and we found the cover fiddly to replace.

Nor is this the quickest machine, falling behind the other lasers and, in some tests, failing to trouble the fastest inkjets. Print quality is good, with text documents appearing clear and sharply printed. Graphics and photos are inevitably printed in grey, but they come out well.

For anyone who simply wants lots of affordable black prints, this HP laser is a very sensible option. It comes with enough toner for 5,000 prints, meaning that if you’re after laser sharpness but don’t want to fork out laser prices on a page-by-page basis, the Neverstop 1202nw is a worthy choice.

HP Neverstop Laser 1202nw specifications

Lexmark’s MC3224adwe is one of the smallest MFPs around, with a footprint of just 411 x 394mm. That will appeal to businesses that are short on office space – as will its feature set, which includes duplex printing as well as scan, copy and fax services, support for either wired or wireless connections and a 7.2cm colour touchscreen.

The other thing that’s eye-catching about this particular model is its very low price, but be warned: cheap printers tend to be expensive to run, and the MC3224adwe is no exception. Its toner cartridges are only good for 1,500 pages each, which at current prices means you’ll be paying a steep 3.8p per mono page and a massive 16.8p for colour.

Clearly, then, you won’t want staff to be printing things out willy-nilly – and the good news is that Lexmark provides plenty of access controls. From the tidy web interface, you can block all public access to print, copy and scan functions, while individual user accounts can be customised to determine what features each person is allowed to use.

When you do send it a print job, the MC3224adwe is no slouch in the speed stakes. Lexmark advertises a print rate of 22ppm, and our 22-page test Word document was indeed delivered in 59 seconds – albeit with a wait of ten seconds for the first page. Our challenging 24-page colour DTP Word document was dispatched at the same speed, while switching to double-sided printing reduced the average throughput to 12.2ppm.

Scanning is pretty swift too, with a ten-page copy job completed at a brisk 17ppm. Note, though, that the ADF is only single-sided, so if you want to scan double-sided documents you’ll need to manually turn the pages over and run them through twice.

As for output quality, the Lexmark impressed us with razor-sharp 6pt text and plenty of detail in mono photos with barely a hint of banding. Colour reports look superb as well, with our performance chart showing super-smooth transitions across complex colour fades. And while lasers don’t always do a great job with colour photos, the MC3224adwe rendered our snaps with real energy and pizzazz.

Although the touchscreen is easy to use, its small size makes it quite fiddly when, for example, you want to set an email address as a destination to send scanned images to. An easier option is to use the web interface to set up scan shortcuts: these can include email addresses, FTP servers, fax numbers and network shares, all of which will then appear on the panel, ready to be accessed with a couple of taps.

Lexmark’s Windows driver provides plenty of job control features too, allowing users to choose single-sided or duplex printing, create booklets and posters, and store commonly used print jobs for future use. Security is well covered: you can assign a PIN to confidential prints before walking up and releasing them at the printer, and when printing multiple copies, you can proof the first run before releasing the rest.

One disappointment is that the MC3224adwe doesn’t currently support Lexmark’s Cloud Connector feature, which allows scanning and printing directly to and from OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive cloud accounts; hopefully this will be added soon in a firmware update.

On the upside, both AirPrint and Wi-Fi Direct are supported, and Lexmark also offers mobile apps for Android and iOS: we were able to print documents, web pages and photos directly from our iPad, and you can remotely capture scans and share the printer with other installed apps.

The running costs of the Lexmark MC3224adwe make it unsuitable for a high-volume print and copy role – but if you need an MFP for light use then all the features you could ask for are here, along with great output quality in a compact and affordable package.

Lexmark MC3224adwe specifications

Sitting at the top of Kyocera’s Ecosys family of A4 colour MFPs, the M6635cidn combines a wealth of features with exceptionally low printing costs. Its high-capacity toner cartridges deliver mono and colour pages for only 1p and 5.1p, so while the initial purchase price may seem high, it’s an investment that will pay off handsomely over time.

The M6635cidn also supports Kyocera’s HyPAS app platform, opening up a wide library of apps providing features such as colour control and cloud printing. To use it you simply need to install a standard SD card into the slot at the rear of the printer: a 4GB card supports up to five apps, while the 32GB card we used for testing upped this to 16.

The catch is that the apps themselves aren’t free. We tried out the Cloud Connect app to scan and print from our Google and Evernote accounts, and the Cloud Direct app for Dropbox, which allowed us to send scans to our account, browse cloud storage and print files. Both worked well, but then for £100 each they should. Another app you might want to invest in is Colour Control, which permits mono printing and copying but blocks access to colour until users have logged in at the control panel. That’s a feature many businesses will find useful, but it costs a steep £125.

Still, whatever functions you’re using, the 7in colour touchscreen makes HyPAS operations a pleasure. It’s one of the best-designed panels we’ve seen, with plenty of room for tapping in your login details or cloud account information, and it can be customised from the web interface.

The Ecosys M6635cidn also distinguishes itself with a true 1,200dpi print engine – not something we often see at this price point. Using the top resolution impacts on speed, however: at 600dpi, our 24-page colour DTP document was delivered at 35ppm, but in high-quality mode that fell to 11.5ppm.

Still, even at 600dpi the M6635cidn produced pin-sharp text at sizes down to 6pt fonts, and mono photos had plenty of crisp detail and very little murk. Colour reports were just as good, and although our colour photos initially looked a bit drab, we were able to improve them markedly with a quick tweak to the driver’s contrast and saturation settings.

Nor does the flatbed scanner let the side down. Scans look great and the 100-page ADF performs well, working through our ten single-sided pages at an average of 27ppm. Double-sided scans completed at just 8ppm, however, even though the scanner is a true duplex model and scans both sides of a page in one pass.

Print security is another strength. Jobs can be assigned a PIN from the driver, and will then only be released from the control panel, while a Print and Hold option allows you to check one copy before releasing the rest. You can optionally dedicate 64MB of RAM to store frequently used jobs, and expand the available storage with an SD card. Integrated job accounting, meanwhile, can be enabled in the driver to manage print, scan and copy operations. When it’s active, users must log in order to print in colour, exceed set page counts and access other functions.

There’s no denying that the upfront cost of the M6635cidn might be off-putting to smaller businesses, especially once you factor in the cost of any extra HyPAS apps you might need. There’s a range of optional add-ons to consider too, including 500-sheet feeder trays (up to three can be fitted), an internal SSD for secure document storage and an 802.11n adapter for wireless connections – which, at £250, is decidedly on the pricey side.

In terms of functionality, though, there’s very little to fault the Ecosys M6635cidn on. It’s crammed with features and delivers good performance – and despite the initial outlay, its low running costs mean that this MFP can end up saving you a lot of money in the long term.

Kyocera Ecosys M6635cidn specifications

Lexmark’s new “GO Line” family of printers sets out to bring enterprise-class reliability, security and features within reach of smaller businesses. And the entry-level C3224dw is certainly affordable: even though this 22ppm colour laser features an integrated duplexer and supports wired, wireless or USB 2 connections, it costs only £93 exc VAT.

As you’d expect, for that money, the design is quite basic. The C3224dw sports a two-line backlit LED control panel, but doesn’t include an NFC sensor for tap-to-print operations. And while the 250-sheet lower tray may be fine for a light office printing role, you can’t add extra trays to increase choice and capacity.

Still, the printer has a decent web interface, which you can use to set up wired or wireless connections (note that, as usual, you can’t use both at once). Alternatively, we were also able to use Lexmark’s Mobile Assistant iOS app to link our iPad to the printer and use that to configure a wireless connection to the main network.

Once the C3224dw is online, it only takes a minute to install the driver software. The installer automatically locates the printer and installs a handy status monitor tool. You get plenty of print settings to play with too, including options to print single or double-sided, create booklets or posters, and add watermarks to selected pages.

If you need multiple copies of a document, you can set it to pause after the first run, so you can proof the output before releasing the rest of the copies. And for sensitive print jobs, you can assign a PIN, so the pages won’t be released until you walk up and enter the right code – although since the printer lacks a numeric keypad, this can be a lengthy process.

Still, performance is on the money. Our 22-page test Word document was produced in 59 seconds, with a wait of 11 seconds for the first page. The C3224dw also breezed through our challenging 24-page DTP-style Word document, this time averaging precisely 22ppm.

Quality is good, too. The driver defaults to a proprietary 4800CQ resolution, which is designed to provide a balanced mix of speed and quality. You can customise the driver to get a 600dpi option, but this doesn’t seem to make any visible difference.

Thankfully, it doesn’t matter, as the C3224dw produced razor-sharp text at default settings, even at font sizes down to 6pt. Mono photos revealed plenty of detail in darker areas, while our colour chart showed smooth transitions across complex fades. That means you can look forward to eye-catching reports and great colour photos, with barely a hint of banding.

Mobile support is another strong point. The C3224dw supports AirPrint and Wi-Fi Direct, and the Mobile Print iOS app makes it a breeze to print documents or web pages. We were also able to print photos from our iPad’s camera and link the app to our Dropbox account for direct printing from the cloud.

The big catch with the C3224dw is running costs. The largest toner cartridges you can buy are rated for a mere 1,500 pages, and when you also factor in the cost of periodically replacing the waste toner bottle, you’re looking at an average cost of 4.1p for mono pages and a wallet-bashing 17.7p for colour.

With printing costs this high it’s a must to keep colour printing strictly under control, as overeager staff could easily waste thousands of pounds per year. Thankfully, you can completely block public access to both mono and colour printing, and set up local user accounts on the printer that govern precisely which features each individual is permitted to access.

Even so, it’s hard to overlook the fact that Brother’s HL-L3270CDW is only around £40 more and offers lower running costs, plus a colour touchscreen and a superior spread of features. But if you’re looking for a cheap business-class laser for very occasional colour printing, the Lexmark C3224dw delivers decent performance and superb print quality for an exceptionally low initial outlay.

Kyocera’s Ecosys P6235cdn is no lightweight laser: it targets medium-to-large workgroups with serious printing needs. Its long-life print drum and developer are each rated for 200,000 pages and they come with a three-year warranty (whichever comes first), so there’s a good chance you will only ever need concern yourself with replacing toner.

Even that’s not something you will have to do very often. The starter mono and colour cartridges supplied in the box are good for 6,000 pages and 5,000 pages respectively - and replacements are rated at a massive 13,000 and 11,000 pages. That translates to low ongoing costs of just 1p per mono page and 5.1p for colour.

There’s no need to be constantly reloading paper either, as the P6235cd’s 500-sheet internal paper tray can be supplemented with up to three more 500-sheet feeders. And staff won’t spend ages waiting around for big print jobs to emerge, thanks to a claimed 35ppm print speed.

