HP's OfficeJet Pro 9010e is a colour inkjet multifunction peripheral that can print, copy, scan, and send and receive faxes. It's well suited to a home office, with sensible office features including wired and wireless networking, and a USB host port for walk-up prints or scans. It's also adept at paper handling, featuring a 250-sheet cassette, automatic duplex printing and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder. This also duplexes, so the 9010e can make double-sided prints, scans, copies and faxes.

The OfficeJet Pro 9010e follows much the same style as HP's current range of home MFPs, although it's been sobered up somewhat with the addition of sensible grey plastics at the top and bottom. It's not a bad-looking device, brightened up to a degree by its 6.9cm colour touchscreen along with a couple of concealed status LEDs on the top left side.

Unpack and install the 9010e and one of your first considerations will be whether to sign up for HP+, HP's "smart printing system". Doing so qualifies you for six months' worth of HP Instant Ink, a subscription service that automatically orders new cartridges as you need them. The free offer is worth up to 4,200 pages, which isn't to be sniffed at, but HP+ membership means you must agree to keep the printer connected to the internet, and to use only HP's own cartridges.

Usually we balk at this imposition, but happily, the 9010e provides you with credible alternatives. You can sign up for Instant Ink anyway – the most expensive, 700-page-per-month plan works out at just 2.7p per page – or you can buy your own cartridges. In recent months we've tested HP printers costing as much as 24p per page, but use the highest-capacity cartridges and on the 9010e it's a very reasonable 5.3p.

Cost of ownership fears allayed, you can just get on with printing. The OfficeJet Pro 9010e takes a while to get going, needing 23 seconds to deliver the first page of black text, but it doesn't hang about afterward. It reached 18.8 pages per minute (ppm) on our black text test and even hit 7.3ppm on our very demanding colour graphics test – excellent for an inkjet in this range. It duplex-printed ten sides of colour graphics onto five pages in just under three minutes, a rate of 3.6 images per minute.

Image

This MFP also has a rapid scanner. It completed a preview in six seconds, needing only seven seconds to scan an A4 page at 150 dots per inch (dpi). The same scan took ten seconds at 300dpi, whereas capturing a 6 x 4in photo at 600dpi took a mere 15 seconds. Only at the maximum 1,200dpi did we have more of a wait – here the photo scan took 80 seconds.

With a fast printer and fast scanner, it's no surprise that this MFP made quick copies, spitting out a single black or colour page in ten seconds. Multipage ADF copies were impressive, needing only 78 seconds in black or colour. We timed a ten-page, 20-side duplex colour copy at a fraction under five minutes.

With pigmented inks, this isn't the ideal printer for glossy photos. This caveat aside, our results were impressive. Black text looks laser quality to the naked eye, while colour graphics were strong, let down only slightly by some subtle banding.

While duplexed inkjet prints are usually fainter than single-sided ones, we couldn't see any obvious differences here. Photocopies retained lots of detail from the originals. Black copies were excellent, though colour ones weren't entirely faithful to the original hues. Typically for an HP scanner, high-res photos showed evidence of digital sharpening. There's no option to turn this off, but it's noticeable only when you zoom in. The defaults work much better for document scans: our 300dpi A4 test was crisp and perfectly exposed. Unusually, the scanner didn't do so well at 150dpi, delivering a pixellated document with some compression artifacts.

Stick to medium-resolution scanning, don't bother with photo prints, and this MFP is unlikely to ever fall short. Its speed and sensible feature set mean it will keep pace with all but the most manic micro businesses. Sweetening the deal, it comes with a two-year warranty, upgradable to three years if you sign up for HP+. With sensible running costs either way, signing up for Instant Ink also feels like a genuine choice, and this MFP is all the better for it.

A major hardware organisation has implied that Nvidia is at fault for the widely reported instances of melting power cables on its new RTX 4090 graphics cards.

Nvidia's latest line of GPUs was released in October but their power cables have been mired in reports of extreme thermal faults leading to some users’ cables smoking or melting entirely.

Specifically, the GPUs' 16-pin 12VHPWR power cable, which adopts the new ATX 3.0 PSU standard released this year, has been identified as the core issue at play. Nvidia investigated the circa 50 extreme cases reported to it and concluded that “a common issue is that connectors are not fully plugged into the graphics card” - an issue of user error.

However, the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), a tech consortium which created the new power standard, and whose board includes representatives from companies including AMD, Arm, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia itself, has sought to distance itself from Nvidia’s claims.

It stated firms are responsible for rigorously testing their own hardware, and referenced an affected individual who has filed a class action lawsuit against Nvidia in a California district court.

"PCI-SIG wishes to impress upon all members that manufacture, market, or sell PCI-SIG technologies (including 12VHPWR connections) of the need to take all appropriate and prudent measures to ensure end-user safety, including testing for the reported problem cases involving consumers as alleged in the above-referenced lawsuit," the group said in a statement to the press.

“Members are reminded that PCI-SIG specifications provide necessary technical information for interoperability and do not attempt to address proper design, manufacturing methods, materials, safety testing, safety tolerances or workmanship. When implementing a PCI-SIG specification, members are responsible for the design, manufacturing, and testing, including safety testing, of their products.”

In the lawsuit (PDF), the plaintiff alleged that Nvidia “marketed and sold the RTX 4090 with a defective and dangerous power cable plug and socket, which has rendered consumers’ cards inoperable and poses a serious electrical and fire hazard for each and every purchaser”.

PC hardware reviews channel Gamers Nexus replicated the fault through the improper connection of the connector to the graphics card, and recorded the card reaching temperatures as high as 250ºC.

The group analysed cables sent in by affected viewers and determined that wear and tear proved the cables had been inserted at an angle, or with pins loose.

Despite this, in lieu of an audible ‘click’ when the cable is inserted properly, the reviewers noted that it’s very possible for a user to accidentally install the card insecurely. They also warned that those tinkering with cables after hearing about the issue might be opening themselves up to failure.

The 12VHPWR is a new power standard and used in Nvidia’s RTX 4080 and 4090 cards in place of the two eight-pin connectors that were used with the firm’s older cards. Rival AMD still utilises this older solution, having opted against including the 12VHPWR on its newest cards.

PCI-SIG’s statement is seemingly aimed at quashing fears that the thermal problems are endemic to the new standard.

IT Pro has approached Nvidia 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.

In this new age of working from home, the need for new tools and equipment at home is greater than ever, and for some of us, that means getting your hands on the best digital copier around.

Whilst sales of products such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and thermal cameras have seen huge growth in the age of coronavirus, digital copiers are also seeing high demand. These machines are still a staple of daily administrative operations such as copying, scanning and printing, so getting one of the best digital copiers may be high on your list

The best digital copiers will always be popular due to the evergreen demand for their functionalities.

The market for the best digital copiers products is mature enough that it can now offer everything for everyone, making choosing the right products slightly harder task in line due to the wealth of options available.

Below you can find our pick of the best digital copiers.

The best digital copiers available

1) Brother MFC-J6945DW

Brother’s all-rounder is a budget-friendly choice

REASONS TO BUY

• Great value
• High print quality
• Support for tabloid format

REASONS TO AVOID

• Lacking a number of premium features

Money is always an important consideration when choosing a product, especially in these challenging economic times. The Brother MFC-J6945DW hopes to impress in at least two key categories: price and the ability to give an air of being a genuine all-in-one product.

Based on its compact size (22.6 x 14.9 x 18.8"), the Brother MFC-J6945DW is clearly intended as a solution aimed at small businesses looking for basic copying functions combined with scanning and faxing features at an attractive price. With an input capacity of 600, the Brother MFC-J6945DW should be able to tackle even medium-grade copying projects, especially when paired with its ability to support tabloid formats.

Copying and printing costs per page are kept reasonably low, with users able to keep an eye on these with the help of the Brother Page Gauge tool which allows for easy tracking of the ink levels both in use and in reserve. The company’s INKvestment Tank is packaged with a year's worth of ink supply, which is a good starting point, amounting to some 300 pages per month.

At the same time, this copier is more than capable to deal with any chart, presentation and graph you throw at it at in a respectable speed, with the best performance in terms of quality being reserved for photos and text (particularly considering that it is still “just” an inkjet). While the lack of premium features such as Bluetooth support may raise some eyebrows, let’s bear in mind that Brother’s MFC-J6945DW is not here to rattle its bells and whistles, but rather cover as many bases as possible, which it does rather admirably. Finally, the manufacturer promises 22 pages per minute, but customers should be warned that their mileage may vary, meaning anyone looking for such functionality may be well advised to leave the heavy-duty and high-volume tasks to more expensive brethren.

2) Xerox WorkCentre 6515

A capable copier offering smartphone-esque ease of access

REASONS TO BUY

• Compact build
• Large touchscreen for accessible use

REASONS TO AVOID

• Some sporadic colour banding with photos
• Paper capacity and print speeds could be improved
• Not intended for businesses with higher copying demands

Hitting the sweet spot with small businesses is not an easy task in a saturated market, but Xerox seems to be trying with its WorkCentre 6515 model. The key feature here is an intuitive touchscreen interface which offers access to a plethora of features at a glance, with modern-day smartphone functionality being a clear source of inspiration.

The quality of prints and copies resembles some much higher priced premium models – high resolution (1,200 x 2,400dpi) and sharp colours and text, even if the letters occasionally slip a greyer copy or two and photos sometimes suffer from colour banding. However the consistency is generally commendable for this price range, while more demanding users will welcome the option of single pass two-sided scanning.

While the paper capacity of 300 sheets may appear modest, the Xerox WorkCentre 6515 plays a charm card with its ability to send scans to a user’s phone, offering a range of mobile plugins for easier copying, scanning, and printing with phones via the companion Xerox Mobile Link App.

The capacity to process some 50,000 images per month at the speed of 30 pages per minute should meet the demands of the majority of small or even medium enterprises. The focus on SMEs is also reflected in the Xerox WorkCentre 6515’s ambition to easily fit on just about every table based on its compact size and weight measurements (16.5 x 19.9 x 19.7 inches and 67.7 lbs)

While originally intended for smaller businesses, the price and functionality of the Xerox WorkCentre 6515 will easily recommend it as a reliable and affordable workhorse even in the medium enterprise environments looking for a quality copying solution at a highly reasonable price.

3) Canon ImageRunner Advance C5535i II

Hefty price tag shouldn’t overshadow that this copier fires on all cylinders

REASONS TO BUY

• Enhanced productivity
• Advanced security features
• Accessible and informative control panel

REASONS TO AVOID

• Slightly bulky
• Steep price might scare off smaller to medium enterprise owners

The Canon ImageRunner Advance C5535i II is no budget device, but as with some of its competitors, it is designed to fill an intended niche as capably as possible, encompassing the needs of larger or growing businesses which demand a multi-functional device and have enough space for it to boot.

In addition to copying, the Canon ImageRunner Advance C5535i II supports printing, scanning, and faxing, paired with the ability to send documents from the device itself. The supported copying and printing capacity is 35 pages per minute for tasks involving both black and white and colour materials. With the paper capacity of 1200 sheets (which is expandable to 3000 via an added external tray), the Canon ImageRunner Advance C5535i II can happily meet all the demands of enterprises working with large copying or printing volumes.

In addition to the tray, the Canon ImageRunner Advance C5535i II also has access to a range of various modules and accessories which can be customised based on the demands of a particular administrative task. These include fast feeding trays, the ability to work with booklets, barcodes, and more.

The Canon ImageRunner Advance C5535i II is graced with a large 10 x 7 inch touchscreen whose design will immediately make smartphone users feel right at home. Its modular design allows for great customisation and easy browsing through the documents that need to be copied or scanned, and also supports easy linking with online storage services such as Google Drive.

Security is another differentiator for the Canon ImageRunner Advance C5535i II, as access to its copying/printing settings is protected with the password management system, tag/badge reader, and PIN code, while authorised personnel can access all of this from a remote central location.

While the Canon ImageRunner Advance C5535i II may be on the pricier end of the cost spectrum, this can be mitigated by making use of its dedicated features that allow for detailed tracking of the usage and allocation of printing and copying resources.

4) HP Colour LaserJet MFP E87660z

Leasing power just when you need it

REASONS TO BUY

• Per-contract leasing model might be an attractive option for businesses demanding flexibility
• Supports heavy-duty work cycles
• Large memory capacity

REASONS TO AVOID

• Size may limit deployment options
• HP toners can be costly

The HP Colour LaserJet MFP E87660z is a somewhat unique selection based on the procurement model it offers – instead of being made available via standard retail channels, HP offers this printer/copier combo via contract lease. As such, it may be a great option for smaller business or home-based users who do not foresee a permanent need for demanding copying operations.

The key word here is “demanding”, as the HP Colour LaserJet MFP E87660z may be just the right option if you need to plan ahead for handling some intensive copying tasks over a period of time, but without warranting the purchase of an expensive copier for keeping.

Based on the leasing model, the HP Colour LaserJet MFP E87660z will perform all of the copying tasks you put before it, while keeping the maintenance and servicing costs down. All that is required is to get in touch with HP online and state your demands and time intervals in which the device’s services may be required.

With its ability to churn out some 50 to 70 pages per minute and 300,000 sheets per month, the HP Colour LaserJet MFP E87660z should be able to meet even the strictest demands of its users. In addition to automatized two-sided copying, HP wants to make life easier for its customers by offering a range of colour and image management options, such as HP EasyColor and HP Colour Access Control which allow for easy control of who gets access to operations involving printing and copying. The copying resolution is 600 x 600, and the basic model is capable of holding 1,140 sheets, with the potential to upgrade its capacity to 7,180 pieces.

The HP Colour LaserJet MFP E87660z is also big on accessibility, offering access to one-touch keys and quick copying settings that can be saved as one of 25 presets for various repeating tasks in the future. Based on its ability to connect with Google Cloud Print, Apple AirPrint, Microsoft SharePoint, and similar services, scanning, copying and printing tasks can be accessed remotely for added flexibility. Finally, the device is delivered with 7GB of base memory and upgradeable potential of 640GB of storage capacity, confirming its status as a device intended for working with large-scale copying operations within set timespans.

One caveat: HP toners can be expensive, meaning any prospective buyers should carefully calculate its costs prior to leasing this device - as well as making sure they have enough room to account for its slightly bulkier size.

5) Sharp MX-6071 Advanced

If the Enterprise had the need for a copier…

REASONS TO BUY

• Advanced voice command and motion sensor features
• Document finishing options
• Enhanced energy saving and security capabilities

REASONS TO AVOID

• High price
• Base paper capacity may not satisfy all users

Sharp recently launched its MX-6071 Colour Advanced Series as the upgrade of its earlier MX-6051 line of multifunctional printers. When it comes to copying, the series received a makeover in the form of a dual document feeder and advanced voice commands used for ordering printing and copying jobs. Based on its MFP voice function and support for Amazon’s Alexa, a user can basically order the device to start copying documents once everything is set.

The operational capacity for the Sharp MX-6071 Advanced is 60 black and white and colour pages per minute, with paper capacity hitting the 6,300 mark. An integrated motion sensor ensures that the device is always ready to go into fully operational mode. Once it detects the approaching user, it leaves this sleep mode and gets ready for the job. Faster warm-up times should also comfort those looking for greener energy-saving options for their digital copiers.

The device’s Duplex Single Pass Feeder supports scanning speeds of 220 ipm. The ability to change both paper and toner without stopping the copying operation is yet another testament to Sharp’s dedication to having the efficiency follow in the footsteps of other advanced capabilities of the device.

For added security during copying, this model features LED lighting to prompt users to pick up the original documents in case they are forgotten. Manual and stapleless stapling and saddle stitching are a welcome addition to those looking for advanced document finishing functions. The quality of images comes with perfectly sufficient 1,200 x 1,200 dpi and the focus on visuals can be observed with the copier’s colour LCD touchscreen which supports drag & drop rearrangements of operational icons. In addition to copying, scanning, and printing, the device also offers optional faxing features to complement its already stellar range of functions.