In practice, we were pleased to see that our 35-page Word document was indeed delivered in precisely one minute at the standard 600dpi resolution. And switching to double-sided printing had an impressively small impact on performance, causing speeds to dip only to 30ppm.

Unusually for a laser at this price, the Ecosys P6235cdn offers a high-quality 1,200dpi print option - but selecting this caused single-sided print speeds to fall to 13ppm. It was a similar story with our 24-page colour DTP document, which came out at 34ppm at standard resolution and 10ppm at 1,200dpi.

This isn’t a big problem, though, as the higher resolution is superfluous for most business purposes. Output quality is excellent at 600dpi, with razor-sharp text that we couldn’t fault at all. Colour quality was just as good, with no discernible stepping across complex colour fades in our test chart and faithful reproduction of grey shades using equal mixes of cyan, magenta and yellow.

The one scenario where you might want to tweak the settings is when printing photographs. Mono photos revealed slightly more detail at 1,200dpi, while colour photos - which initially came out looking slightly dingy - were greatly improved by tweaking the driver’s colour contrast and saturation settings to +4.

Management is handled via the printer’s Command Center RX web interface, which allows you to configure user authentication and job accounting. Users can be set up with numerical account IDs, and each can have a total page limit assigned, as well as an optional limit on the number of colour pages they can print. Users can log into the web interface themselves with their account ID, to view their own page counts, check on the printer status and view job logs. Enabling these features requires a visit to each user’s desk, however, as the driver needs to be manually configured to use job accounting.

For frequently used or secure documents, it’s possible to set aside up to 64MB of the printer’s base 1GB of memory as a RAM disk - and if you need more space, you can simply pop in an SD card. Kyocera also offers a good selection of optional add-in cards, although at £250, the IB-51 802.11n wireless adapter is expensive.

Finally, to complement the standard Windows software, Kyocera’s Mobile Print iOS app brings a good range of features to mobile users, including PIN-protected prints and the ability to print from cloud accounts such as Dropbox. The free MyPanel mobile app also provides handy printer status details, including paper and toner levels.

While the 1,200dpi print mode is slow, the Ecosys P6235cdn hits all the important notes. It’s expandable and easily maintained, with good print performance, strong security and very low running costs.

Brother's DCP-L3550CDW is a relatively affordable colour laser MFP, but it's full of useful features for a home or small office: wired and wireless networking, fax, duplex printing and a 50-sheet ADF. Sadly, this model can't make duplex scans, faxes or copies, while the range-topping MFC-L3770CDW can.

You could hardly accuse this MFP of being good looking, but it's a practical design, with control coming from a 9.3cm colour touchscreen. Brother has clearly invested in usability: the DCP-L3550CDW can multitask, scanning to a PC, for example, while servicing a print job, and even releases the automatic document feeder for use after copying while the printer is still churning out the copied pages.

This MFP isn't particularly quick for a laser. Rated at a modest 18ppm in black or colour, it delivered black text at 16ppm, and mixed colour graphics at a middling 14.7ppm. Duplexed colour graphics emerged at 5.6ppm. At 14 (mono) and 17 seconds (colour), single-page photocopies were swift, while ten-page ADF copies completed in 47 seconds, black or colour. Scans were very quick, with previews and low-resolution A4 scans completing in seven seconds or less. Only at 1,200dpi did things slow down appreciably, but even then scanning a 10 x 15cm photo took just 44 seconds.

Print quality was generally very good, with sharp text and even, glitch free-graphics, but pages lacked the impact and sheen of the best lasers, looking in some lights more like output from a capable inkjet. Copies were too dark at the default setting, but scans were among the best we've seen from a Brother device.

The DCP-L3550CDW uses separate toner, drum, belt and waste toner consumables, which can cut running costs, but juggling seven consumables is a lot to manage for home users. Print costs are around 2p per page in black and 8.4p in colour, which isn't excessive for a printer in this class.

Ultimately, this MFP is undone by Brother's own MFC-L3770CDW, which in addition to its duplex ADF offers faster printing, a 30-page multipurpose input and a USB slot for direct prints and scans. Curiously, it cost only 10 more at the time of writing, leaving us wondering why we would choose the DCP-L3550CDW, capable though it is.

Verdict

This A4 colour laser offers decent printing and even better scans, with a range of helpful features, but it’s undermined by the fact that Brother’s far superior top-of-the-line MFP is only fractionally more expensive - making this model somewhat redundant.

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.

Despite living in the age of the paperless office, inkjet and laser printers are still the centre of a big office debate that has no easy answer.

Which one you use in the office is dependent on a number of factors, such as the initial cost, price per page, speed, longevity, and so on. There's a lot to get wrong, so it needs to be thoroughly considered before making the final call.

Back in the day, inkjet was often recommended for home use, while laser printers were more popular in enterprises and offices, but this isn't necessarily the case anymore. Laser printers used to be known for being faster and more durable, but inkjet technology has slowly narrowed that gap. However, laser printers are still known for being much quieter and with a smoother finish, with no warm-up time required before printing.

Are laser printers better?

If your decision is based on speed, there isn't much of a difference between inkjet printers and laser printers. The former used to max out at around 30ppm in black and white, and 10ppm for colour, while most laser printers could hit 40ppm in both colour or black and white.

Even now, with modern laser printers capable of 60ppm or even 70ppm, there isn't a significant gulf. A newer generation of office-ready inkjet printers, with A4-spanning print heads that can reach speeds of up to 75ppm. The only real advantage for lasers, in this area, is speed of the first printed page, which is around 7.5 seconds. Although inkjets are not much slower, printing the first page in around 9.5 seconds.

Where laser printers do have an edge is the finished product - the print quality. Lasers tend to produce clean, crisp black text and colour graphics, making them good for external uses such as marketing. Inkjets have improved dramatically when it comes to text, to the point where they're almost a match for laser printers. They certainly produce more natural results, particularly when it comes to photos, hence why the majority of inkjets are professional photo printers. An office inkjet probably won't offer the same photo quality, but it should be more than enough for everything else.

The workload is also an area that laser printers have an advantage over inkjets. Lasers are capable of anywhere between 2,000 and 20,000 pages in a monthly duty cycle. Inkjet users can only dream of such efficiency, typically churning out between 1,500 and 5,000 pages within the same time. That will be adequate for most small businesses, but if you are heavy printers and have a much larger organisation, then it's likely that a laser printer is better suited.

When it comes to the best printers for businesses, you can find both inkjets and lasers making the cut, but the lower asking price for inkjets makes them an attractive option for most deployments.

Laser printers vs inkjet cost per page

Again, conventional wisdom states that lasers are expensive to buy but cheap to run, while inkjets are cheap upfront but cost you more long-term. What's more, where a laser toner cartridge will see you through thousands of prints, an inkjet will need its cartridges replaced far more frequently.

Of course, conventional wisdom is no longer reliable. Look at real laser vs inkjet costs, and you may be surprised. On the one hand, lasers are getting cheaper, and the budget models are coming with smaller starter cartridges that run out fairly quickly, though the standard or super-sized cartridges will still have impressive lifespans. In toner alone, expect the cost per page to come in at around 2p for a black-and-white page and 5p to 10p for a colour page. On the other hand, business inkjets are getting their own costs per page right down, to the extent that some models can now produce prints for around 1p per page for black-and-white to 5p per page for colour. Meanwhile, the extra-large cartridges are able to print over 9000 pages (black) or 6,500 pages (colour).

There are other costs to consider, though. Laser printers deliver excellent results even on plain paper, so there's no need to splash out on speciality media. On the inkjet's side, inkjet-ready office paper is no longer much more expensive, and inkjets usually consume less power in operation than their laser brethren. As a result, running costs can be lower for some inkjets than for comparable lasers. Combine that with a lower purchase cost, and there's definite scope to save your business money.

Is a laser printer better than an inkjet?

Historically, lasers have been the mainstay of workgroup printing, and you'll still find that enterprise-grade laser printers offer more management tools plus support for more high-end technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet and IPSec, not to mention upgrade options like expandable memory or a secure, plug-in hard disk.

All the same, an increasing number of office inkjet printers have the same embedded management features as their laser cousins, plus features like secure pull-printing, where jobs are held in a queue until released at the printer with a PIN code, or wireless, touch-to-print and cloud-printing features that enable the printer to work with a wider range of devices or take print jobs from remote locations. While a laser might offer more management and security features, a business inkjet can still give you all the tools you need.

Today, there is no catch-all answer to the question of inkjet vs laser for the office. It's more a question of scale, workloads and the kind of tasks you need your printer to handle.

Lasers definitely win through when it comes to heavy workloads, networking and management features, professional quality prints and the ability to scale up to serve large teams, but office-focused inkjets aren't far behind in many of these areas and can beat lasers on purchase cost, running costs and everyday performance. Be realistic about your needs, and you should be able to make the right choice.

Not everyone needs bells and whistles. HP's LaserJet Pro M15w is a very compact, single-function printer focused on delivering mono text and graphics. There's no scanner or fax modem, and you won't need to clear an entire desktop to find somewhere to put it. Rated at only 18ppm and with no automatic duplexing it won't break any productivity records, but with Wi-Fi support it could be an unobtrusive and easy companion in a small home office.

With no control panel, connecting the M15w to a wireless network is a choice of using Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), or letting HP's install program configure it over a USB cable. We chose the latter, but subsequently couldn't print to it - even though HP's Device Toolbox software could communicate with it. Reinstalling cured the issue.

A simple printer, the M15w's driver is similarly low on frills. All the basics are there, but the one option on the Advanced tab is to reverse the print order. We like the simplicity: most users just want to print with no frills. Send a print job and the M15w immediately impresses with very quiet, clunk-free printing, again making it easy to live with. We measured a peak power use of 846 Watts - low for a laser - while standby power was just 2W.

Given this printer's modest specifications, we were happy with our results. A first page arrived in nine seconds, after which black text appeared at 17.6ppm and complex graphics at a relaxed 8.9ppm. Two 10 x 8in photos took 48 seconds, while the printer needed a minute to print six 6 x 4in photos onto three A4 pages. Text was as excellent as we'd expect. Mono graphics were generally good - typically for a cheap laser there was some very subtle banding - while photos appeared over-sharpened, but most users would neither notice nor care.

A great, basic printer, then, but there's a big 'but'. The M15w arrives with a startup cartridge fit for only 500 pages. More significantly, replacements are only rated at 1,000 pages, and at the time of our test they cost 38 each. The resulting 3.8p per page means that this excellent printer is only really suited to very occasional use, and as such it's hard to wholeheartedly recommend.

Verdict

An excellent no-frills printer, this mono laser is small, cheap and quiet. The biggest downside is that low-capacity cartridges mean that running costs are high.

Brother's MFC-L2710DW looks a bit like it's carved out of coal, but otherwise it ought to fit the bill for a home or small office. In its base there's a mono laser rated at a giddy 30ppm, and on top there's a scanner with a 50-page ADF. You can connect it via USB, wired or wireless networking, and make prints, scans, copies or faxes. It's not a bad specification for the money, but while the printer supports duplexing, the ADF doesn't - multi-page double-sided copies could be a fiddle.

Setting up the MFC-L2710DW involves sliding the paper stops in the clattery and brittle-feeling paper tray, dropping in some paper, then inserting the supplied drum and toner. You get only 700 pages in the box, after which replacements can be had with either a 1,200 or 3,000-page life. Even calculated for the latter, costs are a considerable 2p per page, or 2.5p once you factor in the new drum you'll need around every 12,000 pages.

Start using the MFC-L2710DW and there's plenty to like. Despite its speed it's relatively quiet, seeming almost silent next to the industrial Oki MC363dn. The ADF is quick enough that, should you forget to extend its paper stop, you'll be picking originals up off the floor after cloning them. We timed a 10-page mono copy at just 33 seconds, with a single page needing nine seconds. Printing was rapid, too, nudging 24ppm on black text and only fractionally slower with complex graphics.

Unfortunately we encountered the same issues with Brother's TWAIN scan interface as we have with other Brother devices. While previews worked perfectly, a scan wouldn't return an image to the host application. Again, we completed our testing using the iPrint&Scan app, but here the results were far better: dark shades were clearly distinguished, right down to the second-darkest shade in our test target. Black text prints were excellent, but graphics and photos were dingy, and photocopies far too dark.

The MFC-L2710DW is a simple, compact mono laser MFP with lots to recommend it, but its drawbacks include dark graphical prints and photocopies. More significantly, steep-ish page costs mean it will prove expensive if it's put to anything other than light use.

Verdict

The Brother MFC-L2710DW is a simple, compact mono laser MFP with lots to recommend it, but its drawbacks include dark graphical prints and photocopies. More significantly, steep-ish page costs mean it will prove expensive if it’s put to anything other than light use.

If you don't need scans or copies, but colour is all-important, Kyocera's Ecosys P5021cdw might just fit the bill.

It's a reasonably compact colour laser printer, capable of a claimed 21ppm speed in black or colour. Its standard 250-sheet paper tray is supplemented by a 50-sheet multipurpose feed you could add another 250-sheet tray, but doing so will cost almost as much as the printer itself. Duplex printing comes as standard, along with wireless networking and Gigabit Ethernet.

As with other Kyocera Ecosys printers, the P5021cdw features a ceramic, long-life drum here it's guaranteed for the first of three years or 100,000 pages, and in practice it's likely to last for the printer's lifetime. In theory, that cuts down on waste and costs, but while the first is undoubtedly true, here the second benefit doesn't materialise.

Kyocera ships the printer with standard, 1,200-page toners. After they're exhausted, you can buy replacements rated at 2,600 pages (black) and 2,200 pages (cyan, magenta and yellow). But even using these, and with no drum to replace, running costs are a punishing 12.7p per page.

The P5021cdw prints with a minimum of fuss. There's some fan noise, but generally it's well muted and free of any harsh edges. In our tests, which include the time taken to spool the print job, it came quite close to Kyocera's stated speeds, managing text at 19.5ppm and colour graphics at 17.1ppm. At 8.8ppm, duplex print speed was quite reasonable. At the highest quality setting, the printer needed 38 seconds to produce two 10 x 8in photos, and 37 seconds to print six 6 x 4in photos onto three pages.

Print quality was generally very high, with predictably good black text and crisp colour graphics. Shade gradients were seamless, while colour fills emerged looking solid and even. We were less impressed by its results in our photo tests, which printed with a pronounced blue-green tint.

Changing the colour mode to Vivid made things less aquatic, while selecting "Text and photos" greatly improved all but one subject, but that's a little fiddly. Photos printed from an inserted USB key didn't suffer the same issues.

A reasonably priced, reasonably good colour laser printer, the P5021cdw is let down mainly by its high running costs even a black page will cost 2p. As such, it's hard to recommend over some of our 5-star printers.

Verdict

A reasonably priced, reasonably good colour laser printer, the P5021cdw is let down mainly by its high running costs – even a black page will cost 2p. As such, it's hard to recommend over some of our 5-star printers.

Oki's MC363dn looks like it's fallen through a wormhole from the 1990s: big, heavy and unapologetically strewn with buttons. While it misses out on snazzy touchscreen controls, however, its specifications are impressive for this price. There's a fax modem, duplex prints, scans and copies, a front panel USB port for walk-up prints and scans, and a gigabit Ethernet connection at the back. The only significant omission is wireless networking - if you need it, you'll need to spend another 70 or so on the MC363dnw.

This MFP's looks aren't the only reason you wouldn't want to share a small office with it - it's particularly noisy, clattering away whether printing or scanning, and spinning up its shouty cooling fans momentarily even when simply scanning from the plate. It's not especially intuitive to use compared to touchscreen rivals, and according to our measurements its power saving mode didn't actually save any power.

Whinging aside, this is a very capable and quick MFP for the money. While it took around 37 seconds to warm up and deliver a first page, or 17 seconds from standby, it went on to deliver text at 20.8ppm and colour graphics at 16.6ppm. Scans were extremely fast, ranging from six seconds for a preview up to just 21 seconds for a 1,200dpi photo, and photocopies shot out at 34 seconds for 10 black pages, or 38 seconds in colour. With a single-pass duplex scanner, double-sided copying is fast and fuss-free.

While black text quality was superb, our other results were less impressive. At the default setting, graphics, photos and photocopies had a dark, under-saturated look. Switching to the Office Colour profile improved the former two, but they still weren't entirely to our tastes. On the plus side, Oki's toner produced a lovely gloss finish across text and mid to dark graphics. Scans were good enough for most office uses, but the driver's Auto Adjust feature seemed inconsistent, sometimes returning images with a warm brown colour bias.

The MC363dn doesn't produce the best results, but it's good value, and no more expensive to run than most other colour lasers in this bracket. It's far better than it looks, but it wouldn't be our first choice.

Verdict

The Oki MC363dn doesn’t produce the best results, but it’s good value, and no more expensive to run than most other colour lasers in this bracket. It’s far better than it looks, but it wouldn’t be our first choice.

The lowly printer, oft maligned by operators and users alike, is the target of a wide array of attacks from hackers. The principle objective of a printer attack is, ostensibly, the information flowing through the device, but multi-function printers and larger network printers offer a variety of other tantalising morsels for the creative hacker.

It's never been more important to pay attention to printer security - failing to do so could put your company at risk of a serious data breach. Printers are such an appealing target because whilst businesses may spend a fortune on server security, printers are barely given a second thought.

But before looking at how to close this vital security gap, it's essential to understand the types of attack levelled at printers.

What makes a printer vulnerable

There are three components of these systems that can be attacked: the operating system driver, the management tools and the printer's software.

The operating system driver is a bit of code that users are typically unaware of because it exists to provide an interface between the computer's print spooler (the bits that handle print jobs) and the physical printer.

This driver is loaded when the computer boots and, as with any other software, may contain exploits (particularly in older models). The result of such an attack is most likely the escalation of local user privileges or the execution of arbitrary code on the PC itself, as opposed to on the printer.

Anyone who has added a printer to their PC has no doubt installed a wide variety of third party or vendor-provided applications with which to manage it. This software is typically installed as part of the printer setup, configured to run at system boot time, and seldom updated.

Like their more complex cousin, the print driver, an attack against these tools would most likely result in either a local privilege escalation or an execution of arbitrary code on the local machine, as opposed to any control of the printer itself. Read here for HP's analysis of threats to your printer.

Printer security: The new IT imperative' explores this topic in more detail. Download now to learn more.

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How hackers will attack your printer

There are four primary ways to attack the printer: the web-based administrative interface (WebUI), SMTP, FTP and SNMP. Note that none of these routes of attack need the hacker to be physically present.

The WebUI of many printers is often a first stop for anyone attacking a printer. Any compromise of the WebUI, whether through brute-forcing credentials, or via some exploit, gives an attacker the ability to control any configurable feature of the printer.

Often, an attacker will use this access to enable features -- such as queue retention policies and FTP access -- so they can return later, recover sensitive print jobs and parse them for sensitive information. Attacking the WebUI is akin to kicking in the front door of a house you intend to burglarise: effective, but not so subtle.

Sending spam through a printer may not sound like a plausible scenario, but thanks to the ability of many network printers to send and receive emails, this is very much a possibility. This stems from the fact that the printer itself can't send email, but rather requires access to the company mail server.

Unfortunately, a great many administrators will simply allow printers to send emails through the corporate mail server without authentication, making the printer an excellent source for emails. Worse, emails originating from these hosts are great for internal phishing attacks because they may genuinely appear to be a scan.

SMTP, FTP and SNMP

Many enterprise-class printers also support management and monitoring via the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). While SNMP is most commonly used to track ink or toner levels and the number of pages printed, it can also be used to alter the configuration of printers -- provided an attacker can gain access to the printer's read-write community string and/or authentication credentials.

There are three different versions of SNMP, each of which has its own method for authentication: SNMPv1, SNMPv2c and SNMPv3. SNMPv1 and v2c require a simple "community" string, such as a pre-shared passphrase used to identify authenticated devices.

SNMPv3, on the other hand, requires a community string as well as an encrypted username and password pair for authentication. Unfortunately for enterprises, the overwhelming majority of devices are configured to use SNMPv2c, which excludes the proposed security enhancements of the base SNMPv2.

The end result is that once an attacker is on the network, it's a trivial matter to sniff out the SNMP community string and to then use that string to perform configuration modifications to enterprise-ready network printers or multi-function devices.

Protect against attack

In the end, the attack surface of a network printer is quite a bit larger than you might have previously understood. So how do you secure these fixtures of the modern office?

The most effective strategy begins with understanding the workflows that use the printers. This allows you to isolate the devices on the network to a separate VLAN while restricting what traffic is allowed to traverse it. Finally, keep print drivers and management software up to date.

Understanding the workflows around any given printer insures that the measures you take to secure it don't negatively impact the business. Isolating printers on their own VLAN ensures that you're able to control the flow of network traffic to and from that segment of the network easily.