• If you are looking for the best digital copiers, we know that the list of devices presented above is by no means an exhaustive one. So we’ve also included the following three copiers, which we believe will be just as good for various user profiles and needs. Although these devices do not necessarily conform to the five-category criteria we set above (copiers for small enterprises, large enterprises, those with advanced features etc.) they instead represent great all-around solutions that are equal in most regards.

6) Lexmark MB2236adw

Great offering in a compact package

The Lexmark MB2236adw goes above and beyond the call of duty for a simple copier, including supported features such as printing, scanning, and faxing. Copied documents look authentic enough, with scanning being capped at 600 dpi. Images can be resized i.e. enlarged and reduced easily, while the compactness of the model will remain one of its main selling points. The same can be said of an attractive price tag which will make the user forget about the lack of Wi-Fi Direct or front USB. Copying can also be done via a single button, making up for the lack of touchscreen with the speed and the intuitiveness of use.

7) Konica Minolta Bizhub i-Series

On the visual charm offensive

The Konica Minolta Bizhub i-Series A3 and A4 models are both good enough options for the majority of copying operations, particularly if the visual quality is your main criterion for evaluating a photocopier. Konica Minolta has its own custom toner technology, with particular attention being given to the quality of its particles. The A3 models come packaged with the copy speed of 36ppm. Their duty cycle is capped at 3,300 sheets while the A4 models offer a copy speed of 42ppm and support for 1,600 sheets. In addition to considering the importance of visuals in your copying operations, just make sure you have enough space to house the devices from this series.

8) Ricoh IM C4500 MFP

Can we ever be too secure?

The Ricoh IM C4500 may seem a curious inclusion here, particularly considering that the company has built its reputation around combining the reliability of its products with the focus on green technologies. Even if you do not care about the minimum ecological footprint of this model and its energy-saving capabilities, its motion sensor and flexible app settings are bound to impress efficiency-minded users.

Yet, the area in which this copier/printer/scanner and fax machine (optional) wants to shine is its focus on security. The Ricoh IM C4500 MFP wants to settle this issue once and for all with its Always Current technology that handles security and app upgrades and updates automatically. Based on its capacity to copy your documents at the speed of 45 ppm in black & white and colour, the paper capacity of 1,200 sheets and 200,000 pages per month duty cycle, it will be an ideal choice for small to medium enterprises whose owners do like to keep tabs on the security of their copying operations.

Still want to look for another option for the best digital copier? Make sure you include the following parameters in your checklist.

Copy performance

Unsurprisingly, the copying speed of the photocopier is a key consideration for many. This is usually expressed as the ppm value (pages per minute) which is usually the same for working with black and white or colour documents. However, bear in mind that laser machines are faster than their inkjet counterparts, and the ability to copy two sides of a document at the same time is a must for many users today.

Paper management

Closely related to the copy speed, this refers to the amount of paper you can load into your copier and the number of pages it is capable of processing on a monthly basis (duty cycle). Checking these in advance will save you time and spare you the frustration when planning for the longevity of your copier and the workload you will burden it with.

Intuitive use and connectivity support

People who need the services of digital copiers come from various backgrounds, the majority of them being non-technical ones. In order to maintain healthy levels of usage efficiency, the best digital copiers need to be accessible and intuitive, with one-touch copying and large touchscreens being key features to consider. Also, more advanced features such as voice commands and motion sensors can speed up the copying process at a higher price. The same goes for checking if your copier supports remote central control, connection with cloud storage drives and wireless interfacing with smartphones.

Security

This feature gets overlooked sometimes, but it may be essential to check if a copier supports automatics updates, passwords, and warning systems for forgotten documents, particularly if you have to copy sensitive documents in environments with large numbers of users.

Over the years, wireless technology has continued to develop to the point it’s now very common to find, both in the home and the workplace. Cables are yesterday’s news, with everything from headphones to keyboards taking part in the wireless revolution.

Enter the magic of Bluetooth, the short-range wireless technology standard compatible with most devices and software, including Windows 10. It can be used for all kinds of things, from exchanging files or creating a network, to connecting smartphones and wireless headphones to your PC. In the workplace, you’ll probably have seen it used to connect keyboards or mice to your machine.

However, if you’ve got a new Bluetooth device and are itching to get it set up fast on your laptop or PC, perhaps taken from our list of best Windows laptops, there’s nothing worse than not being able to locate the setting in the operating system.

How to turn on Bluetooth in Windows 10

The good news is that it’s fairly straightforward to turn Bluetooth on or off in Windows 10.

1. First, select the start button and navigate to Settings.
2. Here you will see a listing for Devices; click on this, and there will be an option for “Bluetooth & other devices”.
3. Once you’ve opened this up, you’ll be able to switch the Bluetooth toggle on or off.

Alternatively, you can turn Bluetooth on or off from the Action Centre, which is located next to the time and date on your taskbar. Simply select the action centre, click on Bluetooth, and then that should turn on the function. Be aware, however, that if Bluetooth is turned off, it might appear as Not connected.

If you want to add this Bluetooth shortcut to your action centre, click on start, then Settings and find System. From here, look for Notifications & actions and then click on Quick actions. In this part of settings, you should be able to click on Add or remove quick actions and then turn on Bluetooth.

How to pair a Bluetooth device in Windows 10

Once you’ve turned Bluetooth on, you can now pair a number of devices to your PC or laptop, including audio devices or keyboards.

1. First, turn on your Bluetooth audio device and make sure it’s discoverable. Check your device's instructions to see how to make it discoverable if you’re unsure how to.
2. On your PC, click the start menu, then Settings, and navigate to Devices
3. From here, click on Bluetooth & other devices
4. Click Add Bluetooth or other device, before finally clicking on Bluetooth

Once this has been selected, you should be able to choose your device from the list on the screen and follow any additional instructions if they appear, before selecting Done.

Once you’ve done this, the good news is that your Bluetooth device and PC will normally automatically connect to each other anytime the two devices are in range of each other and Bluetooth is turned on. You can also use a handy shortcut (Win+K) to open up the Connect sidebar, allowing you to manually connect to (or disconnect from) previously paired devices.

How to pair a Bluetooth printer or scanner in Windows 10

If you want to pair a Bluetooth printer or scanner to your PC or laptop, the steps involved are slightly different to how you would normally pair a Bluetooth device to Windows 10.

1. First, turn on your Bluetooth printer or scanner and make it discoverable. Once again, if you’re unsure how to do this, check your device’s instructions or visit the manufacturer's website.
2. Navigate to the Start Menu, then Settings, and find Devices
3. From here, select Printers & scanners
4. Click on Add a printer or scanner
5. Let your device search for nearby printers, then choose the one you want to use and select Add device, making sure to confirm the connection on the printer or scanner if requested.

Once you’ve topped up your printer with some ink or toner, you should be good to start using it and printing to your heart’s content.

How to diagnose potential Bluetooth problems in Windows 10

Are you running into problems while using Bluetooth on Windows 10? Here’s a selection of troubleshooting steps you can try. We also have a much broader list of the most common Windows 10 problems and most common Windows 11 problems, if the issue isn't covered below.

Check your product information

If you’ve set up a new device and still find that Bluetooth isn’t working, it’s a good idea to double check the product specifications to ensure that it does, in fact, have Bluetooth capabilities. Not all devices have Bluetooth functionality so it’s always worth checking this first.

Make sure Bluetooth is turned on

Perhaps the most obvious thing to check is that Bluetooth is actually turned on. You'll be able to see whether it is on, and connected to a device, by simply opening up the Action Centre in the bottom right of the desktop window. If the Bluetooth tile is lit up blue, but you see “Not connected”, this means Bluetooth is switched on but isn’t currently paired to any devices. If it is greyed out, it means Bluetooth is switched off.

You can also check Bluetooth is turned on by going to settings, Devices, Bluetooth & other devices, and see if it’s turned on here. Additionally, if you are using a laptop with a physical Bluetooth switch on its body, then make sure this is turned on.

Check your Bluetooth device

The problem could be with the device you’re trying to connect to your Windows PC or laptop. Make sure it’s turned on, charged, or has fresh batteries, and is physically located near the PC you want to connect to.

Once you’ve done this, try turning it off, waiting a few seconds, and then turning it on again. If you find that your device is unresponsive or slow to respond, then make sure it isn’t too close to any other USB devices that are plugged into a USB 3.0 port. Unshielded USB devices can occasionally interfere with Bluetooth connection.

Check your PC

The problem could be with your PC, instead of the device you want to connect to it. On the PC or laptop you want to connect to, make sure Airplane Mode is off. Select Start, Settings, Network & Internet, and then find Airplane mode. Make sure this is switched off. Alternatively, you will be able to find the Airplane Mode tile in the Action Centre.

You can also try turning Bluetooth on and off again, by locating it through the steps above before switching it off, waiting a few seconds, and then switching it on again.

Lastly, you can also try removing the device you’ve added and then add it again. Select start, Settings, Devices, and then Bluetooth & other devices. Here, select the device you’re experiencing issues with and select Remove device, before confirming by hitting Yes. To pair the device to your PC again, follow the steps above.

What workplace devices use Bluetooth?

You might be surprised by the amount of devices that use Bluetooth nowadays. The good news is that many of them can be used in the workplace as well, and all can be connected using the above steps.

Keyboards and mice

Wireless business keyboards and mice are a common sight in most offices, given the flexibility they provide. The great thing about Bluetooth keyboards and mice is that they will still work even if you are some distance away from your PC or laptop, which is useful if you're giving a presentation or you have an unusual setup, such as a standing desk.

Additionally, if you’re working at your desk, you won’t have to worry about untidy cable management, and many Bluetooth devices even allow for rapid switching between multiple paired devices.

Headphones, earphones, and headsets

Once again, no cables means you have a lot more flexibility with how you work. By connecting to your laptop or PC’s audio via Bluetooth, it means that you can get up and move around without having to touch your headphones.

The audio, like music or a video call with a colleague, will keep playing as long as you’re in range of your PC or laptop - and, depending on the model you're using, this can be quite some distance.

You can also connect these to your smartphone to make your commute a lot easier, or rock out in the kitchen if you’re working from home.

Bluetooth printers

Gone are the days of having to physically connect your laptop or PC to a printer when you’re in desperate need of a document. Instead, you can pair it and print immediately, without having to get up from your chair.

This can be extremely useful if your printer is located outside of your home office, such as in another room or even a cupboard. It also makes it much easier to share a single printer among an entire household or office without having to run cables everywhere.

Although it's certainly possible to use Bluetooth with your printer, this functionality has largely been replaced by Wi-Fi printing, both at home and in the office.

In recent years, Intel surrendered its long-held dominance in the workstation processor space to AMD. But now the regular Threadripper has been discontinued in favour of the feature-rich but more expensive Threadripper Pro, Intel is clawing its way back. The 12th generation of Intel Core processors, codenamed Alder Lake, has undeniably strong qualities – particularly for workstations and high-end desktops. And Scan’s 3XS GWP-ME A124C shows just how much Alder Lake has to offer content-creation professionals.

The central element of the A124C is its Core i9-12900K processor, which is one rung below the top 12900KS model. The novelty with Alder Lake is that it has two types of cores: high-performance P cores and power-efficient E cores. Only P cores support Hyper-Threading, so while the 12900K has 16 cores, it presents 24 threads. Clock frequencies are also different, with the 12900K’s P cores set at a nominal 3.2GHz with 5.1GHz boost, while the E cores start at 2.4GHz with a 3.9GHz max. The P cores also offer a 5.2GHz “turbo” capability.

This array of frequencies and features makes perfect sense for content creation. Software packages in this space either favour fewer cores with high frequencies, or they like lots of cores. Broadly speaking, 3D modelling, video editing and photo editing would be the former, and 3D rendering the latter. The i9-12900K offers the best of both these worlds.

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C review: Specifications

Although Alder Lake chips supports DDR5 memory, the Asus TUF Gaming Z690-Plus WiFi D4 motherboard supplied by Scan only allows DDR4. Scan populates it with 128GB of 3,200MHz modules, which may lose out on bandwidth to DDR5 but will last the lifetime of the system in terms of capacity. These are supplied as four modules, with four sockets lying empty, but as the motherboard maximum is 128GB you can’t upgrade any further. According to Scan, DDR5 is currently almost twice the price of DDR4, so it’s a sensible choice to go with the latter, as the performance loss isn’t huge.

One area where Scan has opted for the latest and greatest is graphics acceleration. This is the first system we’ve seen with the Nvidia Quadro RTX A4500. This includes faster core GPU and memory clocks than the Quadro RX A4000, but also more GDDR6 memory – 20GB instead of 16GB. The memory interface is 320-bit rather than 256-bit, so bandwidth overall is significantly increased from 448GB/sec to 640GB/sec. Meanwhile, Nvidia bumps up the number of CUDA cores from 6,144 to 7,168. As the model number implies, the RTX A4500 sits between the A4000 and A5000 in compute power and memory allocation. However, it’s a lot more expensive than the A4000, and would make up more than a third of the price of this system on its own.

The 12th generation Intel Core processors have leapfrogged AMD’s current generation not only by supporting DDR5 memory (even if our sample didn’t supply this) but also PCI Express 5.0, although you only directly benefit from this via the 16x PCI Express 5.0 slot used by the graphics card. However, support elsewhere for PCI-E Gen4 means that the NVMe storage can still operate at high speeds.

There are four M.2 slots on the Asus motherboard, and Scan has populated one with a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro Gen4 drive. Sustained read and write speeds of 6,667MB/sec and 4,944MB/sec respectively ensure that booting and app loading are quick. A capacity of 2TB is ample for a general content-creation system, but you should add a secondary AV drive for video editing. In this case, there are four SATA/600 ports on the motherboard, and the chassis provides a couple of 2.5in drive bays behind the motherboard for SATA SSDs.

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C review: Chassis design

The 3XS chassis is based around a Fractal Design Meshify 2. This has options for 3.5in bays but Scan hasn’t fitted these as standard. Instead, it leaves the chassis open to improve airflow. Should you want to prioritise storage, fear not: you can fit up to 14 drives via optional brackets, on top of up to four dedicated 2.5in mounts.

Unsurprisingly, liquid cooling is used to keep noise levels low, in the shape of a Corsair H100i Pro XT unit with a 240mm dual fan radiator. Power comes from a 750W Corsair RMX 80 Plus Gold supply, which is adequate for the components installed: we measured a peak of 515W when we pushed it in Blender, and it idles at a very reasonable 56W.

The top edge of the chassis includes discrete analogue audio minijacks for headphones and a microphone, USB-C and a couple of USB-A ports. These will be easily accessible if the case is on the floor by the desk side. Due to the sheer size of the chassis the rear will be tricky to access, but there are two more USB-C ports (one USB 3.2 Gen 2, so 10Gbits/sec, and one USB 3.2 Gen 1 at 5Gbits/sec) and six USB-A ports (two Gen 2, four Gen 1). You will also find connectors for Wi-Fi 6 aerials, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and six audio ports including S/PDIF.

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C review: Performance

If you look back at the professional workstations we’ve reviewed over the last few years, you’ll find almost all of them are united by one factor: AMD inside. That tells its own story. Finally, with Alder Lake, Intel has a chip that can compete at the “mid-range” point of £2,500 to £5,000.

In fact, the Scan’s overall score of 602 in the IT Pro benchmarks were just barely behind the Chillblast Fusion Threadripper Pro RTX 3975WXs Workstation’s score of 676, despite that system costing more than twice the price. The Scan’s results included 260 in image editing, 578 in video encoding and 731 in multitasking, more or less on par with Scan’s own Ryzen Threadripper 3970X-powered 3XS GWP-ME N1-32T. You can expect the slightly faster Intel Core i9-12900KS to pull ahead.