Keeping print drivers and management software up to date ensures that local machines aren't victims to malicious code that targets the software supporting our printers. Some printers have options to disable remote firmware updates or firmware updates sent as print jobs. This can make rolling out firmware updates a bigger job, but it's still a good idea if your printer doesn't have additional security measures to prevent the installation of malicious firmware.

Print security should be a priority for every business, but all too often it's ignored. Learn how to avoid printer security breaches in this whitepaper.

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The HP factor

It's also worth noting that HP's latest round of laser printers, the M500 series, introduced three key hardware and software features to protect against attack. Indeed, two of the three features can be incorporated into older HP printers through firmware updates. See the link for a full list of printers covered.

The one security feature that won't be available to older machines is HP Sure Start, which depends on a "golden" BIOS that's separate to the printer's active BIOS. If, at the time of booting, the printer detects its BIOS has been compromised it will roll back automatically to the original.

The second new line of defence is whitelisting, which should ensure that only "good" firmware can be loaded and executed on the printer. If it detects non-HP firmware it shuts down and notifies the network manager.

Run-time intrusion detection rounds off the features, with constant monitoring of in-device memory that checks for attacks. Crucially for IT managers in charge of dozens of printers in different places, the printer reboots automatically.

So the lesson is to be aware of the security holes offered by the printer on your network and take whatever action is required, whether that's upgrading to a new machine, isolating printers onto their own VLAN, making sure your firmware and software is up to date, or a combination of all three.

Unless you want your next client correspondence, contract or sales report to be nicked by an attacker, you'd be well served to mind the printers.

To discover more about how HP printers can protect you from attack, head to HP's BusinessNow site.

There is certainly a solid claim for the office printer to be seen as one of the most underappreciated fixtures found in almost every modern office. No matter how far along your business is on its digital transformation journey, there’s no denying the humble office printer is still as integral to modern work life as it was in the days before cloud-hosted documents. Although, with a much greater selection to choose from in a rich market, understanding how to buy the right printer for your business is a tougher task than it might sound.

The promise of the paperless office has been dangled before us for more than 40 years – yet we’re hardly any closer to it now than we were in the 1970s. True, a gradual move towards digitisation means we don’t need to handle so many physical printouts in our everyday working lives, but businesses still need to produce hard copies of certain documents. Invoices and reports, documents for signing or proofing, sales pitches, and many others all require physical copies which means the in-house printer still has a big and central role to play.

The good news is that there’s a huge range of printers on the market that can handle your needs. No matter what your requirements when it comes to price, speed, and printing technology, there’s a model to suit every task. However, with great choice comes great confusion, for some, and a comprehensive understanding of what the different types of printers are available - from inkjets to all-in-ones - can inform how to confidently buy a colour printer.

Choose the right tech

Lasers remain a popular choice for business printing: they’re fast, they’re reliable and they can deliver great results on cheap recycled paper. Even low-cost lasers can produce pin-sharp text, with colour quality that’s good enough for professional reports.

LED printers work on a similar principle, but instead of beaming a laser across the page, they use a stationary array of LED emitters to generate the static charge that sticks the toner to the paper. Since they have fewer moving parts, LED printers are cheaper to manufacture, yet most can match lasers for speed and produce equally good results. They may, however, produce a slight cross-hatch pattern on large areas of colour.

Finally, there are inkjet printers. The old advice was to avoid inkjets, as they have historically suffered from poor reliability and high running costs. Today’s business models are serious contenders, however, with high-capacity ink tanks and big duty cycles. Running costs are generally lower than for laser or LED printers too, although for the best prints you will need higher quality paper, which may increase overall costs.

Cut the costs

When making a big purchase, in an ideal world, the ‘buy well, buy once’ approach would be preferential but when it comes to printers, it is simply not that easy. The running costs and, perhaps more impactfully, the cost of ink will also need to be factored in. Cheaper models still use the same expensive consumables as higher-priced machines and are sometimes less efficient, meaning that over time, making a larger initial investment in something more premium may save running costs down the line.

To illustrate this, in our tests of printers reviewed in recent years, one cheaper model - Brother HL-L3270CDW - ultimately cost thousands more to run per year, when printing 100 pages per day, compared to the ever-so-slightly pricier Kyocera Ecosys P6235cdn.

Of course, you could decide to go down the mono-only printer route, saving money in the colour ink department, but the ever-falling costs of buying a colour printer make the small saving in the initial investment seem futile. You never know when you’ll need that added functionality. If you have serious concerns about the cost of ink, there is plenty of debate around buying genuine cartridges versus aftermarket products so you can decide for yourself what’s right for your business.

Sustainability matters on multiple front

Many businesses have also publicly adopted green values - ways of minimising their harm to the planet and even giving back to it in some cases. Understanding which colour printer to buy can also bring often unseen benefits to the environment. Having a full understanding of the business’ printing needs and how they can be delivered using the most eco-friendly printer can please the planet, your staff, your stakeholders, and your annual budget, all while upholding the company’s commitment to sustainability.

And now we live in a time where the cost of living crisis is impacting everyone, from individuals to the enterprise, going green has never made more sense. The type of printer in which your business invests can lead to huge savings now energy prices have soared. In our tests, for example, we dubbed the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C5290DW - an inkjet printer - a ‘green giant’ thanks to its ultra-low energy use compared to LED rivals. At no point during our time with it did the Epson exceed 27W while printing. Some of the LED models we’ve had in our labs, by comparison, peaked as high as 1.17kW during their warm-up phases. According to these figures, while running a printer for 60 minutes a day, a greener machine can lead to savings to the tune of £8,000 a year just in energy costs.

Additional savings can be made by switching the printer to duplex mode - using double-sided printing - which can lead to a reduction in the amount of paper used and reduce running costs too. Limiting your workforce’s colour printing can also help reduce wastage, and opting for cheaper, recycled paper can further decrease the company’s footprint and the printer’s impact on your bottom line.

Safety PIN

All businesses should understand the value of cyber security and proper identity management, but perhaps one of the lesser known yet still absolutely necessary considerations when choosing a printer, is the need for a GDPR-compliant machine.

A printer can be a security risk: it’s all too easy for users to print out confidential documents and leave them sitting in the output bin for all to see. If that’s a concern, look for a “walk up and print” feature that holds documents at the printer, releasing them only when you arrive at the local control panel and enter a PIN.

Certain printers also have the ability to reserve a portion of their internal memory as a RAM disk, or use an SD card or internal hard disk to store frequently used forms and documents. Be warned that any personally identifiable information stored on the printer comes under the remit of the GDPR – so make sure the storage device can be encrypted, and when the time comes to recycle the printer, remove the drive and have it professionally destroyed.

Remember too that if your printer is accessible over the internet, it’s a potential target for hackers and needs to be locked down. Simple security measures include changing the default password for the management interface, keeping the firmware up to date and disabling any unneeded features such as SNMP management, FTP access, or internal email services.

The paperless office may be a pipe dream, but SMEs can still reduce their impact on the environment and slash operating costs by investing in a multi-function printer (MFP). Printing is traditionally a core function of all business operations but the ability to digitize documents using the same device can reap rewards in terms of reduced paper usage, less equipment and improved efficiency.

Combining print, copy, scan and fax functions into a single device brings many other benefits. Productivity can be enhanced by integrating scanning into your workflows so instead of printing a document, you could send it by email, as a network file or even to the cloud.

By centralizing document printing and processing, an MFP makes it easier to manage the use of these facilities. Left unchecked, printing and copying costs are a big drain on company profits so it pays to implement strict controls. Many businesses are already seeing the benefits of MFPs and this increased demand is driving costs down, making them an affordable option for SMEs.

Defined benefits

Before purchasing, determine clearly what you want the MFP to achieve and how many users it will be supporting. An MFP with slow print, copy and scan speeds has the potential to become a bottleneck as staff queue up to use it.

Many MFPs claim print speeds ranging from 20ppm (pages per minute) to 31ppm but we found these could only be achieved at all resolutions when printing simple text-based documents. You'll have to accept compromises when producing quality colour marketing material as almost all are slower when printing at their highest resolutions.

Double-sided printing, or duplexing, should be on your check list as this will halve paper usage. However, staff must be encouraged to use it as we've yet to see an MFP (or a printer for that matter) that can enforce this mode.

Most MFPs come with good-quality colour flatbed scanners but if you anticipate a high scan volume, you'll need one with an automatic document feeder (ADF) which can handle large quantities of documents. For increased performance, check that the ADF supports duplex operations allowing it to scan both sides of a page in one pass.

When duty calls

How much do you expect your MFP to be used for printing and copying? We suggest estimating your expected monthly print volume and choosing an MFP with a recommended (not maximum) duty cycle that's at least two times higher leaving you with plenty of headroom to cater for increased demand.

When selecting an MFP, don't be seduced by a low purchase price. Vendors will claw back these savings by making their consumables more expensive and in a high-demand print environment, this will increase running costs massively.

Choosing the right printing technology is just as important but don't discount inkjets, as today's business models have shaken off the perception that they're expensive to run. We've reviewed laser, LED and inkjet models and running costs are all in the same ballpark.

Inkjets are a natural choice for photo printing but lasers and LEDs are less choosy about paper quality. We found they produce far better results than inkjets on cheap 75gms recycled paper, helping to cut costs further. Also, encourage staff to use the driver's draft mode to print internal documents where quality isn't so important as this will also save on consumables.

Well connected

A networked MFP is a must-have in a shared office environment and with wireless now all-pervasive, it makes sense to specify this as well. Not all MFPs include wireless as standard so check they can be upgraded and for how much, as costs for add-on modules vary considerably.

Workforces with Apple mobile devices will appreciate AirPrint support as this allows them to print documents directly over the network. NFC (near-field communications) is another boon for mobile users as they can walk up, tap their device on the MFP's operator panel and pair it for quick printing.

Vendors are focusing even more on mobile device support with many offering free apps for iOS and Android devices. These let users remotely print to the MFP with some also allowing them to access the scanner over the network and pull images directly to their mobile.

Cloud support is very variable across different vendors, so it pays to check what features are available. How useful would it be to email a document to the MFP and have it print immediately or scan a document using the MFP's touchscreen and send it straight to shared cloud storage?

Security first

Internet-connected MFPs can be easily hacked so change all default passwords immediately. If you're handling confidential information, look for driver features that provide extra security such as assigning a PIN to print jobs so they can only be released by walking up and entering it at the touchscreen.

Some MFPs can enforce user authentication from their web interface, allowing you to strictly control access to print, scan, copy and fax functions. Unfettered access to cloud storage is another back door so ensure accounts set up at the MFP as scan destinations can be secured with a password or PIN.