The Cinebench R20 score of 10,192 is also promising, albeit not quite ahead of the Armari Magnetar V16R-RD850G3 and its AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor, which managed 10,972. Considering the 5950X is also a 16-core CPU, but with multithreading across all cores, Intel is doing well here.

Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A4500 graphics reign supreme, too. In SPECviewperf 2020, the 3XS managed 161 in the 3ds Max viewset and 468 in Maya, showing great 3D animation abilities. For engineering and CAD, 125 in Catia, 182 in Creo, 473 in Siemens NX and 302 in SolidWorks imply strong functionality with every platform.

The A4500 also packs potency for compute tasks. The LuxMark 3.1 result of 13,745 is well ahead of the 10,000-odd that’s typical of a Quadro RTX A4000 system, and not far off an A5000, which usually return a little under 16,000.

What we haven’t yet seen is a direct rival to AMD’s Threadripper chips. For example, the outstanding Workstation Specialists WS-1640A-G4 costs less than £5,000 before VAT– but in return you get the horsepower of a 3900X with its 64 cores and 128 threads, which still give it a comfortable lead in performance across almost all of our benchmarks, including more than 100 points in our in-house performance tests and a 250% increase on the 3XS’ Cinebench R20 score.

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C review: Verdict

If there’s one thing that’s clear from the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C, it’s this: Intel is back. The 12th gen Intel Core processor isn’t trouncing AMD just yet, but it’s beating it in some areas and holding its own elsewhere.

In the absence of AMD’s next generation of Ryzen chips, Intel has grabbed back its workstation crown at this price range. Nvidia retains its dominance, with the Quadro RTX A4500 providing another option between A4000 and A5000. And Scan has done an exemplary job of showcasing these components in the 3XS GWP-ME A124C, which we heartily recommend as a content-creation workhorse.

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C specifications

Aimed at home workers and small businesses with a paper mountain to tackle, the Xerox D35 Scanner offers great scanning performance for a small price. For only £210, you get a top speed of 45ppm for colour and mono scans at 200dpi, with speeds only dropping to 35ppm for colour scans at 300dpi.

The D35 is ready for some serious scan action thanks to a high daily duty cycle of 8,000 pages and a capacious 50-page ADF. Its relatively flat paper path helps when scanning heavier media such as photos, and the paper tray guides can be flipped down for scanning documents up to three metres in length.

Installation on a Windows 10 PC took ten minutes, with the routine loading the latest drivers and complete software bundle. Along with the Visioneer OneTouch scan-management app and integral Acuity image-enhancement tools, you get ABBYY’s FineReader OCR software, Capture SE for batch scan management, DriverPlus for scan customisation and the Organiser AI app for slick document management.

Visioneer OneTouch sits quietly in the background and links the scanner’s function button to nine different actions for walk-up scanning. Actions include scans to detected applications on the host, local and network folders, printers, email, fax, FTP and SharePoint servers, while output formats include BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PDF and searchable PDF.

The OneTouch Acuity feature provides anti-skew, auto-crop, de-speckling, page rotation and blank page skipping capabilities. Its redaction feature can obscure areas of a scan with coloured blocks, and for more image-manipulation tools you can call up the TWAIN DriverPlus interface.

To start a scan, you click a OneTouch profile from the system tray or walk up to the scanner, choose an action number and select simplex or duplex operations. In all cases, there is a five-second pause as the app acquires the scanner and then starts the scanning process.

Performance was near perfect, with duplex scans of 30 bank statements returning 44ppm for 200dpi greyscale and colour settings. Stepping up to 300dpi saw greyscale scan speed hold steady and colour drop to 35ppm, but the D35 surprised us with its 600dpi scans, as it achieved an impressive 43ppm for greyscale and 33ppm for colour.

You won’t need the higher resolutions, however, as output quality at 200dpi is perfectly adequate for sPDFs and document archiving. The D35 is very quiet during scanning, and it handled all our documents, receipts and waybills without a single paper jam.

The Organiser AI app will prove useful as it scans the host PC, detects all document types and provides extensive search facilities. It also integrates directly with Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive so you can send files to the cloud simply by dragging them to the icons at the bottom of its interface.

The D35 may be a USB-only scanner, but it has a trick up its sleeve as it can link up with Visioneer’s VAST Network service. Install the Visioneer Network Scan Service Manager app on the host PC and you can share the D35 over the LAN.

Once each client PC has the D35 TWAIN driver, Network Scanner Manager app and network driver installed, it can connect to the scanner and use it as though it were local. We tested this on a networked Windows 10 PC and, after connecting to the scanner, could acquire images from any TWAIN-compliant app and use OneTouch as well.

The Xerox D35 Scanner delivers a lot of features for a very modest outlay, and combines them with good speed and output quality. It’s a great choice for heavy scan workloads, and the network support makes it even more versatile.

Xerox D35 Scanner specifications

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.

3D printers have a range of uses within a business, whether it’s for printing custom circuit boards, scalable prototypes, or precision-moulded parts for a larger machine. Innovative companies have

Whether you’re making the step up to getting your business’ first 3D printer, or simply looking to further invest in the technology, there are a number of tools and accessories that can make your 3D printing experience that much better, regardless of the particular 3D printing use case.

Filament storage container

As anyone who has had the misfortune of having to deal with a 3D printer jam knows, it’s really important that moisture and dirt is kept away from filament as much as possible. Wet filament loses its structural integrity, and will not stick together properly in the printing process.

To that end, there are a range of filament storage containers available, to suit any size and filament type. Although a tightly-shut box could suffice to keep dust out, in wetter climates such as the UK it might not prevent moisture from getting to the filament held within.

This is where containers with desiccant inside come in. A desiccant is any compound that absorbs large amounts of moisture from the air, and they are often packed with products to absorb unwanted moisture. The most common day-to-day example of a desiccant is silica gel, which is often found in packets inside shoe boxes to keep moisture from compromising the quality of the shoes.

Desiccants can work wonders to keep filament dry, but after time will need to themselves be dried out or replaced altogether. Alternatives to using desiccants within filament containers include vacuum-sealed containers, which can efficiently keep filament in pristine condition, or vacuum packets into which conventional containers can be sequestered.

Filament dryers

If you are unable to keep your filament dry, it can be salvaged by being precisely dried. This is where filament dryers come in, offering consistent temperature and humidity control and specifically built with filament in mind.

The more premium filament dryers even have screens that show users temperature readings, and allow for settings to be tweaked to suit exact drying needs.

Digital Calliper

A digital calliper can take the accuracy of your measurements to a new level, providing accurate measurements for every occasion on a handy digital display.

Businesses that invest in a digital calliper can forget having to awkwardly mark a ruler to transfer measurements from one print to the next, with the most accurate models offering readings accurate to three decimal places.

Good quality print beds

A house is only as stable as the foundation that it's built on, and a 3D print is no different. Investing in a good quality print bed can elevate the sturdiness and accuracy of your prints,

Good thermal resistance is a must, as print beds can be heated to 90-110°C during the printing process. Heated beds help to ensure that the first layer of the print remains stable, to prevent the entire structure from sticking to the nozzle and potentially tearing itself apart as the print continues.

Print remover

Even the best quality print materials cannot totally guarantee that prints won’t become fused to the print bed once complete, and in these circumstances it’s important to have a print remover available.

Also known as ‘hot bed shovels’ or ‘spatulas’, print removers are essentially a sharp, flat blade that lets a user scrape their print from the bed without risking damage to the finished product. If you don’t fancy ordering a custom tool online, any good hardware shop will have a scraper/spackle knife in stock, also known as a putty knife. Although these are intended for plastering jobs, they work just the same as a print remover and are even available in larger sizes to suit your needs.

Range of nozzles

Nozzle attachments free you from the confines of your default nozzle width, allowing you to fill larger builds quicker or alternatively achieve a level of detail impossible with larger filament. This could be especially useful for businesses 3D printing custom tools, or even printing custom circuit boards.

Conductive filament

On the previous point, if your business is looking to 3D print circuit boards, 3D printers can go a step further than just setting out a blank board with holes for the conductive element.

Conductive filament can be used to lay down a predefined board pattern, and is made of materials such as carbon fibre and graphene. It’s important to note that 3D printed filament can only take quite a low voltage, so proposed builds must always take into account the manufacturer-defined limits to avoid damage or safety hazards.

Companies offering conductive filament include Protopasta, NinjaTek and Voxelab.

Nozzle cleaning tools

Needles make for ideal nozzle-cleaners, as the sharp and thin tips can get into the nozzle to clear away any excess filament that might be causing problems or even blocking the nozzle entirely.

For best results, it's recommended that you heat the nozzle to melt the excess filament as much as possible, allowing it to be easily scraped away with the sharp tip of the needle.

Specialist cleaning kits are available, with a range of needle sizes and proper grips to prevent unnecessarily fiddly cleaning jobs or even minor injury.

NEC has designed the MultiSync E273F for the new – or at least, new-ish – world of hybrid working. One filled with laptop-based workers who hustle between home, office and coffee shop on any given day, and who would rather not bring their charger with them on their travels.

That’s relevant here because the E273F features a USB-C input capable of delivering 65W to any connected machine; that’s enough power for all the best business laptops. In a hot desking environment, it then makes sense for the USB-A ports at the monitor’s rear to be connected to a keyboard and mouse, with a third USB-A port easily accessible on the side.

Naturally, if this monitor is to be used for hot desking then it must cater for all-comers when it comes to display inputs, so it’s reassuring to see both HDMI and DisplayPort present. One curiosity is that the DisplayPort isn’t compatible with mini-DisplayPort adapters, and when we tested this with our Microsoft Surface Dock (which includes a mini-DisplayPort output) the E273F wouldn’t display anything until we disconnected it. Something to tell your service desk before calls come in complaining about a broken screen.

If a monitor is to be used by a number of different people, then it also needs an intuitive onscreen display, and the E273F achieves this by using text rather than symbols. Press any of the four control buttons on the display’s front and you’re given access to Picture, Sound, Setup and Information, which you navigate by touching the corresponding button; labels appear for Enter, Down, Up or Exit. If your IT team wants to reduce the options then it can activate the OSD lock during setup, giving users the choice of brightness, contrast and volume.

As “volume” indicates, the E273F includes speakers, but think video calls and news bulletins rather than enjoying music or movies. Depth, subtlety and bass aren’t words you will be associating with the E273F’s 1W audio output, but it’s still good to have built-in speakers, and users can take advantage of the side-mounted 3.5mm jack if they connect over USB-C.

Where this monitor surprises is its flexibility and slim bezels. We mention the two together because you could easily put a duo of these screens side by side in portrait format. Because the E273F rotates in both directions (which is by no means always the case), the centimetre-thick bezel at the bottom can be placed at either edge. It’s also joyously easy to twist the screen through a 340° circle – the main limiting factor is the short 1m USB-C cable that comes in the box – and 130mm of smooth height adjustment will make it easy for users to place the MultiSync in the right ergonomic position.

Then we come to the 27in panel itself. As you may have anticipated considering the price, it’s a Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 panel rather than a 2,560 x 1,440 or even 4K display. While more pixels are always welcome, a Full HD resolution is enough to satisfy the needs of most office workers. We replaced our regular 4K 32in display with the E273F for three weeks during our tests, and in general use – such as web browsing, email, writing, Wordle – we found it to be perfectly sufficient. Sometimes even helpful, as you generally have one window open rather than a jumble. But there were times when we wished it was 1440p instead, especially when working in data-dense spreadsheets.

Naturally, we put the panel through a bunch of technical tests along with real-world ones. NEC quotes a typical peak brightness of 250cd/m2, and our unit hit 255cd/m2 with its native colour profile. This covered 86% of the sRGB gamut (out of a 96% volume) with an average Delta E of 1.43, 1,020:1 contrast ratio and 7048K colour temperature.

You can use the OSD to switch to its sRGB profile, which increased sRGB coverage a fraction (to 88%) but more tellingly adjusted the colour temperature to 6379K. So, closer to that gamut’s target of 6500K. If that doesn’t sound like much of a difference then you’re right, but we were more than happy with the crisp whites and colour coverage when using the panel at its native and sRGB settings. You can also jump to temperature presets of 7500K and 9300K if you prefer.

In many ways, then, this is a simple, conservative monitor. It won’t dazzle you with colours, but it will impress with its whites. It’s only a Full HD panel, but that panel comes wrapped up in a slim bezel and is supported by a flexible and solidly built stand. And while the MultiSync’s list price is around £290 exc VAT, it’s far more likely to be bought in bulk, with discounts to match. If you intend to update your office with hotdesking-friendly monitors in either black or white finishes, the E273F is a great-value and high-quality choice.

NEC MultiSync E273F specifications

Small businesses and home workers short on desk space will appreciate Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX1300, as it packs plenty of document-digitising features into a footprint that’s only 296 x 114mm. It’s good value, too, with the scanner combining a choice of USB or 802.11n wireless connections with fast 30ppm scan speeds.

The iX1300 doesn’t need any space in front for ejected documents either, as it employs a smart motorised telescopic stacker. Just put your documents in the pop-up 20-page ADF and when scanning starts, the stacker automatically rises, extends itself and then closes back down again after the last page has been scanned.

The iX1300 comes with Fujitsu’s ScanSnap Home software, which is designed to make scanning a simple, one-tap operation. It’s swift to install; we visited the website provided in the quick start manual, downloaded the latest version and plugged in the scanner to a USB port on our Windows 10 host when instructed.

The utility ran a firmware update and guided us through creating a wireless connection, after which we dispensed with the USB cable. The routine loaded Fujitsu’s online update utility, which checks for new drivers plus OCR language packs and also downloaded the free ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap software.

ScanSnap Home provides a set of default scan profiles, with the Auto-Scan profile initially assigned to the scanner’s button. This makes light work of scanning as it detects the type of document loaded, automatically applies the most appropriate scan settings and saves them to a folder of your choosing.

You can create new profiles or use existing ones and modify their settings for resolution, colour, greyscale or mono scans, simplex or duplex operations and scan destinations. Output formats can be JPEG, PDF or sPDF, and the latter two options can also be password-protected.

A standout feature is support for direct scanning to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and OneDrive cloud accounts. To use them, you need the relevant desktop app loaded on your host PC and logged into the accounts you want to send the scans to.

You’ll need to use ScanSnap Home for all scanning operations, as Fujitsu doesn’t provide a TWAIN driver for acquiring images into third-party products. This isn’t a deal breaker, though; we created new profiles that loaded the ABBYY FineReader app, applied OCR and converted documents to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and sPDF formats.

Scans are started by selecting a profile from ScanSnap Home and clicking on its central display or by highlighting a profile and using the scanner’s button. Either way, the iX1300 delivered on its speed promises, with a sheaf of 20 bank statements returning a perfect 30ppm for greyscale and colour scans at both 200dpi and 300dpi resolutions.

Stepping up to the top 600dpi setting saw speed for greyscale and colour scans drop to 9.4ppm. You’ll only need to use this higher resolution for photos, though, as output quality and OCR accuracy for general document scans at 200dpi are excellent.

Paper handling was fairly good, although the ADF can only take 20 sheets of 80gsm paper and occasionally fell over with double feeds when we used heavier 100gsm paper. That said, the iX1300 has a handy manual feed slot at the front for bulkier items such as booklets, and its return path feature means you don’t even need to open the scanner’s cover to use it.

The iX1300 is a clever little wireless desktop scanner that’s an affordable choice for small businesses and home workers. The versatile ScanSnap Home software makes scanning a breeze, and it delivers good speeds and output quality.

Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1300 specifications

It’s not often that we delve into the kind of hardware targeted at Twitch streamers. The brilliance of the Stream Deck, however, is that it has many uses beyond playing a police siren sound effect to a watching audience.