Many businesses are unaware of just how much uncontrolled personal use is costing them so it pays to lock this down. Look for management features that place page limits on colour usage or block it completely, restrict access to the copier and provide job accounting facilities so you can see who is using them.

An MFP is more than just a printer and copier, as it combines all the features SMEs need to streamline their document management workflows. The best MFPs are affordable options for SMEs and can help you reduce costs, increase productivity and be more environmentally friendly.

Brother's latest L8000 colour lasers deliver heaps of new features that will appeal to both small offices and busy workgroups. Sitting at the top of the tree, the HL-L8360CDW offers great performance, improved colour quality and all the connection options you could possibly want. It can also grow with your needs, as its standard 250-sheet input tray can be supplemented with a 500-sheet tray or a base unit that takes four 520-sheet cassettes.

The printer uses a similar chassis to the HL-L8350CDW, but its 800MHz CPU is twice as fast and memory has been quadrupled to 512MB. This extra muscle showed through in our print tests: where the older HL-L8350CDW only managed a pedestrian 9ppm in our 24-page colour DTP document, the HL-L8360CDW delivered a much faster 29ppm at 600dpi and 27ppm using the driver's interpolated 2400 x 600dpi 'Fine' setting.

Mono prints, meanwhile, lived up to Brother's promises perfectly, with a 31-page Word document printed at 31.5ppm in both resolutions. Duplexing the same document dropped speeds to 15.5ppm; the time to first page for all tests was no more than 12 seconds. Text quality varied depending on the paper: with cheap 75gsm paper we saw a slight dusting around small fonts, but switching to higher-quality 100gsm paper cleared this up completely.

Photos and business graphics, however, looked good regardless of paper weight. Photographs came out with bags of detail and no noticeable banding, even in large single-colour blocks. Some photos looked a little murky but we could improve them using the driver's brightness and contrast sliders. Switching to Fine resolution also helped, particularly with mono photos, exposing greater detail in darker areas.

There are quite a few consumables to keep track of. As well as four toner cartridges, the image drum tray, transfer belt and toner waste box are all replaceable. Toner costs aren't too bad, though: once you've used up the standard starter cartridges, you can switch to super-high-yield versions, which work out to 1.3p per mono page and 9.4p for colour.

The printer is very simple to configure, although you'll have to choose between wired and wireless operation, as you can't have both interfaces active simultaneously. NFC for tap-to-print is a new feature, AirPrint worked fine on our iPad and we had no problems registering the printer with our Google Cloud Print account from the web interface. We were also easily able to print from our iPad and Lumia 640 Windows mobile phone using Brother's iPrint&Scan app. The iOS app is better featured as along with a handy printer status view, it offers options to print from iCloud, Google Drive, Evernote, OneDrive and Dropbox.

Print controls and security are solid too. Brother's Secure Function Lock 3 feature lets you configure up to 200 user accounts and assign them print profiles, which define permissions for mono and colour printing, as well as page limits and access to Web Connect features for internet printing. The printer supports LDAP and Active Directory authentication plus NFC ID cards, and any attempts to access a denied function via the touchscreen are simply met with a "Function Locked" message. One slight niggle here is that you don't get a local warning message on your desktop when you try to carry out a restricted print function, which could lead to support calls when users don't fully understand why their jobs aren't going through. Another useful feature is confidential document protection, which holds jobs at the printer and only releases them once the user walks up and enters a PIN at the printer.

Brother's HL-L8360CDW is up against some tough competition: the spectacular Xerox VersaLink C400 costs the same but is faster, and delivers superior colour print quality. However, Brother's integrated wired and wireless network support, tough print security measures and wide-ranging great connection options make it a strong choice.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 277

Verdict

Brother's HL-L8360CDW A4 laser printer offers good print speeds and quality. What clinches it though is excellent networking support and great print security.

600dpi A4 colour laser

31ppm colour/mono

800MHz CPU

512MB RAM

6.8cm colour touchscreen

Gigabit Ethernet

802.11n wireless

NFC

2 x USB 2

duplex

250-sheet drawer

50-sheet MPT

rec. monthly duty cycle – 4,000 pages

441 x 486 x 313mm (WDH)

21.9kgs

1yr on-site warranty.

Options: 2yr warranty extension, £80

4 x 520-sheet input tray, £580 (all ex VAT)

RUNNING COSTS

Super high yield: K toner (9K), £98

C, M, Y toner (6.5K), £175 each

drum unit, (50K), £89

belt unit (130K), £37

waste box (50K), £14

Overall cost per A4 page: mono, 1.3p; colour 9.4p

Xerox' ConnectKey is designed to make its VersaLink printers smarter and more secure and the new C400 brings this technology firmly within the budgets of SMBs. This affordable A4 colour laser comes ConnectKey-ready, allowing you to customize its capabilities with a wide range of freely available apps.

You'll see this in action on first power up as the 5in colour touchscreen reveals four pre-installed ConnectKey apps. These provide easy access to printer settings, job status and printing from USB devices but the one of most interest is App Gallery.

Tap on this and you can create a cloud account, browse available apps and install them with a couple of finger jabs. We also accessed our account from a browser and installed apps directly to the printer over the LAN.

Many are aimed at Xerox' MFPs but there are still loads for the C400 to play with and its big 2GB of memory means there's plenty of room for them. We installed apps for Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive in two minutes, accessed them easily accessed from the touchscreen, viewed cloud stored files and chose ones to print.

The @PrintByXerox app prints attachments emailed to the printer and although it isn't as easy to set up as HP's Connected service, it is more secure. We sent an initial email to the 'print@printbyxerox.com' address after which Xerox notified us it had created a new account.

We then used Gmail to send messages to the Xerox email address. Next, we logged in to the app at the printer's panel using our new account, reviewed received emails and chose those we wanted to print.

Xerox' Mobile Cloud Print portal is another handy tool, although this isn't free and requires a discovery agent service loaded on a PC on the same network as the printer. The portal enforces strict remote access controls and allows users to email documents directly to the printer using a customized address.

We reviewed the duplex Gigabit-enabled model but 11n wireless can be added in a jiffy with a little dongle that slots in at the rear. At only 46, it's great value and the C400 also allows wired and wireless networks to be active simultaneously.

Print security is good and includes local and LDAP user authentication, print and hold and PIN secured prints. For 155, the Productivity Kit encrypted hard disk offers an immediate overwrite feature for securely erasing sensitive documents once they've been printed.

The C400 delivers on its speed promises, with a 35-page Word document printed in 1 minute and a time to first page of around 11 seconds. Our 24-page colour DTP document was also dished out at 35ppm on both standard and enhanced driver settings.

It's a nifty duplexer too, with the 35-page test document delivered double-sided at 25ppm. The C400 is a little noisy though; the SPLnFFT iOS app on our iPad recording a 61dB average at one metre during printing.

Print quality is outstanding with razor sharp text and no hint of dusting, even on cheap 75gms paper. Mono photos exhibited remarkably high levels of details in darker areas, although there's little appreciable difference between standard and enhanced modes.

Colour photos were stunning - the C400 delivered high levels of detail, excellent colour balance and eye-wateringly vivid blues. Transitions across complex colour fades were super smooth with barely a hint of banding in large areas of solid colour. Xerox offers standard, high and extra-high yield cartridges, with the latter offering low print costs of only 1.1p for a mono page and 7.4p for a colour one.

The VersaLink C400 is a great choice for SMBs that want top-notch colour quality, good print speeds and plenty of mobile and cloud printing options. The clincher is Xerox' lifetime on-site warranty offer - buy a full toner pack in the last 60 days of the yearly warranty and Xerox will keep extending it every year for the life of the printer.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 276

Verdict

The VersaLink C400 is a great choice for SMBs that want top-notch colour quality, good print speeds and plenty of mobile and cloud printing options.

The Chinese government has approved the sale of Samsung's printer business to HP Inc for $1.1 billion, although fears over a market monopoly meant a number of restrictions were placed on the final deal.

HP Inc first announced its takeover bid last September as it pushed into the $55 billion copier industry, placing greater focus on multi-function printers and IoT-enabled products. At the time it said it had hoped to close a deal within the following year.

Although the deal was approved late Thursday night, the Ministry of Commerce said that the sale of HP laser printers in China should be "fair" and based on "reasonable terms", according to Reuters. A clause in the agreement forces HP to report their prices and sales data to the Ministry every six months.

Further restrictions in the deal are clearly an effort by the Chinese government to prevent the US company from encroaching any further on the printer market. One of the clauses bars the company from acquiring any further stakes in printing companies in China, even as minority partners.

Another says that products should not be altered to restrict their use with third-parties, and any existing products that do should explicitly state this in their adverts.

HP's acquisition will see over 6,500 printing patents added to its intellectual property, as well as over 1,300 research scientists. The company expects to close the deal inside the fourth quarter, so sometime before 31 December, according to a spokesperson speaking to Reuters.

IT Pro has contacted Samsung for comment.

Speaking at the time of the announcement last year, HP CEO Dion Weisler said: "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."

Samsung branded printers will still be available in some regions, but these will be supplied by HP instead. Once the deal closes, it will represent HP's largest ever print acquisition.

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.

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

Brother's MFC-L5750DW is a one-stop monochrome MFP offering print, copy and scan operations. It offers a big, 123mm colour LCD touchscreen, and it has a connection for everyone, with support for USB, wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint - not to mention more cloud services than you can shake a stick at.

It doesn't slack in the performance stakes either. Brother's 1,200dpi mono laser engine is rated at 40ppm, and that's exactly what we saw in the real world: our 40-page test Word document was delivered in 59 seconds at both 600dpi and 1,200dpi resolutions. The printer employs the same 800MHz Cortex-A9 processor as Brother's workgroup printers, so graphics and photos don't slow it down either. Our challenging 24-page DTP document was whisked out in 35 seconds at both resolutions for a tidy 41ppm.

Impatient users will also appreciate how quickly the L5750DW springs to life. We waited just eight seconds for printing to start from warm, and even when the printer had to wake from its 2W low-power sleep mode, the delay was a brief 14 seconds. The only thing that slows the printer down is using the built-in duplex unit, which we found cut print speed in half, to 20ppm.

Print quality is great, with 12pt text coming out razor sharp on 75gsm recycled paper. Graphs and bar charts looked solid and clean too, making this a top choice for general report production. Photos weren't such a strength, exhibiting plenty of detail, but some unpleasant banding in backgrounds. Switching from 600dpi to 1,200dpi resolution yielded no appreciable improvement, although switching to 100gsm paper did clean things up slightly.