The Stream Deck is a 15-button panel that can be used to control all manner of things: Windows PC or Mac, Photoshop or PowerPoint, Spotify or Slack. Anything that accepts keyboard shortcuts is basically compatible with the Elgato Stream Deck Mk.2.

This second version is a minor upgrade to the model we reviewed last year, and is now only part of a range of Stream Decks that span from the six-button Mini version right through to the 32-button XL. This 15-button panel hits the sweet spot on the price/utility axis as far as we’re concerned, although others will prefers the XL’s greater flexibility.

The Mk.2 addresses one of the key issues with the original model – its captive power cord. This one now connects to the computer via a standard USB-C cable, meaning that if the cable fails you don’t need to bin the entire device. On that note, Elgato recommends you don’t connect it via a USB hub, although we’ve never had any problems doing so.

The other big change is the design of the stand. The original had a flimsy, deckchair-like stand that offered adjustable mounting angles but could easily collapse if buttons were prodded firmly. The Mk.2 has a much sturdier but fixed-position stand. Your only option is to remove the screen from the stand entirely and lay it flat. The deck now comes in white, too, and there’s a selection of face plates if pimping your kit is your thing.

The hardware updates are modest, then, and we certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone with the first model rush out to buy this. The experience is near identical. However, if you haven’t invested before now, the new Stream Deck is definitely worth considering, as the software it runs on Includes some majorly useful functions. This includes plugins, which are basically pre-baked sets of shortcuts for specific apps.

The PowerPoint plugin, for example, includes shortcuts that make slideshow navigation easier, with presets to jump to the next, previous, first or last slide. The Stream Deck’s buttons are soft-touch, by the way, so if you’re presenting slides remotely or in person, viewers won’t hear button clicks. There are other plugins that let you control Philips Hue lights, Cubase, Discord and Spotify, to name but a few. And not all the plugins are designed to control apps: there’s one that uses a Stream Deck button to display your current CPU usage, for instance, while another places world clocks on the LCD buttons.

If you can’t find a plugin for an app or it doesn’t do what you want, you can always bake your own. The Stream Deck makes it supremely easy to program your own shortcuts. We created a set for Adobe Lightroom, which includes features with hard-to-remember keyboard shortcuts such as the clipping tool or the before/after edit comparison. You can use your own screenshots as the button icons for your homemade shortcuts or choose from the huge libraries of icons that Elgato provides. All the icons and plugins are free, too.

The other big step feature in terms of usability is pages. The Stream Deck might have only 15 buttons, but you can have an effectively infinite number of programmed buttons, because the device allows you to flick to a new set of icons on the next page. The Stream Deck also supports folders, so you can nest shortcuts for multiple apps under one button.

And that’s before we even get to the really complex stuff. The Stream Deck supports “multi-actions”, which means you can execute multiple commands with a single button press. We have a button that opens our email client, TweetDeck and web browser showing the BBC News site, for example, helping us to get started in the mornings. You can use a Stream Deck button to trigger a Mac Shortcut or a Web Hook via IFTTT, potentially allowing that single button press to set off entire chains of events on different devices.

It does all this on top of the functions that streamers might want it for, including starting/stopping streams, playing music beds or sound effects (many of which are included with the software), controlling lighting and much more.

All told, the Stream Deck is an extraordinarily flexible device for which we’re constantly finding new uses. If the £140 price proves prohibitive, you might find cheaper originals on eBay, but we’re certain you won’t regret your purchase either way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canon Pixma Pro-200 specifications

The ‘P word’ is dreaded by IT teams and techies the world over. It’s sometimes said there are three certainties in life: life, death, and there always being someone needing help printing from their laptop. From tech-phobic family members to employees who can’t figure out the myriad buttons on the company copier, printer problems are perhaps the most common source of frustration in IT.

Adding a new printer to a Windows 10 laptop is among the most common support tasks, but thankfully, it's a relatively straightforward process - albeit one that can be problematic in some instances. Following the instructions supplied by your printer’s manufacturer in the box can provide the solution in most cases, but there may be times when things need a little troubleshooting.

Regardless of whether it's wired or wireless, printing is still essential for many facets of modern life, despite the rise in digital document-signing, e-tickets for events, and other once-physical products shifting to a digital model. This means having a working printer is paramount to living and working efficiently, and this guide should provide everything you need to get up and running in a hurry.

How to download printer drivers

If you're having problems with connecting to your printer, the first thing to take care of is making sure you have the correct drivers installed. Drivers are small programs that essentially provide a translation service. They take the data your laptop wants to send to the printer and convert it so the printer understands what the computer is trying to tell it.

Manufacturers used to provide customers with the necessary drivers for the printer in the box, in the form of a CD-ROM. Nowadays, it’s commonplace for printers to either install them for you when you first connect to the laptop, or to instruct users to download them from the web.

Printer manufacturers all have dedicated pages on their websites where customers can download and install the right drivers for their printer. These pages aren’t always easy to find, though, and the best way to find the right page is to search for ‘[manufacturer] printer drivers download’ in your favourite search engine and the first result (minus any adverts) should take you to the right page.

How to connect a wireless printer to a Windows 10 laptop

Providing the printer has been turned on and connected to the network - the set-up instructions for which will be provided by the manufacturer - the device should be easily located in the Windows Settings app.

1. Click the Start menu.
2. Select Settings.
3. From the resulting options, select Devices.
4. Then select Printers & scanners.
5. Click Add a printer or scanner and wait for Windows to finish scanning for printers on the network.
6. Once the scan is complete, select your printer - it should appear as the model number - and select Add device.
7. You should now be able to select the printer when choosing to print from a web browser, office software, or any other application.

How to connect to wireless printers

If for whatever reason you cannot see your printer in the Windows settings, it’s likely the issue is located in the network itself. Luckily, this is usually very easy to troubleshoot.

To ace a wireless printer setup, it’s important to check the little details. For individuals running networks with multiple frequencies - which use the same internet line but may have different connections, the most common being 2.4GHz and 5GHz - double check both the laptop and printer are connected to the same SSID. The same goes for set-ups involving wireless extenders or multiple routers - both the laptop and printer must be on the exact same connection.

How to connect a wired printer to a Windows 10 laptop

Wired printers often come with fewer issues when connecting, as it’s usually a simple task involving plugging the printer’s USB cable into the Windows 10 laptop. This may install some drivers before it becomes usable, and sometimes you will have to manually install them yourself. See above for how to navigate this process.

1. Click the Start menu
2. Select Settings
3. From the resulting options, select Devices
4. Then select Printers & scanners
5. Click Add a printer or scanner and wait for Windows to finish scanning for available printers
6. Choose your printer and select Add device

If Windows does not find your printer when scanning on step 5, select The printer that I want isn't listed and the on-screen instructions will tell you how to manually add the printer. From there, you should be ready to print from any application on your laptop.

Epson’s WorkForce DS-790WN is ideal for businesses that don’t want to dedicate a host system to their scanning operations, as along with a standard USB 3 port, this desktop model has integral Gigabit LAN and 802.11n wireless services. Its fast 45ppm scan speed for colour and mono documents means it can digitise your documents in double quick time and, at £499, it’s priced right for those on tight budgets.

The scanner is built to handle high demand, with a quoted 7,000-sheet daily duty cycle and a capacious 100-page ADF. It looks up to the job, too: its sturdy input paper guides kept our large bank statement bundles firmly in place during scanning, and its long paper mode can scan fan-fold documents and banners up to six metres in length.

The large 10.9cm colour touchscreen is perfect for walk-up scanning with icons for sending documents directly to computers, network folders, FTP servers, email, a local USB stick, cloud storage providers and Windows PCs using WSD (web services for devices). Computers are displayed in the touchscreen once they have Epson’s software installed, while the other network destinations are enabled from the scanner’s web console.

For direct to email scans, we set up our SMTP mail server and added email contacts (up to 300 are supported), after which they appeared in the touchscreen for quick access. Cloud scanning is configured from Epson’s Connect portal and, after registering the scanner, we could create destinations for Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and EverNote.

Networked over Gigabit Ethernet, installation on our Windows 10 PCs was quick. A single utility handles device discovery, driver downloads, installing Epson’s Scan 2 and Document Capture Pro utilities and checking for firmware updates.

The Scan 2 utility provides plenty of scan controls and is loaded when acquiring scans from third-party products using the TWAIN driver. You can select a resolution, colour, greyscale or mono scans, document and contents skew correction, simplex or duplex operations and blank page skipping.

Advanced settings offer text enhancement, brightness and contrast controls, and punch hole removal, plus watermark addition and an option to send images to two destinations simultaneously. Along with local and network folder destinations, you can select BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PDF and sPDF output formats, and save the settings as quick access profiles.

Epson’s Document Capture Pro provides excellent scan-management tools. You can create a range of jobs that comprise scan settings, output formats and destinations, job separation using options such as barcodes, patch codes or OCR detection areas, and save them for one-click access. Each PC appears in the scanner’s touchscreen so scans can be sent directly to them, and assigning button numbers to selected jobs on each PC makes them available for selection as well.

Performance is superb, with our stack of 30 bank statements swiftly dispatched at the quoted 45ppm for greyscale and colour scans at both 200dpi and 300dpi resolutions. Increasing the resolution to 600dpi also returned respectable speeds of 12.4ppm.

You won’t need a higher resolution for document archiving, however, as output quality at 200dpi is fine for these tasks, with Epson’s OCR services correctly converting every word on our statements down to 6pt fonts. The scanner was very quiet when scanning our test documents and its paper handling was near perfect, with only the occasional courier waybill causing the ultrasonic jam detection to be activated.

The WorkForce DS-790WN has every scanning angle covered, making it a great choice for business that want standalone digitising services. Its touchscreen makes walk-up scanning a breeze, Epson provides lots of scan-management tools and it delivers great speed and quality.

Epson WorkForce DS-790WN specifications

Shenzhen-based Obsbot describes the Tiny 4K as an “AI-powered PTZ 4K webcam”, and unusually, it actually delivers on the AI promise. Combined with the pan, tilt and zoom features that PTZ is short for, it removes many annoyances associated with video calls.

Take something as simple as your position within the frame. Similarly to Apple’s Center Stage feature, the Tiny 4K is clever enough to follow you as you move around. It doesn’t do it using digital zoom, but by rotating itself on its gimbal so that you can still enjoy a crisp 4K resolution. The only time you lose that is if you zoom in, as this is a digital effect, not an optical one.

You can also set a zoom preset that means – with a gesture – you can tell the camera to crop to your head and shoulders during a call. Repeat the gesture and it cancels the zoom and returns to the full view. We found it works best when there’s a relatively clear background behind your hand, and it may take a few practice goes before it becomes second nature, but it’s a nice feature. And if for some reason it doesn’t work, you can jump into the app to manually change the zoom (and pan and tilt).

This would all be for nought if the image quality was mediocre, but the Tiny 4K produces a well-balanced and detailed image. There’s little noise, even in low light, and the colours are excellent. The auto focus works well – if you hold something up to the camera, say – and while we’re not wholly convinced by the HDR feature, it gives a lift in tougher lighting conditions.

Obsbot builds a dual microphone into the base of the camera, which will cut out some background noise through, you guessed it, AI. And one of the nicest features is its privacy mode, where the camera points directly downwards on command.

There are a couple of rough edges. The software is cluttered with options once you head into the settings, and could prove confusing at first glance. The unit is also best attached to a monitor rather than a laptop, because the stand is only properly secure once you remove a tape over the adhesive.

Again, though, Obsbot shows its smarts by using a magnetic base. So you can permanently attach the stand to your monitor, and then temporarily remove the Tiny 4K to sit in a freeform position on your desk, say. Or attach it to a tripod using the screw slot on its underside. In fact, the only real downside to this webcam is its price, which is sturdy at almost £250. You can save around £100 by choosing the 1080p version instead, but that will lead to blurrier zoomed-in images. Personally though, we would advise swallowing the extra cost.

Obsbot Tiny 4K specifications

The Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 isn’t just a gaming monitor – it’s the first gaming screen with a 4K resolution and 240Hz refresh rate. And while that might not sound suitable for work, there are plenty of reasons why this panel could make professional sense.

The 4K resolution delivers loads of on-screen space, for starters, and the Neo’s 1000R curve matches the shape of the human eye – which means better viewing angles and reduced eye strain.

It’s an impressive proposition, but the Neo G8 costs £1,083 exc VAT, so it’s hardly cheap – indeed, it’s far pricier than conventional office screens, unless you consider pro-level design and photography displays. Can it find a place among the best business monitors?

Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 review: Design

Samsung’s 32in unit has a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution, which means a density level of 137.68ppi. That’s a superb start for any screen, whether it’s a gaming display or professional panel, and it means that the Neo G8 delivers crisp imagery and text alongside loads of on-screen space, while professional users have plenty of room to zoom in on creative tasks or use multiple windows.

Underneath the 32in display you’ll find Quantum Mini LEDs. They’re Samsung’s proprietary version of the Mini LEDs that can be found in high-end TVs, and there are 1,196 of them inside the Neo. They can turn off and alter their brightness levels independently, and they’re brighter and more versatile than conventional backlighting systems. It’s as close as you’ll get to OLED technology without the extortionate price tag.

It’s important not to overlook the Neo G8’s gaming credentials when so many people work at home or use hybrid working arrangements. The 4K resolution, Quantum Mini LEDs and 240Hz refresh rate mean that the Neo G8 offers unparalleled quality among 16:9 gaming screens, but you will need a hugely powerful graphics card to run the latest titles.

Unsurprisingly, the Samsung Neo G8 includes more tech than any conventional business monitor. If you spend this much on a professional product you’ll get a 4K panel without Quantum Mini LEDs or a 240Hz refresh rate, and the handful of 4K OLED panels available either cost more than £2,749 exc VAT or have vast 48in diagonals. If you want to spend this cash on a gaming panel, expect a Samsung Neo G9 widescreen or settle for a 4K screen with few of the Neo’s features.

There’s an awful lot of innovation inside the G8, but it looks just as bold on the outside. The base is wide and made from sandblasted metal, and the rear uses glossy white plastic.

Happily, the Neo G8 has plenty of adjustment options too: you get 120mm of height adjustment, 22 degrees of tilt and 30 degrees of swivel, and compatibility with 100mm VESA mounts. The Neo rotates into portrait mode, too, which isn’t a given on a large gaming screen, and especially not on curved displays.

In other areas, though, the Neo G8’s physical design disappoints. While the back of the display is robust, it’s too easy to wobble when nudged. You don’t get tool-free building here, either. And with a weight of 8.9kg and a depth of 310mm, it’s not a small screen - so make sure your desk has enough room to comfortably accommodate it.

Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 review: Image quality

This VA screen is a heavyweight in more than just the physical sense, however. It’s got 10-bit colour with 12-bit gradation, and Samsung says that it renders 100% of the sRGB colour space and 95% of the DCI-P3 gamut. The 240Hz refresh rate with adaptive sync might not be a professional feature, but it makes motion smoother and will aid animations and game designers.

That sounds great on paper, and the Neo G8 doesn’t disappoint in benchmarks. Out of the box the G8’s brightness level of 192cd/m2 was joined by a stunning 0.02cd/m2 black point thanks to those Quantum Mini LEDs. The resulting contrast ratio of 9,600:1 is sensational – far beyond any IPS or VA screen with conventional backlighting. The 240Hz synchronised refresh rate delivers butter-smooth motion in games, animation apps and everyday tools, and the backlight variation level of just 7.7% means impressive uniformity.

The huge contrast ratio means the G8 supplies vibrant, nuanced, and bold imagery with incredible depth. If you need a display for content creation, the G8 will be great, and this screen makes web browsers, everyday apps and games look incredible too.

Switch over to HDR mode and the Neo continues to impress. The panel delivered a consistent peak brightness level of 1,411cd/m2 and its black point remained at 0.02cd/m2, which means a maximum contrast ratio of 70,550:1. Combine that with the complexity on offer from the Quantum Mini LEDs and you’ve got a display that does justice to HDR material.

That brilliant contrast performance means everything looks superb, but the Neo G8 can’t quite keep up with colour accuracy. The panel’s average Delta E of 2.17 is good, but the maximum Delta E of 4.14 is a bit too high, and it sits alongside a slightly warm colour temperature of 6,065K.

They’re not bad results, and they mean that the G8 can handle any everyday task, including mainstream creative and design work, alongside games and media. But if you want to tackle top-tier photography and graphics jobs, you’ll get more accuracy from a true professional display.

The Neo’s gamut figures underline this situation. The G8 did a sterling job with sRGB colours, rendering 99.5% of the space, but it only rendered 91.2% of the DCI-P3 gamut. That’s good enough for mainstream HDR work and HDR games, but professionals will want closer to 100%. An 80.7% Adobe RGB coverage level also precludes the G8 from working in that space.

The Neo might not have flawless image quality, but it’s bright, deep and vibrant, and it has good colours. For the vast majority of professional workloads it’s very capable. If you’d like to go beyond the Neo with a display that can nail the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB gamuts with improved accuracy, you can pick up a high-end specialist panel like the BenQ PD2705Q, Dell UltraSharp 25 USB-C or the Philips Moda 27 for less half the price - although you won’t get a lot of the fancier features or the classy design.

Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 review: Ports and features

You’ll need plenty of bandwidth to run this screen properly and fully use those Quantum Mini LEDs, but happily the two HDMI 2.1 ports and single DisplayPort 1.4 socket can handle it. The rear also houses two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and a headphone jack. That’s fine connectivity, but the downward-facing ports are tricky to reach, and it’s a bit disappointing to see no USB charging and no USB-C.

Samsung’s on-screen display remains excellent, with a row of status indicators above sensible and responsive menus, and Samsung’s quick-access options enable fast source switching alongside rapid brightness and contrast adjustment. The Neo G8 has picture-in-picture options that support two display inputs at 120Hz. There’s also a widescreen mode that switches the screen to a 3,840 x 1,600 resolution, which will enable a wider field of view in games.

However, a D-Pad beneath the bottom bezel navigates the menu – and it’s not very good. The soft-touch buttons sit almost flush with the monitor casing, which makes them hard to grip, and they require too much force to activate.

Naturally, because this is a gaming display, the Neo G8 also includes RGB LEDs. There’s a ring of lights around the rear and two lines of lighting on the front. The G8 has a feature called CoreSync that matches their colour to on-screen action to provide ambient lighting, but the lights aren’t bright enough to have an impact unless you’re gaming in the dark. Customisation is also limited to 52 colours rather than the entire RGB gamut, which is a little disappointing.

Samsung’s panel has a cable-routing hook but doesn’t have a headphone hook or speakers, and since this isn’t a hard-nosed business display, don’t expect a KVM or built-in webcam. You’ll often find that professional displays have longer warranties, too – the Neo G8 only has one year of coverage.

Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 review: Verdict

Despite those physical issues, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 is undoubtedly one of the world’s best gaming monitors. Look beyond that, and there are plenty of professional situations where the Neo can work well. Its huge resolution makes it easy to spread out windows and apps, the curve is immersive, and the Quantum Mini LED-powered backlight delivers huge contrast, depth and punch. Combine that with the decent colours and you’ve got a screen that can tackle many professional and creative workloads.

That said, the Samsung doesn’t have the accuracy or gamut ability for the most demanding colour-sensitive scenarios. It’s missing some features that you’ll find included on proper pro displays, and many of those screens will have longer warranties. The £1,083 exc VAT price is extremely steep, too.

If you’re willing to pay, though, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 combines world-leading gaming imagery with the quality to tackle most work tasks. If you’re a home worker or want the best of both worlds, that makes it a tempting proposition.

Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 Specifications

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and this almost unprecedented device - containing a combined webcam, microphone array, speaker and light - is the living proof. As the way we work has changed since 2020, companies have had to adapt to the new reality. Anker, perhaps better known for their high end cables and chargers, has expanded its ‘Ankerwork’ suite of office products with a well thought out desk companion that solves a wealth of needs for a single price tag.

Ankerwork B600 Video Bar review: Design

The B600 certainly isn’t a small device. It’s around twice the size of a standard webcam, meaning that if you’re using a laptop, you’ll probably opt to have it freestanding or threaded onto a desk mount, as it took a certain amount of skill to get it to sit comfortably even on a 27in monitor. There’s a camera cover for complete privacy, which doubles as a housing for the lighting; a good example of the intelligent design on show here.

At the rear are two USB-C ports, one for power and one to connect to your machine. It’s worth mentioning at this point that the B600 is a thirsty beast and requires both to be used - even a slightly lower current is enough to throw this hungry device offline. That leads nicely into the only real niggle we have - the supplied USB-C power supply has a cable so short it barely reaches the desk, so if you don’t like having 4-gang extensions on your desk, you might want to invest in an alternative of your own. In the great scheme of things, it’s a minor niggle, but at best, it’s a confusing choice.

Also on the rear of the unit is a single USB-A port. This is designed to accommodate the dongle supplied with Ankerwork’s wireless headsets, if you’d prefer a private conversation rather than using the built-in pair of 2W speakers.

Ankerwork B600 Video Bar review: Setup

Ankerwork products can all be controlled from a single app, available for Windows and MacOS, as well as Android and iOS - which is great news for Chromebook and iPad users. The best way to describe the app is “dynamic” in that it morphs its look and options, depending on which combination of products you have connected. Simply install the software, open it, tell it to add a product and it will do the rest - it really is that simple.

Although the B600 is compatible with any software where you’d usually use a webcam, speakers and microphones, there are some overriding settings available in the app which are worth taking ten minutes to configure. These include whether it should adjust the luminosity of the light to compensate for ambient light levels, and whether to ‘follow’ you with the face tracking feature. There’s also a wealth of options to adjust tint, contrast and other aspects of picture quality, but we found the defaults were more than ample. Once all this is done, you can fire up your chosen videoconferencing app, and get chatting.

Ankerwork B600 Video Bar review: Performance

Anker has never been a company to do “just enough”, and the full 1080p webcam in the B600 produces images that we’d go so far as to say are ‘broadcast quality’. We were amazed with the crisp, clean picture, excellent colour reproduction and natural looking facial reproduction thanks to the built-in light bar, even in otherwise low light.

This can all be set to auto-adjust using Anker’s MagicSight algorithm. The facial recognition software also ensures you’re always centred in the frame; some video-conferencing products (such as Meta’s Portal TV, for example) tend to move unnecessarily, but the B600 manages to keep itself still unless its absolutely needed. In a huddle room scenario with multiple subjects, however, it can get a little confused, so in these instances it’s preferable to turn this feature off in favour of a wide angle of the room.

The four-mic array provides excellent reproduction and thanks to the VoiceRadar feature, the B600 can pick out your voice, while simultaneously cancelling out background noise - great for homeworkers who want to block the sound of kids, vacuum cleaners or roadworks. Meanwhile, just as the camera follows your face, the mic array can still pick out your voice from up to 2m away, if you have to run to grab a pen and paper.

The two side-embedded 2W speakers pack the kind of punch that means they’re great for listening to music through, as well as being more than sufficient to be able to hear voices in an online meeting, though there remains the option to pair with a compatible Ankerwork headset for a more personal, hands-free experience. As an aside, the Ankerwork headsets come with free AI-powered transcription, making them well worth a look too.

Ankerwork B600 Video Bar review: Verdict

As we enter the post-pandemic way of working, it’s a credit to Anker that they’ve produced what is essentially an entirely new product category, and got it more-or-less right first time. At £220, it’s an investment, but that’s exactly the point - this is a product that does away with several others, and manages to outperform all of them. It’s a product that you’ll be using for years to come, and the only challenge left for Anker is how its successor will manage to top it.

Even the accompanying Ankerwork software is a significant cut above average, and actually becomes more useful as you add more products from the range. It’s a neat trick, and it’s an even neater one to design a product that’s equally at home in a bedroom office or a corporate boardroom. For this reason, we have no hesitation in giving it our full recommendation.

Ankerwork B600 Video Bar specifications

Small offices and mobile workers that want a videoconferencing (VC) solution that puts everyone in shot will love Maxhub’s UC M40. This slim metal baton sports a 5-megapixel 4K camera with four lenses arranged around the top to deliver a full 360-degree panoramic field of view (FoV).

Measuring 68mm on each side and only 182mm tall, the UC M40 is one of the smallest panoramic cameras we’ve seen, and its 450g weight makes it highly portable. This compactness doesn’t come at the cost of features, either, as the UC M40 is very well endowed.

Inside is an array of four omnidirectional mics used for active speaker tracking. You can see these in action as the upper surface has a circular blue indicator that shows where it has detected a voice.

There’s much more to this camera than an all-round view, however. In Standalone mode its smart image manipulation offers a choice of seven different visual presentations. You don’t need to load any software, and you can swap between each view using the mode button located below the front lens.

The first two views link up with the camera’s active speaker tracking. The Discussion mode places a panoramic view along the bottom with views of the two most recent speakers above, while the Beamforming mode changes the two upper windows to a single 180-degree view that focuses on the current speaker.

The five other modes don’t use speaker tracking and offer a choice of single panoramic or split screen with different compositions of the four available views. The camera uses Maxhub’s “hyperstitching” technology to bring the lens images together and does a fine job. The only way we could see the joins was by moving our hand all the way around the camera body.

You can have even more fun by swapping to the Professional mode and using Maxhub’s PanoCAM Studio software to create up to seven custom views. These range from a Compose mode that combines a panorama with six close-up views of participants to a Presentation mode that can be used to show a whiteboard along with the active speaker.

In Standalone mode, we connected the camera’s USB port to a Windows 10 host computer and added power. You can use just a USB connection, but this only provides enough juice for the camera and will disable audio.

The UC M40 is UVC-compliant so will work with any VC app that supports this. We had no problems using it with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype and Cisco WebEx. Video quality at 1080p is very good, with a sharp focus and good colour balance and, although the internal 3W speaker is small, we could clearly hear remote participants in our huddle room.

We found the Discussion and Beamforming modes worked perfectly, with the tracking views snapping instantly to the active speaker the moment they started talking. We were also impressed with the mic array’s ability to identify human voices and reject other sounds such as hand clapping, paper rustling and keyboard clatter.

The PanoCAM Studio software is equally easy to use and we had no problems designing a range of custom views. In Presentation mode, we could draw a box in the main panoramic view that we wanted the camera to focus on and activate facial tracking so it followed the presenter as they moved around.

To use the custom views in your preferred VC app, you’ll have to leave the software running in the background and select its Studio Camera device as the video source. It worked fine with Microsoft Teams, and a feature we really liked was the ability to swap between any of the six custom views during meetings.

Maxhub’s innovative UC M40 offers a refreshingly new perspective on video meetings. Easy to set up and use, it has a view for every occasion, good video quality, and is an affordable choice for small businesses.

Maxhub UC M40 specifications

Coming in at the entry point of Canon’s family of imageFormula desktop scanners, the R40 offers home workers and small offices an affordable solution that’s easy to set up and use. It’s a standalone USB-only device with no network capabilities and, for the price, claims good speeds of 40ppm for mono scans at 300dpi and 30ppm for colour scans.

An advantage of USB scanners is their simple installation process. We chose a Windows 10 host PC, ran a single utility to load the TWAIN drivers plus the CaptureOnTouch 4 software, and plugged the scanner in.

There are some compromises: the R40 comes with the basic CaptureOnTouch Standard version so you don’t get the batch scanning and barcode recognition features of the Pro version. Furthermore, only Canon’s higher-end desktop scanners include the CapturePerfect scan editing tool and Kofax VRS (Virtual ReScan) image-enhancement app.

To be fair, the target market is unlikely to need these tools, and we found the software to be very capable with plenty of scan automation features. It links document and output profiles together and can assign nine shortcuts to the scanner’s single-digit LED display for fast walk-up scans.

Document profiles group together settings for colour or mono scans, resolution, simplex or duplex modes, blank page skipping and image straightening and rotation. The advanced setting option disables these and loads the TWAIN driver, which can be used to configure all the basic scan settings and apply extra functions such as brightness and contrast controls, background smoothing and shadow removal.

Output profiles determine where scans will be sent. Along with support for local and network folders, the installation routine pre-installs nine extra plugins. These allow CaptureOnTouch to send scanned documents to user–defined apps, printers, FTP or SharePoint servers and email, plus Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and SugarSync cloud storage.

Profiles convert scans to PNG, BMP, JPG, TIFF and PPTX formats, while OCR is automatically applied when PDF is selected. If you choose the email option, CaptureOnTouch doesn’t send the scan directly but loads whatever client app is installed on the host PC and creates a new blank message with the scanned document attached.

Cloud scanning is also basic: the app simply sends the scans straight to your local sync folder. However, the setup manual has a link for a free download of the ReadIris Pro 16 OCR software, which supports direct scanning to cloud storage accounts.

The R40 combines a generous 60-page ADF with a 4,000-page daily duty cycle. Performance is a mixed bag, though, with duplex greyscale scans of 30 bank statements returning 46ppm at 200dpi and 300dpi, 6ppm faster than Canon’s claim.

Colour speeds were less impressive. The R40 delivered the quoted 30ppm at 200dpi, but dropped to 21.2ppm at 300dpi. The difference was more marked at 600dpi, with 16.8ppm greyscale and 4.6ppm colour scans.

The higher resolutions won’t be required for general document archiving as we found 200dpi produces perfectly sharp images with fonts down to 6pt correctly converted for searchable PDFs. Paper handling is also impeccable: the R40 had no problems with our collection of till receipts and flimsy courier waybills and will scan passports when placed in Canon’s optional carrier sheets.

Performance is inconsistent, but the imageFormula R40 offers a scan-friendly package at a good price. The scan management software will cover most basic requirements, making this a good choice for small offices and home workers that don’t require network support.

Canon imageFormula R40 specifications

The HP Envy Inspire 7920e will look very familiar to anyone who has seen or used anything from the HP Inspire series – in particular, the HP Envy 7224e, which bears an almost identical design. However, there is one clear addition here, in that it has a 35-page auto-document feeder above the A4 flatbed scanner. 

The Inspire 7224e was far from perfect, but it had the feel of a machine that was designed by teams that had clearly spent time in a home office; its ease of use, its unobtrusive style, and the simplicity of its maintenance tools. On first impression, the same is true of the 7920e, though it is further enhanced with more scope for multi-page scanning and copying.

However, at 46cm wide and 38cm deep, the HP Envy Inspire 7920e is hardly compact. The two-tone off-white and beige color scheme does a considerable job of making it blend into its surroundings, though any walls that clash will emphasize the printer's bulk. However, it's worth pointing out that size works in its favor; the build quality is solid, and that is particularly notable for a relatively inexpensive machine.

HP Envy Inspire 7224e review: Performance

The 7920e has a maximum monthly duty cycle of 1000 pages, and HP states the target use case is a small team of under 5 people printing roughly 400 pages a month. In that case, the 125-sheet main input tray should be perfectly adequate, while there’s space for envelopes, cards, and photo paper in the secondary tray above. This strictly takes 6x4 and 5x7in photo sheets – we couldn’t get A5 photo paper to print correctly from either tray. All the same, for home office purposes, you’ll spend most of your time printing A4 documents, anyway.

The controls are minimal, with most operations covered through the 2.7in touchscreen, which helpfully tilts upwards so that you don’t need to crouch down just to see what’s going on. Here you’ll find basic settings, black-and-white and colour photocopying and shortcuts to scan to a specific device. All setup and configuration, meanwhile, happens through the HP Smart smartphone app.