The 50,000-page drum is designed to last the printer's life, so the only consumable is the toner cartridge. After you've used up the 2,000-page starter cartridge, we recommend replacing it with the 8,000-page high yield version which works out at just 1.2p per page.

When it comes to scanning, the colour flatbed delivers a top resolution of 1200dpi, which drops to 600dpi when you use the 50-page duplex ADF on top. Copy speeds are good; a 10-page single-side document was reproduced in 35 seconds, while a 10-page duplex-to-duplex copy took 72 seconds.

Deploying the MFC-L5750DW on a network is swift: Brother's Windows-based setup software discovered the printer on our network and installed the generous software bundle on our desktops. This includes a System Tray status monitor, TWAIN driver, ControlCenter4 scan and print utility plus Nuance's PaperPort SE 14 software for OCR and document management.

These apps can all be accessed directly from the Brother Utilities desktop tool, which also provides quick access to the Web Connect portal. We used it to set up cloud printing and scanning services for OneNote, OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook and Flickr: in each case, we simply had to provide our account details and enter an 11-digit code at the printer's friendly touchscreen. Access to these services can be PIN-protected, as can Brother's Easy Scan to Email feature. This is a real time-saver, allowing us to register email addresses as destinations without having to configure SMTP settings.

The printer also offers the ability to scan documents as Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, and email or save them to the cloud. Brother's iPrint&Scan iOS app allowed us to print and scan from an iPad, and also provides direct access to diagnostics and printer firmware updates.

If you're worried about access security, support for local and Active Directory authentication lets you decide what functions each user is allowed to access. Confidential prints can be kept from prying eyes by assigning a PIN from the driver, which must be entered at the printer before the document is released.

There's a lot to like about Brother's MFC-L5750DW, which combines low running costs with a great range of features and user-friendly software. It's an excellent choice for small businesses who regularly need to produce black-and-white documents and reports, and its mobile and cloud scanning features are a great bonus too.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 269

Verdict

There’s a lot to like about Brother’s MFC-L5750DW, which combines low running costs with a great range of features and user-friendly software. It’s an excellent choice for small businesses who regularly need to produce black-and-white documents and reports, and its mobile and cloud scanning features are a great bonus too.

1,200dpi A4 mono laser

1200 x 600dpi duplex colour scanner

800MHz Cortex-A9 CPU;

256MB RAM

40ppm

2 x USB 2

10/100 Ethernet

802.11n wireless

12.3cm colour touchscreen

250-sheet input tray

50-sheet ADF

Duplex

Rec. monthly cycle – 3,500 pages

435 x 427 x 486mm (WDH)

16.5kg

Brother Control Centre 4 and Nuance PaperPort SE 14 software

1 year onsite warranty

Laser printers aren't only made for offices. Here to make that very point is Ricoh's SP 150SUw. Small and compact, it's also an all-in-one device that's able to print, scan and make copies at the drop of a hat.

Features and design

There's nothing particularly fancy about Ricoh's SP 150SUw. For instance, if you want to print on both sides of the paper you have to do it manually. Controls are few and far between, too. There's only one power switch joined by another button that makes single photocopies. The paper input is pretty basic, too. There's just the 50-sheet paper input tray, and as for a paper output tray, there isn't one. Although if you keep the printer on a desk with plenty of space, the printed pages will stack nicely on top of one another as they print out.

Installing the printer is easy enough, and Ricoh's software is simple to use. However, if it loses Wi-Fi connectivity you might need to try it in a different space as - in our experience - it can drop off the network if situated in an awkward place, such as far away from your WiFi router.

Performance

In terms of print quality, the SP 150SUw does a great job. As predectied, our tests proved printed text was exceptionally black and crisp, but graphics were also cleanly rendered with minimal banding - something that can often haunt cheap laser printers. Photos prints were pretty good, too, which is likely thanks to the printer's claimed 1,200x600dpi maximum resolution. In our page burning tests, the Ricoh machine smashed out the first page in just 10 seconds, completing the full 25 pages of the test at more than 20 pages per minute (ppm). Graphics printing was also snappy, completing this at 15ppm.

One downside we found while testing the SP 150SUw was that scans were comparatively slow, particularly at lower resolutions. For example, a simple A4-sized preview took approximately 29 seconds, while scanning the same page at either 150 or 300 dots per inch (dpi) took 32 seconds. However, capturing a 6x4" photo at the maximum possible resolution of 1,200dpi took just over a minute, which is rather impressive. Scan quality was also less impressive. The TWAIN scan interface lacks an easy auto exposure feature, and without manual tweaking we found that scanned documents were underexposed, meaning white paper took on a blue tint. Having said that, the default settings work much better for photos, which were captured with realistic colour and displayed surprisingly good dynamic range. They weren't so sharply focused, though.

As for photocopying, the SP 150SUw completed a full page copy at a decent enough speed, taking 15 seconds per page, although the results were a little darker than we would have liked.

Running costs

Cheap laser printers often prove to be counter-intuitively expensive to run - perhaps that's the price you pay for saving on the initial cost. Nevertheless, the SP 150SUw is no exception. Even when it's using the 1,500-page 'high-yield' consumable, printing costs work out at around 3p per page, which surprisingly is more than many equivalent inkjets. For example, Epson's WorkForce WF3620DWF works out at about 1.3p. However, the SP 150SUw is most certainly designed for sporadic use, and in those situations, an inkjet's running costs would increase due to the ink wasted by head cleaning.

Verdict

As a home office or SMB printer, its fast printing and compact design make the Ricoh SP 150SUw an excellent choice. However, for those that can't really stretch their budget to over the 100 mark, we'd suggest not to rule out Ricoh completely as the SP 150SUw is the top-of-the-range model, you can pick it up without wireless networking (the SP 150SU) for around 75.

Verdict

Ricoh’s SP 150SUw is a quiet, fast and unobtrusive home Multi-function printer, proving that there's still a case to be made for laser printers in home office and SMB environments. There’s not a whole bunch of fancy features, but it does the job, all while taking up less space thanks to its compact design.

It's hard to spend less on a colour laser printer than the 80 or so that Ricoh's SP C250dn will set you back. You'd imagine, then, that it might be rubbish, but with both wired and wireless network connections and automatic double-sided (duplex) printing, it looks pretty promising. Its 250-sheet paper tray is enough for most home or micro-office users, and there's a single-page bypass feed for when you need to print on specialty media like an envelope or headed paper.

The SP C250dn isn't the smallest colour laser, and at about 29kg, it's good to have a friend help you unpack it. Despite the bulk, it's a pleasant enough design, with a couple of white panels seemingly wrapped around a black plastic core. There are some nice touches, too, as the vents over its two cooling fans can be rotated to blow hot air to the front or back. It's not perfect, though. While the display is backlit, it's a basic two-line LCD. There are no orientation markings in the main paper tray, which is a pain if you want to print on the flipside of a previous single-sided job.

In use, the SP C250dn was some way off Ricoh's claimed 20-pages-per-minute (ppm) speed. It produced a first page of black text in 23 seconds, and went on to deliver 25 pages at a rate of 16.0ppm. In common with most printers, it was far slower to deal with the complex graphics contained in our 24-page colour test - the whole test completed at 5.8ppm. Timed over just the last 10 pages, which represent printing off typical web pages, it reached 10.5ppm - much faster than a similarly priced inkjet would manage. Duplex printing 10 sides of colour graphics onto five pages took the best part of three minutes, but repeating this with the less complex pages took just 70 seconds.

Happily, print quality was very high. Graphics and photos alike had neutral colours, and the toner gave an even, satin finish. Those with sharper eyes might detect some half-toning patterns among subtly different colours, though, and on thin paper stock I could see some bleed through in duplexed pages. Text quality was exemplary, as you might expect from a laser.

Despite vents which could spare you from an unwelcome draft, this is quite a loud printer - particularly so given its modest speed. While there isn't much clattering from the paper transport mechanism, those fans are loud, and occasionally while they were running I heard a sudden, short-lived buzz, as though an unfortunate insect had just been sucked into the blades.

This is usually the part of a laser printer review where we point out the high running costs, and say you'd be better off with an inkjet. However, while this printer's page costs do work out at a steep 12.6p for a page of mixed text and graphics, that's only about 35% higher than some inkjet MFPs at this price. If you'll be printing in moderate volumes we'd still recommend an inkjet, but for occasional use, this is a cheap printer that's well specified and produces great results - it's an excellent investment.

Verdict

While it's not without its niggling flaws, the excellent print quality of Ricoh's SP C250dn makes it easy to recommend. You'll be hard-pressed to find another laser printer that's as cheap as this - let alone one this good.

The fundamental arguments for adopting Managed Print Services are well-established, and they haven't become any less compelling in the last few years. Most businesses can see the efficiencies of moving CapEx to OpEx, streamlining business processes and reducing the burden of support. Partners, meanwhile, can see the advantages in playing in a market where recurring revenue is high and add-on services an easy fit. In MPS, everyone can win.

Yet MPS isn't standing still; it's evolving. It's no longer just about facilitating printing, servicing devices and ensuring that consumables are always in supply. Now the real value is in understanding the needs of the business, transforming business processes and harnessing the capabilities of new multi-function printers to change how information flows around the business. It's about enabling companies to maximise the benefits of turning digital content into printed materials and turning printed materials into accessible, actionable data. It's about minimising downtime, enhancing security and helping business protect their assets.

To make the most of these benefits, businesses need a partner and devices whose capabilities align with their needs. While it's tempting to stick with what you know or focus down on cost-per-page, it makes more long-term sense to think about the whole portfolio of printers and services, and about having the right ecosystem in place to support your business needs. That goes beyond just printing and copying to include security, mobility, digital business processes, device integration, cost-management and more. That's where HP comes in, with a new range of A3 multifunction printers that lead the industry in every way.

Practicalities and the bottom line

In a market where customers pay for what they print on a pay-per-click model, it's become normal to focus on the baseline cost per printed page to the exclusion of all else. Yet this doesn't give the whole picture. How about the speed at which jobs print out and the time savings that could eventually add up to? How much does it cost to use colour to mark out a key point or give a proposal impact? That's why HP has focused on building PageWide and LaserJet printers with best-in-class performance and affordable colour.

Yet the new style of MPS goes so much further. Factor in energy costs, or the costs of management, monitoring and servicing for your MPS providers; the amount of ink or toner that goes to waste when you change consumables, the work involved in updating firmware and settings. That's why HP has designed its printers and consumables to use less energy, take up less space and be as reliable and efficient as possible. HP's new A3 MFPs have been designed to use fewer components and make those components modular, making them easier, faster and cheaper to service.