This does an excellent job of setup, connecting to a network, inserting the paper and ink cartridges and running through the hassle-free alignment process. Once that’s done, you can print straight from your smartphone or tablet, the macOS or Windows companion app, or simply use the standard Windows driver, which gets installed when Windows 10 or 11 picks up the printer automatically.

Needless to say, there’s pressure during setup to sign up for HP’s HP+ and Instant Ink services, with warnings to stick to the safe path of official HP supplies rather than using third-party ink cartridges, but you can skip through if you’d rather avoid any such subscription, even if it’s arguably the smarter way to run this printer.

Print speeds are, unsurprisingly, on a par with the 7224e, meaning they’re decent rather than fast. The first page of our 24-page black and white text document arrived in 18 seconds, with subsequent pages coming through at a speed of 12.3ppm. Dropping down to draft quality boosted that to 16 seconds and 12.5ppm. The first page of a coloured document with a mix of text and business graphics took 25 seconds to hit the output tray, with the remaining pages appearing at a rate of 3.5ppm.

The 7920e also supports duplex printing, at speeds of roughly 7ppm, and has the same Quiet mode as the 7224e. This adjusts the print engine to lower the noise output, and while the reduction isn’t huge, it’s focused on the noises and pitches that are most likely to disturb other people. That might be crucial in a home environment where other people are trying to sleep or work – and could even be very useful in the average office.

Text quality is excellent on the better and best quality settings and passable even on draft. The 7920e also does a fine job with business graphics; they look crisp and well-defined, with smooth graduated fills and accurate colours.

The 7920e also does a better job of photo printing than you might expect from an office device. Despite having a fairly ordinary four-colour, 1200dpi print engine, photos have natural-looking colours, good levels of detail and no noticeable banding or colour smearing issues, particularly on photo paper. You can’t get borderless printing, weirdly, when you have photo paper selected in the secondary input tray, but all in all you get a good result from something that’s clearly not a specialist printer – certainly good enough for business or casual personal use. Just be prepared to wait. Even a 6x4in photo took 96 seconds to emerge, while a full-colour, A4 photo test sheet took 3 minutes and 25 seconds to print.

However, the 7920e’s real strength isn’t its performance or its print quality, but the flexible document handling you get from its scanning and copying features. You’re looking at 15 seconds for a single black-and-white copy and 24 seconds for colour, but load up the ADF and it’ll copy at 6.3ppm (black and white) or 3.3ppm (colour), or scan a 9-page black and white text document at 6.4ppm. You can also set it to copy documents through the ADF and print them double-sided, reducing a 24-page report, for instance, down to just 12 sheets of paper. Combine that with customisable shortcuts, which you can set up through the app, and you’ve got a really flexible device, which you can set to, say, scan a multi-page report and email it to your team at the tap of a button on the touchscreen.

HP Envy Inspire 7224e review: is it worth it?

The first stumbling block for the HP Envy Inspire 7224e is print costs: For a set of 303XL black and color cartridges – what you would use for roughly 600 black and white pages – you can expect to pay $65 (£52) which is particularly expensive compared to some bottle-fed office inkjets, such as the Epson EcoTank ET-3850. This is probably why HP would prefer you to sign up for its HP+ subscription with Instant Ink. With this, you can opt-in for the 300-page per month subscription, which is $9.99 (£9.99) per month. It would still, however, be significantly cheaper in the long run, to buy the Canon Maxify GX70505, or the Canon Pixma G7050 – particularly if you're printing high volumes.

The Envy Inspire 7920e isn't a particularly speedy printer and with its high running costs, it might not be the best option for the office. It is, therefore, more of a home office buddy, one that can offer scanning and sharing capabilities too. However, even with those considerations, we recommend pairing it with the HP+ and Instant Ink subscriptions.

It is a well-built and neatly designed printer, capable of delivering reliable and professional results, but we suggest checking out other bottle-fed models to see what you'll be spending over the long term. 

HP Envy Inspire 7224e specifications

At first glance, HP’s Envy 6432e looks promising. While it’s quite ambitiously priced – particularly when you consider that it has no fax modem or display – it looks great, with a sleek, modern design that stands out amongst the usual squat grey boxes that make up most of the printer market.

It’s reminiscent of HP’s Deskjet 4120e, which also impressed us with its construction. Part of the reason for its slick appearance is the lack of any obvious controls; a mix of power, status and copy buttons are all concealed to the right of the paper tray, lighting up only when relevant. It even somehow manages to include a 35-sheet ADF without appearing cluttered or business-like.

At this price we’d usually expect more than this printer’s 120-page black and 75-page colour in-box cartridges, but the Envy 6432e does qualify for nine months’ free Instant Ink – worth up to 6,300 pages if you use the maximum 700 each month.

After this, Instant Ink subscriptions are reasonable with, for example, 300 pages costing £10 per month. Choose to buy your own cartridges, however, and you’ll be paying 7p per black page, and a wince-inducing 21.6p every time you dare dabble in colour. Compare this, for example, to the Canon Pixma TS8350, which manages 6.2p per page for colour prints and 3.4p per page for mono, and with outstanding quality to boot.

The Envy 6432e looks to offset its lack of display with coloured status LEDs that pulse and glow above the paper output tray. But while these might be amusing, we’d rather have a display capable of helping us set up, use and maintain the MFP. While it was easy to join a network, we spent a fruitless hour trying to work out why the copy buttons weren’t illuminated, before concluding that our sample probably had a fault.

We couldn’t complete our copy tests, but this MFP was underwhelming in most other respects. Its 11.1ppm text speed and 2.1ppm colour graphics speed are far slower than we’d expect at this price. Although it offers duplex printing, it delivered ten sides on five pages at only 1.5 images per minute (ipm). Scans were a little more competitive, but the Envy 6432e still needed 22 seconds to capture an A4 page at 300dpi. Generally, both print and scan quality were good, but not as good as the best rivals at this price.

Overall, the Envy 6432e doesn’t do enough to justify its price. While it looks good, it’s underwhelming in most other respects, and its lack of a screen makes it harder to use than many competitors. If you’re looking for an affordable workhorse for day-to-day printing, then both the Epson Expression Home XP-4100 and the Canon Pixma TS6250 make better options, with more straightforward user interfaces and stronger performance - particularly the latter.

HP Envy 6432e specifications

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.

The HP DeskJet 4120e has three main virtues: it’s fairly compact, simple to use and very cheap. At the time of writing, you can pick one up for under £60 exc VAT, with 6 months of HP+ and Instant Ink thrown in. Yet it’s a fully-fledged multi-function printer with a 1200 dpi print engine, a 1,000 page maximum monthly duty cycle and a 35-page auto document feeder on the scanner. Most IT teams and even some small business owners will probably discount it for being too cheap, but as a printer for remote workers, small offices and personal use, it makes a certain amount of sense.

When we say that it’s compact, we’re being relative, but it has a desktop footprint of roughly 26 x 39cm, expanding as the case slopes outwards to just under 34 x 43cm. With the rear input and front output tray extended it takes up more space, roughly 43 x 58cm, but these fold away neatly when not in use and make this a comparatively unobtrusive MFP.

Impressively, it doesn’t feel as cheap as it is. The output tray and extender wouldn’t take much to break off and we have some reservations about the paper input, but the body as a whole feels solid and the plastics robust. The paper input is our first hint that this isn’t a printer designed for heavy workloads. It only takes a maximum 60 sheets, and that’s at a push. At much above 30 you feel that you’re almost forcing them in between the lighter plastic flap that covers the input while not in use and the guides on either side.

There’s a USB port at the rear, but the 4210e is clearly designed to be used through Wi-Fi. Like other recent HP printers, the default way to set it up is through HP’s Smart smartphone app, which does a great job of taking you through the physical setup, connecting to the network, installing inks and paper and printing a test page. Weirdly, though, it only surfaced the auto-calibration routine after we’d printed a few documents, when most recent HP printers run it as standard, straight after setup.

Simplicity is one of the cornerstones of the design. There are just six buttons and a basic mono LCD display, which covers status and ink levels. With no real menu systems to work with, all configuration is through the smartphone or desktop apps, or a web-based control panel, and if you want to switch modes, change settings or install new firmware, that’s where you’ll need to head. Luckily, it’s all very straightforward and intuitive, and it’s unlikely that you’ll need to visit it much, anyway.

Sadly, we did. While the test page and other documents printed with no trouble from the smartphone app, we couldn’t get the printer to print anything from a Windows 11 laptop either through the default Windows driver or with HP’s Smart app installed. This may have been an isolated problem and was fixed by a firmware update, but it didn’t exactly leave us with much confidence as testing began.

If you’re looking for a fast printer, move on. HP’s stated print speeds are 8.5ppm monochrome and 5.5ppm colour, and though we saw higher speeds that this when we tested it, we wouldn’t go overboard in our praise. On our standard 24-page black text test at normal quality, the first page took 20 seconds to emerge with subsequent pages following at a speed of 10.5ppm. In draft mode, the first page took 16 seconds, while the speed for the remaining pages increased to 14ppm. That’s still one of the slowest monochrome performances we’ve seen in recent years. To make things worse, there’s no automatic duplex option. You can select double-sided printing, but you’ll be removing each sheet and re-inserting it to print the second side.

Unsurprisingly, colour printing speeds are even slower. With a five-page test with a mix of black text and colour charts and business graphics, the first page took 44 seconds to drop, while the print speed after that was just 3ppm. A4 and 6x4in photos took 50 seconds to emerge with the print quality set to high. Nor should you expect instant photocopies; both black and white and colour copies took over 30 seconds to scan and print. Even scanning speeds are relatively slow, at nearly 25 seconds for a 300dpi colour scan or three minutes and 15 seconds for nine pages to be scanned through the ADF.

As for the print quality, it’s best described as solid. On the default ‘Better’ setting, text is crisp and black with good definition on plain paper, though with just a hint of fuzziness when printing on a light-coloured background. Text printed in draft mode is lighter and not quite so sharp, but still perfectly usable for most purposes. We spotted the very odd, thin white line creeping into business graphics, even after alignment, but nothing serious.

The 4120e will also handle photos, but don’t expect what you’d call true photo quality. At the Best setting on photo paper you get reasonable levels of detail, but the presentation is slightly flat, skin tones lack warmth and elements that should stand out with vibrant colours don’t. It’ll do for inset photos in a business document, but you wouldn’t want to print out marketing materials – or sneaky holiday snaps.

If you’re not planning to use Instant Ink, the 4120e also suffers from high running costs. Even with the XL cartridges, you’re looking at costs of 6.9p per black and white print, and 14p per colour print before VAT. As a result, the 4210e only makes sense with an Instant Ink subscription, and even then as a low volume printer. For example, on the Moderate plan you’d be looking at £4.49 for 100 pages per month, bringing the costs down (for either black and white or colour) to 4.5p per page per month. On the 300 page, £9.99 Frequent plan, that comes down to around 3.3p per page.

With HP+ and Instant Ink, the DeskJet 4120e could work as a cheap, low-volume, home office printer, where it’s biggest issues – slow speeds, average quality, no duplex – aren’t going to be deal breakers, and where features like the ADF will have some value.

For anything more, though, you have to wonder whether it’s more sensible and cost-effective to spend more for a printer that will cost you less over the long term and give you better performance as well. While the Epson EcoTank ET-3850 will cost you a lot more upfront, for instance, it might still work out cheaper over the lifespan of the printer as a whole.

HP Deskjet 4120e specifications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epson Photo HD XP-15000 specifications

In 2015, Benson Leung made a spreadsheet. The Google engineer had recently fried his brand new Pixelbook, one of the first laptops to be powered by the (then) new USB-C standard of cable. Unfortunately, in the time between the announcement of USB-C and the first products to use it, hundreds of Chinese companies had started manufacturing cheap cables - many of which were manufactured without the capacitor required to ensure that they were able to correctly supply the 3 amps of current required to power devices. Result: fried motherboards. Leung began compiling an open spreadsheet of ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ USB-C cables - a move that forced Amazon to purge the dodgy ones from its store.

Eventually, USB-IF, the implementers forum for the standard, introduced a marque to show compliant products, but even today, after two further attempts to create an easy-to-follow standard, USB-C is a hot mess, requiring an understanding of the USB 3.x protocol, the wattages required to power different products, and an understanding of other ‘piggyback’ protocols such as Thunderbolt and DisplayPort. The cable that was supposed to do everything has ended up confusing things even more.

It’s an extreme example of a growing problem in the tech sector - namely that so-called standards are rarely standardised. Back in the noughties, most messenger apps were based on a standard called XMPP (or to you and me, Jabber). Now, everyone has fragmented and like the Tower of Babel, we’re all left talking to people in our own silos.

The most recent entry to the canon is Wi-Fi 6, so named because it's the sixth generation of Wi-Fi standard. However, if Wi-Fi 5 supports the 5GHz band, then logically, Wi-Fi 6 supports the 6GHz band, right? Wrong. Only Wi-Fi 6e products use the new band - splitting the standard in two from the off.

HDMI is even more of a minefield. As we move toward 4K as the norm for video content, with 8K waiting in the wings, you need to have an HDMI cable fast enough to support them. The problem is, it’s almost impossible to identify the difference between the latest HDMI 2.2 cable from a ten year old HDMI 1.2 cable - they’re rarely labelled in the same way that Ethernet cables are, for example.

Yet it’s not as hard as these examples make it sound. Look at Bluetooth, currently on version 5.2. Bluetooth SIG has made sure that not only is every new version completely backwards compatible, but often, older Bluetooth chips can take advantage of newer features when connected to a newer generation device.

But to return to where we started, the USB-C debacle has been perhaps the biggest example of how standards have slipped. USB-IF has made two attempts to clarify the different types of USB-C and what they’re capable of, but it remains a complete minefield - a seemingly reliable cable may still not be capable of carrying Thunderbolt, or it may not support your phone brand’s fast charging solution.

Last year, the European Union launched an enquiry into how USB-C got so tangled up, and a working group is currently looking at ways to make it clearer to consumers what they’re buying. The fact that it has taken a government regulator to take this in hand speaks volumes.

The moral of the story is that, unlike software, hardware can’t work on a DevOps basis, debugging problems on the fly as they appear. New standards need to be finalised from the outset, with the past and the future in mind. The alternative is ever decreasing circles into a world where nothing is truly compatible with anything else - and that would be a sad state of affairs.

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

Choosing the best small printer for a business can be a tricky process, requiring careful consideration in terms of costs, maintenance, and, ultimately, convenience.

If you’re hoping to tuck your printer away in a bookshelf or squeeze it onto a desk, choosing a bulkier model is a surefire way to cause headaches and clutter up your workspace.

Notably, opting for a device that gets the job done is crucial. Luckily there’s no shortage of capable printers out there on the market.

As with any purchase though, choosing a printer is often a case of making concessions – be that in terms of price, quality, and even speed. The reality is that manufacturers simply can’t fit everything into these compact devices, but if you shop around you’ll find there are options that tick most of the necessary boxes.

With that in mind, if you’re looking for a compact business printer, here are five of the best out there on the market. Our selection ranges from a sub-£60 marvel right through to a do-it-all laser MFP.

How to find the best small printer for business

You’re going to be let down if you’re hoping to cram every printing feature into the smallest device around. Compact printers often lack useful features like multiple paper trays, for example.

Similarly, if it’s a small multifunctional peripheral (MFP), then this might not have room for an automatic document feeder (ADF), which enables multi-page scans, copies, and faxes.

We’ve found that smaller consumables also come with added risks, often requiring more frequent maintenance and slightly higher running costs. For a small business working on a tight budget, this presents major challenges.

So, if you’re looking to keep those costs down, perhaps stick to refillable inkjets, which offer roughly the lowest cost of ownership out there.

Size matters with printers

Size is critical, especially for those working in a home office or small business office. The last thing you want is a bulky printer swamping a workstation. When choosing a printer with this in mind, consider whether you can get by with a single-function printer, rather than an MFP.