That all enables providers to price even more competitively, but it also helps minimise downtime. The simplified, streamlined mechanisms use a smaller number of highly modular components, fitted with embedded sensors that allow the printer to report back to the provider, informing them if there's a risk of failure and even predicting if that part can fail. This enables MPS providers to be more proactive, fixing potential faults before you've even noticed them. What's more, the faulty component can be set to run at, say, a lower speed, keeping the MFP up and running until an engineer arrives with a fix. It's this sort of intelligence that can make downtime a thing of the past while improving the chances of a first-time fix when the engineer arrives.

Transforming enterprise

Amazingly, these nuts-and-bolts practicalities are only half the story. The real strength of HP's new MFPs lies in the way they enable MPS providers to go beyond traditional MPS and customers to transform the way they work.

If today's MPS is about making costs more predictable and manageable and taking the burden of administration, supplies and maintenance away, tomorrow's MPS is more about the information ecosystem within the enterprise. It's about helping customers create new workflows that allow them to capture, store and harvest value from their printed documents and make the most of the materials they print. Businesses don't merely want to ditch their paperwork or archive documents in a digital format; they want the power to transform paper-based information into data that can be analysed and mined for insight.

This is where a new breed of MPS providers and a few established brands are making their mark, developing expertise, strategy and a coherent, flexible portfolio of products and services, while specialising in different industries, such as legal, medical, manufacturing, energy or education.

Again, though, it's about finding devices with the capabilities to match. HP, for instance, hasn't just invested in high-performance printing and scanning technology, but in features that support new print/digital workflows. HP Capture and Route makes it easier to scan printed documents, process their content and distribute the digital results to back-office applications, cloud-based repositories and content-management solutions like Microsoft SharePoint. HP Embedded Capture enables businesses to scan and capture data direct from the MFP, routing documents where they need to go with no server required. HP Digital Sending Software gives enterprises one common interface across multiple printers and MFPs, simplifying the way they incorporate paper documents into digital-focused business processes, and getting their contents into emails, network folders or SharePoint repositories with ease.

Mobility counts as well. HP's solutions enable simple, secure, effective wireless printing from smartphone or tablet to MFP, plus equally fast, secure remote printing, so that remote workers and mobile sales or support teams can print safely from wherever they might be. With HP JetAdvantage Capture, they can even scan in documents and harvest data on the move using the camera on an Android tablet or smartphone.

Securing the business

Security is a challenge for every business, whatever its size, and it's a challenge too often ignored when it comes to printers. The fact is that the increasing sophistication of printers and MFPs, coupled with their use as an on-off ramp for information moving between digital and printed formats, makes them a juicy and often vulnerable target for hackers.

Luckily, MPS is ready to meet the hackers head-on, as providers harness the power of new devices to not only help their customers adopt new workflows, but help them adopt them securely. Again, working with HP brings huge advantages. For one thing, HP's expertise and experience in security goes well beyond what you'd find in most printer manufacturers, as HP is able to leverage its capabilities in network security, server security and PC security. Just as importantly, HP has the technology to back that expertise up.

In HP's new MFPs, for example, you'll find HP SureStart, a feature that enables the printer to detect intrusions in the BIOS the boot-level instructions that initialize the hardware and load the firmware that runs and controls every feature of the printer. Not only can SureStart detect intrusions, it can stop them and repair the effects of an attack. You'll also find whitelisting features that prevent the manufacturer's firmware from being replaced by a hacked one, not to mention run-time intrusion detection that continually monitors the printer for signs of attack.

What's more, these tie in with wider features. HP JetAdvantage Security Manager works across an enterprise's fleet of HP printers, ensuring they comply with security policies and changing any settings that don't meet requirements. These may include 256-bit AES encryption of the printer's hard drive or of jobs in progress, not to mention pull print features, where jobs will only print when authorised by the user, standing at the printer itself. These features combine to ensure that printers and MFPs don't become the weakest link in the enterprise security chain, and that's good news for both MPS providers and the customers they serve.

Cost-efficiencies, guaranteed availability and reduced admin will always be an important part of any MPS provision, but as a business you should expect more: a vision for how print can benefit your company and how more effective document workflows can help you grow your business and compete. That doesn't just mean making information easier to share, store and access, but also ensuring that it stays properly secured. While there are many providers out there who can offer this, it makes sense to partner with one that has the best technology to use as a foundation and those foundations don't get any sounder than HP's next-generation MFPs.

The copier and the laser printer have always shared DNA, both based on the principles of electrophotography, where positively charged particles of toner stick to negatively charged areas on a drum, before transferring to a sheet of paper and being fused in place by heat. For years, the two technologies have co-existed, the copier reliant on photoconductive material on the drum to copy the image to be printed, the laser printer using a laser to project the image onto the drum. The printer was the device that turned digital documents into printed documents, the copier merely replicated what was printed. In the last decade, however, we've seen the two technologies converging.

On the one hand, the big names in the copier market have dropped the old analogue methods to work more like laser printers, improving quality and performance and transforming copiers into more versatile multi-function devices. On the other, printer manufacturers have integrated print, scan, fax and copy capabilities into one networked unit, creating a new class of printer: the multi-function printer or MFP. The copier as we know it is dead; the MFP is king.

This leaves businesses with a choice. Do they stick with their old, outdated copiers, upgrade to new multi-function devices from the same manufacturers, or move to new multi-function printers from those manufacturers with a background in laser printers. That's a choice HP intends to make easy, with the launch of a new line of 16 A3 PageWide and LaserJet printers, designed from the ground-up to transform enterprise copying and print.

One device does it all

The multi-function printer has one obvious advantage; it can do more than just copy or just print. Both copiers and printers tend to be large devices though HP's PageWide and LaserJet devices feature impressively compact designs and the fewer you have in the office, the more space you have available to use. That's space businesses can use for people, desks and equipment that could increase productivity and improve the bottom line. If a multi-function printer can handle both printer and copier roles, that's one less unit to house, and moving from copiers to MFPs can be a great way to kick-start consolidation, reducing the number of devices you're paying for, the amount of space they occupy and the amount of energy they consume. What sensible IT manager, CIO or CFO is going to argue with that?

Performance

There's a good reason why these MFPs support consolidation: they're extremely fast. Here HP's MFPs have a clear edge on their rivals. Having spent years competing in the laser printer space where speed is king they lead the field when it comes to sheer performance, both in terms of the time to warm up and print the first page and in terms of the page-per-minute throughput.

What's more, HP offers a choice between its advanced LaserJet technology and PageWide printers, which use an ink-based technology with a single print-head that spans the whole width of the A3 page, printing line after line of miniscule dots in a fraction of a second. With PageWide the only real limit on performance is the speed at which the paper can move underneath.

As a result, HP's new A3 LaserJet printers can reach speeds of up to 60ppm, while their PageWide siblings can hit 60ppm or 80ppm in a high-quality General Office mode. That beats just about anything you'll find in each model's price class, giving you high speeds whether you're printing a 30-page A4 report or rattling off 20 A3 copies of an office floorplan. In fact, more people can share one device while still cutting down on the amount of time spent waiting for someone else's job to finish.

A better fit for modern workflows

Copiers came in at a time when paper ruled the office, the filing cabinet was the central data warehouse and the main form of intra-office communication was the memo. Times have, to say the least, moved on. Today's MFPs aren't simply about printing or copying, but about transforming business processes; moving documents in and out of the digital realm and converting the information held on paper into data you can store, analyse and use to enhance productivity or sales. This makes the MFP the most natural on/off ramp and the go-to device for how a modern business works.

Copier manufacturers haven't been slow to recognise this, shifting their R&D and sales operations away from copying and towards MFPs and workflow solutions. What they don't have, though, is HP's technology and experience across the whole breadth of functions, from printing to scanning to security, infrastructure, fleet management and document workflows. HP's new MFPs are built for the way we do business now and how we'll do it in the future.

Making colour affordable

For too many businesses colour is a luxury, to be used in client-facing documents or board-level reports but not to be used elsewhere. Yet there are times when a splash of colour can bring a key point into focus, bring an infographic alive or make a chart or table so much easier to read. HP's new A3 PageWide printers give businesses the choice of high-quality black and white or surprisingly affordable colour, for the simple reason that, with PageWide, the only cost involved in adding colour is the cost of the ink that goes on the page.

Tackling TCO

Yet when you think about printing costs, you need to think beyond the raw cost per page. The majority of A3 office printing and copying works on a contractual, managed services model, but while you're paying for the services you use you're also covering the costs of maintenance, service and support. What's more, there are additional costs your business pays, specifically the cost of energy used to power the devices.

Across the printer and traditional copier manufacturers you'll find huge variations in terms of running costs, but this is another area where HP's technological advantages come to the fore. On the one hand, the new A3 MFPs are designed to be easier and cheaper to maintain, with fewer, more modular parts that are easier to replace and embedded sensors that proactively warn your MPS provider of potential failures. That reduces their servicing and maintenance costs, enabling them to price even more competitively.

What's more, PageWide is an impressively cost-efficient print technology, while HP's toner cartridges are designed to minimise waste and give you more prints before you need to change them. Again, this allows providers to compete on price. On the other hand, HP's PageWide MFPs beat equivalent laser MFPs in terms of power consumption, reducing your running costs and environmental impact, while HP's LaserJet MFPs lead their class for higher workloads. Whichever technology you opt for, TCO will go down.

Reducing downtime

Multi-function devices also vary massively in terms of reliability and ease-of-maintenance, both crucial in enterprise environments where productivity is paramount. That's why HP's new MFPs were designed to not just reduce servicing and maintenance costs for MPS providers, but also minimises downtime for the companies they serve.

As the core parts have embedded sensors, constantly sharing performance data with cloud-based management and security tools, MPS providers can rely on proactive alerts that tell them not just that a printer is at risk of failing but which component is at risk even when it might fail. That enables them to fix the problem before it even becomes a problem or ensure they're carrying the right parts when responding to a call. What's more, the printers are smart enough to deal proactively with a fault, and can opt to run at a lower performance level until the part is replaced. As a result, you don't get left without a working printer when you need one most.

Security and Management

Copiers and security have never been the easiest match, but while copier manufacturers are now embedding security within their MFPs, they have a long way to go to catch up with HP. The more sophisticated these devices become, the more valuable data they convey while they print, scan and route, the more interesting a target they become to hackers, and that's a real problem when many manufacturers have no real background in device-level or network security. That's not the case with HP. In fact, with features like built-in encryption, HP SureStart to protect the BIOS, firmware whitelisting and Real-Time Intrusion Detection to fend off hackers, it's comfortably ahead of the curve.