These offer the ability to create decent photocopies using your phone camera via the manufacturer’s app. It’s worth noting, however, that this won’t help if you need to fax, and it’ll probably become annoying if you make lots of copies.

With that in mind, it's important to plan ahead. You might find it's better to buy a slightly larger and more capable MFP now than, for example, buy a very compact printer that can't cope as your business takes off.

If you can compromise a little on space, you can still get feature-rich small printers. Take the Xerox B315DN in our guide (below): it packs duplex printing and scanning with an ADF into a 0.15m2 footprint – only about twice the very smallest printers.

Some features simply can't be shrunk, though. If you must have an A3-capable printer, you'll just have to find somewhere with the space for it.

Whatever small printer for business you're considering, don't compromise on quality. Focus on something that balances decent speeds with reasonable results, and you won't find yourself wishing you'd spent more – or worse, buying a new printer just a few months down the line. In this list, we've focused on small printers that deliver on the basics, but each has its own special talents.

The best small printers

Canon's MAXIFY GX7150 is about as fully featured as inkjet MFPs get; a four-in-one that combines print, scan, copy, and fax – it is true to the overall MAXIFY range, which offers home users and busy small offices the full works.

It has an automatic document feeder (ADF) that can juggle 50 sheets of paper, and behind it, there's a 100-sheet multipurpose paper tray. What's more, the base houses dual 250-sheet paper cassettes. Both the printer and ADF support duplex operation, so you can make double-sided prints, scans, copies, or faxes, saving paper, reducing hassle, and producing professional-looking results.

The GX7150 connects via a USB, wired Ethernet, or Wi-Fi – though it only supports 2.4GHz. Everything is controlled by the 2,7in (6.9cm) tiltable color touchscreen and a few different buttons.

Price might be the only real stumbling block for the GX7150. It costs a lot – possibly too much if your print needs are lower than a few hundred pages a year. However, if you use up the bundled ink and print far more, then the Canon MAXIFY GX7150 is an exceptional value. Ongoing running costs work out to less than a penny-per-page. And, if you add in the protection of a three-year warranty, you might just recoup the investment.

Putting running costs to one side, the GX7150 is a versatile printer that covers everything a small office needs. It might not be ideal as the bedrock of a creative agency, regularly printing on glossy paper, but for plain paper and general office work, it's great.

For more information, read our full Canon MAXIFY GX7150 review

Epson's EcoTank ET-4965 is an MFP for home workers (with high print needs) and small offices. It's a simple setup and makes life easier with its refillable bottled ink that saves you messing about with short-lived cartridges. That's a real bonus if you're rolling out printers to home workers.

Ease of use is the theme here. The 2,4in color touchscreen control panel is uncluttered and useful. At its base, there's an enclosed 250-sheet paper cassette, while on top, it has a 30-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). Both this and the printer itself support duplex (double-sided) operation, so you can use them together to make double-sided copies of double-sided originals, or just for duplex prints, scans, or faxes.

The EcoTank ET-4965 will seem expensive on paper, as it isn't really worth it if you print in small volumes. It has higher upfront costs compared to other cartridge-based inkjets. You need several thousand pages to get the true value. Home printers will likely ease through that milestone, and an office printer used by two or more workers might also hit the target.

Get through the bundled ink, and it offers lower running costs than any comparable cartridge-based device. Print more still, and it will prove incredible value. It's fortunate, then, that it doesn't have any real weaknesses; a decent printer, copier, and scanner across the board.

For more information, read our full Epson EcoTankET-4956 review

When it comes to mobile devices that print on normal A4 paper, you're limited to a portable inkjet. And there are few better than the Canon MAXIFY BX110.

Despite being smaller than a ream of paper, this tiny inkjet has many of the features you'd expect from a regular single-function device. On top, there's a small screen with a simple control panel. Lift a flap, and you'll find a couple of squat ink tanks (one contains black, while the other has cyan, magenta, and yellow inks). And you can either connect the MAXIFY BX110 with a USB-C cable or join a Wi-Fi network.

The MAXIFY BX110 also comes with a removable, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which lets you take it wherever you want and still print a claimed 330 pages. However, if you keep it in the office, you can plug in and recharge in about two hours, or five hours over USB if you're away from a power outlet.

There are other mobile-friendly tweaks, such as an access point (AP) wireless mode, allowing you to connect and print from multiple mobile devices, and covers that fold flat and keep fluff and dust out of the paper path.

Due to its size, the MXIFY is slower than a full-sized injet and also a bit more expensive to run. But these are worthwhile compromises for an excellent small printer. In our review, we said it was our new favorite mobile printer, and we stand by that.

Price when reviewed: £185 exc. VAT

If you want a compact 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 an 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 small and smart MFP with ultra-low running costs, and you'll only scan occasionally, the Smart Tank 7005 remains a good choice.

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

Canon's MAXIFY GX6550 is a compact and odd-looking MFP with refillable ink tanks. That gives it very low running costs of around 0.5p per page, but its real USP is a scanner with a very unusual portrait orientation. With its ADF accessed from the front, rather than the top or side, the GX6550 is ideal for wedging back into shelving or a tight cubby hole, such as you might find on a reception desk.

This is a fairly strong MFP in most respects, supporting full duplex scans, copies and prints. Its only real omission is a fax modem, which could be an issue if you are buying for reception. One other problem is that the scanner has a small, 5x7" platen, ruling out A4 scans from the glass – you won't be able to open the scanner lid if it's in a confined space, anyway. All in all, the GX6550 could be an excellent choice where you have limited headroom, but if an ultra-small footprint is more important, consider Epson's WorkForce WF-110 (above).

Price when reviewed: £235 exc. VAT

Read our full Canon MAXIFY GX6550 review for more information.

FAQs

It's best to put devices used by other people such as coworkers, housemates or family members in an easily accessible central location, such as a sideboard or end table. If you're going down this route, however, you might want to choose a printer that looks reasonably attractive.

Inkjet printers don't tend to like being left idle for more than a couple of weeks, as it can cause some of their ink nozzles to dry up and become blocked. This reduces their print quality. It's a good idea to print at least a page every month, increasing this frequency if you find the printer still becomes blocked. If it does, check on the display or in the print driver options for print head test patterns and cleaning cycles.

On all printers, you should check regularly for firmware updates, or make sure that automatic updates are enabled. These can be selected via many printer's settings menus, or by running the update program installed with the drivers.

How we test small printers

When testing a printer, there are two key metrics that we measure to assess its performance: speed and image quality. The first of these is measured by running a batch of documents through the machine and timing how long it takes to get through the whole job from the point we hit print, as well as how long it takes to produce the first page.

We use a 25-sheet black-and-white text document to test mono performance, as well as a mixed sheaf of 24 web pages, magazine pages, and presentation slides to test color speed. For inkjet devices, we'll also repeat the mono test at draft quality, and to measure duplex printing, we'll run the first ten pages of the mixed graphics workload, measuring the images per minute.

Image quality, meanwhile, is tested by assessing a series of greyscale pictures, color photos, and mono office documents. For devices with scan functionality, we'll look at the image quality of a scanned office document, color photo, and color input target chart, looking primarily for any evidence of color banding or loss of clarity in both cases.

To measure scan speeds, we time how quickly an MFP can deliver a single photocopy, how quickly it scans at various resolutions, and how quickly preview images appear. In the event that a compact printer includes an ADF, we'll use a ten-page copy job to test its speeds in both mono and color (where we can), and if both it and the printer are duplex, we'll test this with a ten-sheet double-sided batch as well.

If you want to fax, copy or scan, look away now: Epson’s EcoTank ET-1810 didn’t get the multifunction memo. Instead, this single-function inkjet combines a relatively basic printer with the convenience of Wi-Fi, and Epson’s fantastic EcoTank system.

For the money, this may seem a simple device. There’s no display or memory card reader, no Ethernet port, and its minimal control panel is limited to four buttons and some elementary status lights. The ET-1810 doesn’t offer duplex printing, and there’s no enclosed paper cassette – just a simple rear tray that doesn’t do anything to protect the paper stack from dust. That’s not much for almost £190 after tax… until you consider running costs.

Instead of cartridges, Epson’s EcoTank printers use fixed ink tanks, filled by comparatively large bottles of ink. Refills are priced far more cheaply than a typical cartridge, and last for much longer, reducing the hassle involved in keeping an inkjet topped up. A secondary benefit is that there’s much less plastic waste, as you aren’t discarding cartridges every couple of hundred pages.

EcoTank isn’t a new concept. Epson brought it to the UK back in 2014, giving it plenty of time to tweak the details and make it foolproof. The ET-1810 arrives with a bottle each of black, cyan, magenta and yellow ink. You simply remove the cap, place the bottle on the relevant nozzle, and wait a minute while it disgorges its contents into the tank below. The nozzles and bottles are now physically keyed, so you can’t accidentally fill the wrong tank, and we’ve yet to spill a drop when using this revised version of the system.

The ET-1810’s high price begins to make sense when you consider running costs. It comes with enough ink to print 4,500 black pages and 7,500 in colour; that’s more than a lifetime’s work for a lightly used home inkjet. Given that a typical entry-level inkjet might have running costs of 3p per black page and 12p for colour, the ET-1810 will prove hugely cheaper to own; our calculations suggest you need to print 700 black and 1,200 colour pages for an EcoTank to “break even” compared to a typical entry-level inkjet. Even if you do use all the supplied ink, low pricing means ongoing running costs of just 0.16p per black page, and 0.29p in colour.

EcoTank is a great system, but it’s not quite perfect. Epson hasn’t yet worked out how to add a reliable level gauge to its tanks, so you need to visually check their levels and bat away frequent reminders to do so from the driver. Additionally, given that it might take a couple of years for a refillable tank printer to prove better value than a standard one, it’s disappointing that Epson doesn’t protect your investment with a multi-year warranty.

Strip away EcoTank, and the ET-1810 is exactly as it appears: a no-frills inkjet printer. It’s not fast, delivering black text at just 8.8 pages per minute (ppm), although we did double this to 16ppm at draft quality. It compares better for colour speed, but still delivered our taxing graphical test at only 2.9ppm. On plain paper, print quality was solid, but not spectacular. Our early prints suffered from missing horizontal stripes, easily fixed by aligning the print heads from the driver’s Maintenance page. With this fixed, print quality was comfortably good enough for everyday work.

We were pleasantly surprised by the ET-1810’s performance on photo paper. Again, it’s not quick, taking nearly 20 minutes over six postcard-sized photos. It was similarly slow when printing 10 x 8in photos onto A4 paper, taking 12mins 21secs over just two images. The results were as sharp and detailed as we’ve seen from a basic inkjet, though, so it’s a frustration that it will only print borderless photos on 10 x 15cm paper, and not anything larger.

Although it’s basic – and very light – the ET-1810 isn’t the most compact printer. Its tanks jut out at the front, and with the input and output trays extended its footprint is around 60 x 40cm. If you’re sharing a desk with it, the good news is that it’s about as quiet as inkjets get, and it won’t transmit strong vibrations through the desktop.

The EcoTank ET-1810 is a straightforward printer, with decent all-round performance and no particular weaknesses. Though basic, it’s a good everyday inkjet, capable of reasonable results across a range of jobs. Yes, it’s expensive, but in time it’s likely to prove far better value for all but the lightest of users. If you want a no-frills inkjet printer with low running costs, the ET-1810 is a runaway winner.

Epson EcoTank ET-1810 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.

If you’ve seen one Brother inkjet multifunction printer, you’ve seen them all. The DCP-J1140DW is the latest in a longstanding series of squat, blockish MFPs without much in the way of design flair, although the black finish does make at least a little more appealing to the eye than the grey boxy look that often defines MFPs in this category.

Physically, the DCP-J1140DW is easy to set up – you just need to remove some tape and insert four cartridges – but the software presented more of a challenge. There’s no disc in the box, and at the time of our review the driver package wasn’t available on Brother’s UK website; we found it on brother.be. Once installed, you’re prompted to align the heads with the help of the scanner.

As you might expect at this price-range, this device isn’t exactly bristing with extra features. On top there’s a flatbed scanner, but it doesn’t have an automatic document feeder, so you’re limited to scanning documents one side at a time, rather than running large batch jobs. Ther’s no fax, either; this device is unmistakably aimed at general-purpose printing, scanning and copying needs, rather than any specialised use-cases.

With that having been said, it acquits itself admirably at what it sets out to do. This is a sprightly inkjet, coming close to Brother’s claimed 17ppm with 15.6ppm in our mono tests. It managed 7ppm in our more demanding colour graphics test, which is still a strong performance. The DCP-J1140DW has a quick scanner, too, dispatching an A4 sheet at 300dpi in 14 seconds, and taking only 23 seconds over a 6 x 4in postcard at 600dpi. You’ll need to wait only 13 seconds for a mono photocopy, or 16 seconds for colour.

On the other hand, while the DCP-J1140DW is quick, it doesn’t produce especially rewarding results. Its black text was bold, and looked crisp enough to the naked eye, but colour graphics were subdued and lacked impact on the page. Colour photocopies were similarly drab, but this MFP did a good job of preserving detail in mono copies. It also turned out reasonably good photos.

Likewise, the quality of the DCP-J1140DW’s scanner is only adequate, and the focus of our test images seemed a little soft. Dynamic range was more than good enough for office documents, but the scanner couldn’t distinguish the very lightest and darkest shades from our more challenging target.

Overall this is a capable device, particularly for those that mainly want a document workhorse that can handle occasional graphics work, but it doesn’t do enough to stand out. At nearly 3p per black page, or 7.9p for colour, it could also do with slightly lower running costs. However, if you need a printer that’s geared up to meet the printing needs of the average home office, you could do worse than the attractively-priced Brother DCP-J1140DW.

Brother DCP-J1140DW specifications

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

Canon’s Pixma G7050 Is another example of the increasingly popular tank-based style of inkjet MFP, where the ink supply comes not in the form of disposable cartridges, but as separate bottles. However, while some printers in this category are relatively stripped back in terms of capabilities, this monster adds in just about every feature you could ever need from an MFP, right up to fax functions.

Consequently, this printer is absolutely massive, dwarfing smaller rivals like the Epson EcoTank ET-3850, and weighing in at a decidedly chunky 9.6kg. Despite its bulk, however, there's barely an inch of free space, and packing in all those features also results in a printer that looks busy. The fax capabilities in particular mean that the control panel needs an entire number keypad built into it so you can dial out to send them.

This function, along with every other one, is controlled using a two-line text-only LCD screen, which sounds woefully inadequate compared to the technicolour marvel of the Canon Pixma TS8350’s screen. Surprisingly though, the display is actually okay in use. A snazzy touchscreen would certainly make life easier than scrolling through one text option at a time as on this model, but at least this tilts up nicely, meaning you can operate it from seated or standing - although you'll be far better off operating the G7050 via an external connection. To that end, this printer supports ethernet, Wi-Fi and USB connections, as well as a range of mobile and cloud printing options.

There are other benefits to buying this larger Canon “MegaTank” printer rather than smaller and cheaper options like the Epson EcoTank ET-2710. For instance it has a 250-sheet plain paper tray built into the base, meaning that you can keep this main tray stocked with plain paper and also print onto speciality media using the rear feeder. There’s also an automatic sheet feeder on the top that can rattle through copying or faxing a 35-page document.

Just don’t expect improvements in printing quality. Its mono prints are solid and dependable, and the colour prints are reasonable – especially when you consider how much they cost, with mono pages working out at 0.2p, and colour sheets at 0.4p. Photos didn’t come out as strong as we’d expect from a Canon printer in our tests, but some compromise is acceptable, given that a full ink refill costs just over £40 after tax.

None of the tank-based printers are particularly fast when compared to other printers in the same bracket, and the Pixma G7050 follows the same path, usually sitting somewhere between the middle and the bottom of the speed charts.