It's a similar story when it comes to monitoring, auditing and compliance, while Pull Printing features ensure that print jobs only print when the right, authenticated user is standing by the output tray. Throw in powerful tools to manage and monitor large fleets of printers, enforcing robust security policies across every HP MFP on the estate, and HP's A3 MFPs give you a level of security that other MFPs, let alone copiers, will struggle to match.

Effectively, these devices equip businesses for the way they work today, their future needs and the security threats they face. They fit into modern workflows and won't let your business down. Whether you're moving on from your old copiers or looking to move up to a next-generation MFP, switching to HP is the smart business choice.

Brother's DCP-L6600DW is ideal for busy workgroups: it's one of the fastest mono laser MFPs in its class, offering an advertised 46 pages per minute. And where some printers fall short of their speed claims, we found that the DCP-L6600DW delivered on its promises perfectly: our 46-page test Word document was dispatched in 59 seconds at both 600dpi and 1,200dpi driver resolutions. It had no problems with our challenging 24-page DTP document either, which was hustled into the printer's 250-sheet output tray at precisely 46ppm.

The integral duplexer is no slouch. Double-sided printing is never quite as fast as single-sided, but our 46-page test document came out at an average of 24ppm. You won't be waiting around for the printer to warm up: the time to first page for all tests was never more than eight seconds. The scanner's 50-page ADF is pretty nippy too, with a 10-page single-side document copied at 33ppm, while a duplex-to-duplex copy mustered 10ppm. However, note that using the ADF drops the maximum scan resolution from 1,200ppi to 600ppi.

Print quality is great for general office use. Our test page revealed pin-sharp text at even the tiniest font sizes. Graphs and charts looked solid and well defined too but while mono photos showed good levels of detail, their impact was marred by an unsightly banding.

The print drum has a lifespan of 50,000 pages, so it will probably last the life of the printer. That means your only running costs should be toner cartridges: once you've used up the generous 8,000-page starter cartridge, the 12,000-page super-high-yield units work out to a penny per page.

Setting up the printer is easy, since the DCP-L6600DW offers all the network connections you could possibly want. Alongside a Gigabit Ethernet port, it also supports 802.11n wireless, Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint, plus NFC for Android devices. Installation on our Windows 10 desktop was nicely automated, with the software discovering the printer on the network and thereafter setting up the drivers for us.

Along with a handy System Tray status monitor and TWAIN driver, each desktop gets Brother's ControlCenter4 utility, preconfigured to use the network scanner. This provides quick access for copying documents and scanning them to email and local files. The included Nuance PaperPort SE 14 software handles OCR functions and offers good document management tools. Plus, print control and security features are excellent: Brother's secure lock allowed us to create local user lists and decide precisely what functions they could access. Jobs can be secured from the printer driver, allowing users to walk up and release them after entering a PIN.

On-printer controls are accessed via a 123mm colour LCD touch panel, providing easy access to all copy and scan features and plenty more besides. A whole host of scan destinations is available: after using Brother's Web Connect portal to enter our account details, we were able to scan directly to OneNote, OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook and Flickr. The built-in Easy Scan to E-mail app also makes it easy to transmit documents to someone's inbox: simply register an email address, set up a PIN and get scanning; there's no need to mess about with email server settings.

The Scan to Mobile app scans a document to Brother's website, again with automatic PIN protection, and displays a QR code on the LCD panel that can be scanned to access it. We used the Windows Phone 8.1 Vision app to scan the QR code, which downloaded the file directly to our mobile.

Brother's DCP-L6600DW offers busy workgroups a superb range of print, scan and copy features, along with top-notch cloud support. It isn't the best choice for reproducing photographs, but small businesses that work mostly with text and graphs will find its fast print speeds and low running costs extremely tempting.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 265

Verdict

Brother’s DCP-L6600DW offers busy workgroups a superb range of print, scan and copy features, along with top-notch cloud support. Small businesses that work mostly with text and graphs will find its fast print speeds and low running costs extremely tempting

1,200dpi A4 mono laser

1,200dpi duplex colour scanner

800MHz Cortex-A9 CPU

512MB RAM

46ppm

2 x USB 2

Gigabit Ethernet

802.11bgn wireless

12.3cm colour touchscreen

520-sheet input tray

50-sheet ADF

Duplex

Rec. monthly cycle – 7,500 pages

495 x 427 x 518mm (WDH)

18.5kg

Brother ControlCentre4 and Nuance PaperPort SE 14 software

1yr on-site warranty

Like Lexmark's CX310dn, the Ricoh SP C250SF is a business-grade printer that's priced within reach of a personal office or small workgroup. The imposing exterior makes no concessions to "lifestyle design", and the feature list is squarely professional, including a 250-sheet paper cassette and full duplex printing.

On paper, print speeds are merely respectable: our 20-page mono document was produced in 1min 40secs, for an average of 12ppm, while colour came out at 10ppm. Those numbers don't tell the whole story, though: by default the Ricoh drops into power-saving mode after just 60 seconds of inactivity, so print times normally include a 20-second wait for the unit to warm up. From warm, mono pages come out at a more impressive 17ppm.

Frustratingly, a similar delay applies to scanning: after you walk up and press the button, you're left standing around for 20 seconds until the Ricoh is ready to respond. Even once it's awake the scanner is slow: it took 53 seconds to scan a 200ppi greyscale image for us, and more than three minutes for a 300ppi A4 page.

The good news is that output quality is excellent. We simply couldn't fault the quality of text or business graphics, and the SP C250SF even had a good go at reproducing colour photos. On regular 80gsm office paper, it produced results richer and cleaner than you've any right to expect from a laser. Meanwhile, scanned images have a very pleasing appearance, coming out balanced and clear, without conspicuous speckles or sharpening.

Overall, though, we didn't enjoy testing the SP C250SF. Leaving aside the constant warm-up delays, we found the user interface frustratingly obscure: more than once we found ourselves unsure which button to press to access the function we wanted. Advanced configuration, such as setting up scan destinations, is done via the printer's web interface, which is easier to navigate, but still clunky and unclear.

A final weakness is expensive consumables. The initial purchase price is one thing - after all, you get a lot of printer for your money - but 3p per mono page and 15.4p per colour are way too high. Despite its great print quality, the C250SF simply has too many weak points, relative to its rivals, to recommend.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 262

Verdict

Excellent output quality isn't enough to redeem this printer's indecipherable interface, expensive running costs and constant warm-up delays.

The Xerox Phaser 6022V proudly keeps it simple: those seeking scanning and fax capabilities should look elsewhere. Xerox does offer a range of multifunction alternatives, but there's something to be said for the compact footprint of a classic desktop laser.

The price may seem steep considering the stripped-down feature set, but the Phaser 6022V's excellent print quality could justify it: we found it turned out both sharp, precise black text and beautifully balanced business graphics.

As is common with laser printers, a slight banding effect was visible on colour gradients, but illustrations and our photomontage looked strikingly vibrant, with bags of fine detail visible even in darker areas.

Print speeds are unexceptional: our 20-page text document emerged at an average of 11.9ppm, with the addition of colour graphics slowing things down to 9.1ppm. That's a little slow by the standards of business-focused printers, but then the Phaser 6022V is clearly pitched towards the personal end of the market, rather than at larger workgroups.

Xerox claims it's suitable for printing up to 1,500 pages a month, but it's revealing that it offers a comparatively small 150-sheet paper cassette. The output tray is on the modest side for a laser, too, holding up to 100 printed sheets.

The interface is somewhat perfunctory - the 5cm mono LCD is the smallest display of any printer we've recently tested. But this isn't a problem, as without scan or fax functions there's very little to communicate, beyond printer status and toner levels.

On that note, it's worth talking about running costs: we calculate a price of 2.1p per mono page. That's squarely average among its competition, and whether you print ten pages of text or 10,000, the Xerox Phaser 6022V's total cost of ownership falls right in the middle of the pack. Colour printing is costly, though: at 15p per page, the Xerox is very nearly one the most expensive options around, at roughly three times the per-page price of rivals from Brother or Canon.

The Xerox Phaser 6022V isn't a do-it-all printer. It isn't the cheapest to run, and it could be faster. Despite this, if your priority is business printing at home, or in an office of limited size, then its excellent quality and compact design make it a tempting proposition.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 262

Verdict

The Xerox Phaser 6022V isn’t a do-it-all printer. It isn’t the cheapest to run, and it could be faster. Despite this, if your priority is business printing at home, or in an office of limited size, then its excellent quality and compact design make it a tempting proposition.

Not everyone needs colour. Few print jobs really need it, and there are definite advantages to sticking, as the i-Sensys MF229dw does, with mono laser technology.

One is speed. Our 20-page test document flooded out of the printer at an exceptional 22.4ppm. Throwing business graphics into the mix only slowed things to 16.9ppm, although of course pages were rendered in greyscale rather than colour.

Another is price. The MF229dw can't match the cheapest inkjets, but at 2.2p per mono page, it's much cheaper than lasers from the likes of Oki and Ricoh, coming out just a fraction behind examples from Lexmark and Xerox. And since you won't be printing colour, there are fewer consumables to buy overall.

Although the MF229dw only prints in mono, it scans in full colour - exceptionally well, in fact. We were blown away by how clean and detailed its output was. Disappointingly, its roaring print speeds don't translate to a fast scanning engine. A single greyscale page at 200ppi took 28 seconds to scan, and ten pages through the ADF took 87 seconds - slower than most other printers we could name.

As you would expect, print quality is better for text than graphics. Emails and documents were sharp and weighty, but greyscale dithering gave images a slightly stippled appearance, while gradients and skin tones come out in grainy bands. Still, the MF229dw's graphical output is perfectly good for reference.

For a laser, the unit is relatively compact - another benefit of the single-cartridge design - and although the low-res monochrome display looks distinctly clunky, the touchscreen interface is straightforward, with big, clear buttons to control the printer's various functions.

With its 250-sheet input tray and fast print speeds, the i-Sensys has obvious appeal for those who frequently deal in large print jobs. The price is high, though, putting Canon's i-Sensys MF229dw into contention with the Lexmark CX310dn and the Oki MC342dnw - both pretty speedy printers in their own right.

Unless you're certain you won't ever want to print colour, you may prefer to opt for one of those models, and sacrifice a few pages per minute for more creative flexibility down the line.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 262

Verdict

It's not cheap and you won't be able to print anything in colour, but if you're just looking for large-batch office printing and scanning, the Canon i-Sensys MF229dw will blitz through them with frightening speed.