If you need fax capabilities, the G7050 is a great choice; if you don’t, you should consider the Pixma TS6250 for around £70– or the Pixma G5050, which doesn’t include a scanner but is something of a bargain at less than £200.

Canon Pixma G7050 specifications

The HP OfficeJet 8012e is a multi-function printer aimed squarely at the more demanding home office user, though it might also work as a personal printer for the kind of C-suite executive who wants their own dedicated device. The specs are more about all-round competence than high-end printing capabilities or speeds. It claims to print at speeds of up to 20ppm with automatic duplex printing, self-healing Wi-Fi connectivity, a full suite of mobile printing services and integration with HP+ and HP Instant Ink.

The 8012e isn’t a workgroup printer, but HP clearly thinks it’s going to see a lot of action. It has a recommended monthly duty cycle of up to 800 pages – roughly twice what’s expected of most home printers – and not just a 225-page main input tray but also a 25-sheet ADF for the scanner. As far as handling A4 business documents goes, it does it all, though faxing is handled through an online service rather than hardware built into the printer itself.

If you need this kind of printer in your home office, then the OfficeJet 8012e is one of the more stylish options out there. You get a two-tone white and grey body rather than the white and beige of the Envy Inspire line, but it’s a nice enough design with a mix of sharp angles and more gentle curves, even if it’s on the large side. There’s little on the front except two very understated LED indicators and the 5.6cm touchscreen, which controls most of the device’s basic functions. The main paper tray slots into the base at the front, with the 60-page output tray acting as a lid, a flap sliding outwards to give the prints additional support.

Setup couldn’t be much easier. The touchscreen itself asks you to select your language and your region, before prompting you to install the supplied cartridges and fill the paper tray, then running you through the automated print and scan calibration routine. After that you’re sent to HP’s Smart app to find the printer and connect it to your Wi-Fi network. Once that’s done, Windows 11 picks up the printer automatically, or you can install the Smart app on your PC for additional features and controls.

HP’s ahead of some manufacturers with this app-driven approach because it both makes setup easier and adds some genuinely useful features. For instance, you can set up useful shortcuts for scanning and printing to, say, scan in and email a document to yourself or to an office email address. You can also monitor usage, ink levels and perform basic maintenance tasks without firing up your desktop or laptop.

We didn’t see the Officejet 8012e reach HP’s promised headline speeds of 20ppm, but we did see speeds of 14ppm in our 24-page black and white text print tests after the 8.8 seconds it took for the first page to print out. Funnily enough, the page rate didn’t change significantly switching between Normal print mode and the closest thing it has to draft-mode: the ink-saving EconoMode. Print speeds with more complex colour documents were lower, at 6.85ppm after a 22 second wait for the first page. However, the HP proved to be a speedy duplex printer, only dropping to 13.5ppm on double-sided prints.

To put this in perspective, the OfficeJet 8012e is faster than many home office printers, including HP’s own Envy Inspire 7224e, though not quite as speedy in black-and-white as the Epson ET-3850 or Brother MFC-J1010DW, both of which reach speeds of 15ppm or higher. For colour documents and graphics, though, the 8012e is a real contender; nearly 7ppm is good by inkjet standards.

In terms of print quality, the OfficeJet plays to its strengths. Text is sharp, well-defined and black. Colour graphics are cleanly reproduced with subtle gradients and no sign of smearing or banding, and while you’d expect some degradation if you switch to EconoMode, the results aren’t bad at all. True, colour graphics lose a little punch and clarity, but black text still looks great. You really need a pair of strong reading glasses to spot much difference, which is a good indication that it’s not worth worrying about for everyday business use.

One thing the 8012e doesn’t pretend to be is a photo printer. It’s actually quite fast for 8x10 and A4 photo prints, where it took between 90 seconds and just under three minutes to produce the print. On 6x4 prints and A5 photo prints, however, you’re reliant on the guides in the main paper tray, with no dedicated photo paper input, while a 6x4in borderless print took just over 76 seconds to emerge. Many consumer printers will do the job in half that time.

As for the results, they’re fine. Colours are natural and you can pick out smaller details. Definition is reasonably sharp. However, there’s something a bit flat and subdued about the output, especially around reds and pinks, that leaves you feeling vibrant colour and contrast aren’t the 8012e’s thing. It’s one area where it’s beaten by the cheaper Envy Inspire.

The OfficeJet boosts its office credentials by integrating a 25 page ADF on top of the flatbed scanner. It can spit out a black-and-white copy in just 16 seconds or a colour copy in 25, while a full-colour, 300dpi scan takes a mere 22 seconds to come through. It scanned nine colour pages in a minute and a half. Here the Brother and Epson competition is slightly faster, but not to any disastrous extent. The only disappointment is that graphics and photos don’t always come out well, with over-saturation of ink on the page and occasional white lines or even banding effects.

Another area of concern is that paper handling isn’t quite as flawless as you might hope. Twice during testing the printer had to pause midway through for twenty or thirty seconds while rollers spun and the printer rumbled on to no visible effect. This isn’t a huge issue – the prints came out eventually – but it caused us to repeat the tests. The OfficeJet also had issues with our 170gsm photo paper, jamming while loading the sheet on two occasions, and rendering it unusable in one of those.

It's also slightly disappointing that the built-in connectivity doesn’t hit the same level as some of HP’s consumer models. Instead of 801.11ac we get old-school 802.11n, while there’s no Bluetooth for making the initial connection.

For running costs, you’re looking at around £63 for a set of high yield cartridges, with colour print costs of approximately 7.6p per page and black-and-white costs of roughly 3p per page. These aren’t exorbitant, and the use of separate CMYK cartridges means you don’t have to replace all cartridges just because one has run out. All the same, this printer will cost you significantly more to run than Epson’s EcoTank ET-3850, where the ink costs dip well under 1p per page, even for colour.

You could save on your ink costs by signing up for Instant Ink through HP+, and HP includes 6 months in the box. At the time of writing, 300 pages per month would cost you £9.99 inc VAT per month, or £22.49 inc VAT per month for 700.

Overall, the Officejet 8012e comes across as a decent mid-volume home office printer. It’s pretty fast and great for handling text-heavy documents, scanning and copying and, at well under £150 exc VAT, solid value. The problem is that there are other printers out there offering great value, either by beating the HP on performance or by offering much lower running costs without a subscription. The OfficeJet is fast enough and good enough to please its intended audience, but the EcoTank ET-3850 could be a better bet long-term.

HP OfficeJet 8012e specifications

The MSI Modern MD271CP is an unusual business monitor – because it’s designed to look stylish while it tackles your everyday work tasks.

Most business products don’t emphasise aesthetics, so the MSI does a tremendous job of standing out. And, with a price of £208 exc VAT, you can get your hands on this good-looking curved display without spending loads of cash.

The MSI Modern MD271CP undoubtedly looks slicker than its main rival, the Iiyama ProLite XUB2792QSN-B1, but the two products should have an interesting battle – that hard-nosed business screen has a broader range of features and it only costs £213 exc VAT.

MSI Modern MD271CP review: Design

This monitor may cost just north of £200, but it certainly doesn’t look like it. From the front you’ll see slim bezels and a sleek round base, and at the rear the MSI has a cylindrical stand that attaches to the back of the panel with a sleek, curving connector. It’s available in a more modest black shade, but we’ve reviewed the eye-catching white variant, finished with attractive metallic trim.

The MSI has reasonable build quality. The base and metal stand are sturdy, but the plastic rear is inconsistent: it’s robust in central areas but has flex at the sides. Nevertheless, this screen can easily withstand office life. It has 110mm of height adjustment alongside tilt and swivel movement, and it supports 75mm VESA mounting. That’s decent movement, and the only thing missing is the option to swing the screen into portrait mode. It’s easy to build this panel, too, thanks to tool-free assembly.

Portrait mode is rare on curved displays, though, and the MSI’s 1500R curve brings several big advantages to the fore. MSI says that the curve results in fewer eye movements, which can reduce workplace fatigue – and the curve also makes the screen more immersive because the edges and corners angle towards users.

Underneath the curve you’ll find a 1,920 x 1,080 VA panel. That figure is fine for everyday workloads, and it provides enough space for Office apps and web browsers. That said, it’s cramped if you want to use two or three windows, and the 27in diagonal means you can easily pick out individual pixels – the lack of sharpness doesn’t ruin everyday work tasks, but it’s evident.

Elsewhere, the 75Hz refresh rate delivers smooth animation and movement in everyday tasks, and the screen uses mid-range 8-bit colour rather than the 10-bit range needed for complex creative work.

The MSI’s rival from Iiyama looks like a typically underwhelming office monitor, but it’s more practical than the MD271CP. It’s got 130mm of height adjustment, move swivel movement, and portrait mode support. On the inside, its 2,560 x 1,440 resolution means it’s sharper and more spacious than the MSI.

MSI Modern MD271CP review: Image quality

The MSI may look great, but its initial benchmark results were disappointing – and we were worried that this screen was all style and no substance. Out of the box the MSI’s brightness level of 183cd/m2 is ample for office use, but the black point of 0.63cd/m2 is very high – which means a disappointing contrast ratio of 290:1. That low contrast ratio means that colours lack depth and vibrancy, and the high black point means that black areas look grey.

After using the on-screen menu to alter settings, the MSI reached a peak brightness of 190cd/m2, but that made no discernable difference to the contrast and black point performance. The movie and video game modes didn’t improve things, either.

That’s not the end of the story, though. MSI’s Display Kit app can alter settings instead of the on-screen menus, and adjusting these options made a huge difference to the MSI’s contrast performance. We ramped the contrast slider up in the app and the panel’s brightness level improved to 220cd/m2 and the black point dropped to 0.06cd/m2. That means the MSI deployed a revised contrast level of 3666:1, which is fantastic – higher than the firm's quoted 3000:1 figure.

The difference is clear. That far higher contrast ratio means the MSI has loads more punch – it’s like using a whole new monitor. Dark sections actually look dark, and you get loads of extra subtlety and vivacity.

Once we’d ramped the contrast up to appropriate levels, the MSI rendered 94.9% of the sRGB colour gamut with a delta E of 1.55 and a colour temperature of 6,491K. Those are great results, and the MSI does a solid job of producing most shades required by mainstream tasks. It’s a consistent panel: the MSI’s backlight strength is only deviated by single figures in every sector.

Those results mean the MSI is suitable for less-demanding creative workloads – if your day-to-day needs include a bit of photo editing or design work, this screen is up to the job. It makes web pages and everyday apps look great, and it’s an ideal monitor for after-hours media playback too.

Bear in mind, though, that MSI’s reliance on 8-bit VA hardware means that colours look a tad oversaturated and flat. The MSI also only rendered 69.1% and 71.6% of the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces. These latter attributes mean that the MSI isn’t suitable for more demanding creative workloads. If you do need something for those trickier situations, a 10-bit IPS panel would be preferable.

If you’d like more nuanced colour, the rival Iiyama will do the job – it’s got superior delta E and sRGB gamut performance from its 10-bit IPS panel, and it has a higher resolution. Its only downside is a more moderate contrast ratio that provides more muted imagery when compared to the MSI.

MSI Modern MD271CP review: Ports and features

MSI’s machine places a clear emphasis on style, but it doesn’t have a particularly broad set of features. Around the rear you’ll find an HDMI input alongside a USB-C connection that handles DisplayPort. The USB-C socket also provides a modest 15W of device charging, but it doesn’t enable data transfer. The rear has an audio jack, and the display has a pair of 1W speakers, but they’re muddy, quiet, and barely usable.

As we’ve seen, the MSI’s on-screen menu isn’t the best option if you want to get the most out of this product – and it’s got basic design and slightly sluggish performance, too. You’ll get far better results if you use the MSI Display Kit app in Windows instead.

MSI’s panel isn’t overflowing with features, and this is another area where the Iiyama ProLite XUB2792QSN-B1 does a more thorough job: behind its dull design you’ll find a USB-C port with 65W of power delivery, two full-size USB sockets, native DisplayPort and wired Ethernet.

MSI Modern MD271CP review: Verdict

The MSI Modern MD271CP eventually proved itself as a stylish and bold option for everyday office work – it looks far more attractive than most work monitors, and once we’d fiddled with the MSI Display Kit app the MD271CP supplied bold, vibrant imagery.

The VA internals mean you’ll certainly find more nuance and accuracy from the IPS-based Iiyama – if you need a screen for colour-sensitive creative work, the MSI isn’t the panel for you. Similarly, the Iiyama has more practical port and adjustment options.

The MSI Modern MD271CP does have the punch to make everyday creative and office tasks look great, though – and it looks superb while doing it. The MSI could do with a touch more substance, but its appeal is about more than just style.

MSI Modern MD271CP Specifications

The HP Envy Inspire 7224e forms part of a new generation of home office multi-function printers, with a revamped style, decent specs and a chassis that’s over 45% made from recyclable plastics. It’s a smart printer, built to be setup and run through the HP Smart smartphone app, and designed to be used and supported through the company’s HP+ service, including Instant Ink supplies. Perhaps this explains the surprisingly low price point. This is a lot of printer for under £100, and it’s clear that HP plans to make its money in the long term through the HP+ subscription rather than through sales of the device itself.

With a desktop footprint of 46 x 38cm, even with the output tray folded away, this isn’t a particularly compact printer. It’s substantially bigger than the Canon Pixma TS8350, for example, or even the squarer Epson Ecotank ET-7250. However, HP has done its best to minimise the bulk with rounded corners at the base and an interesting two tone off-white and beige design. It’s going to fit better into a lot of home offices than your average black or dark grey model.

The minimalist front panel is dominated by a 2.65in LCD touchscreen, which can tilt slightly backwards for easier operation when you’re looking at the printer from above. This provides easy access to the most basic copying and scanning operations, plus user-definable shortcuts you can set up through the smartphone app. These cover a range of capabilities including scan and email to a specific email address, or scanning and uploading to cloud storage, with options for most of the major services including Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and Box.

This app-centric approach turns out to be the norm with the Envy Inspire 7224e. It’s the default option for initial setup, where the app makes a Bluetooth connection to the printer and hooks it up to your Wi-FI network, then holds your hand through cartridge installation and installing paper. It carries through to simple admin and management, including keeping track of ink supplies. It’s an approach that makes setup and basic operations so easy that you barely notice them.

In fact, with Windows 11 picking up the Envy Inspire 7224e automatically, it couldn’t be much less work to get a printer up and running. What’s more, it’s one of a small number of printers to have moved beyond 802.11n wireless connectivity to embrace dual-band 802.11ac, which should help speed things up when you’re printing larger and more complex files.

The Envy Inspire 7224e isn’t what you’d call an office workhorse. There’s no automatic document feeder for the scanner, and HP specifies a recommended workload of around 300 to 400 pages per month. Yet the main paper input tray holds 125 sheets, while the photo paper feed on top can hold up to 15 5x5 to 5x7in photo sheets. That should be fine for basic home and office usage.

Speeds are decent for a printer with only one or two people sharing. The first page of our 24-page black text document took nearly 18 seconds to emerge, but subsequent pages flowed through at a speed of 12.5ppm. Colour documents take a little longer, with 24.4 seconds for the first page and a speed of 6.4ppm after that. That’s slightly off the pace of a printer like the Canon Pixma TS8350, but hardly slow.

What’s more, the HP doesn’t lose too much speed in Duplex printing, where our first black and white page appeared in 17.97 seconds, and our remaining test pages came through at a speed of 11ppm. In fact, the feed mechanism did a fast, flawless job of outputting the first side then sucking the page back in to print the second.

One sure sign that this is a home office printer is that it has a special Quiet mode, which reduces noise levels at the cost of a reduction in speed. The speed reduction is significant, with a 4 page PDF file that took 52 seconds to print originally taking 98 seconds to print in Quiet mode. Sadly, the reduction in noise levels isn’t so impressive. We measured 51dB from 1m away in standard printing and 54dB in Quiet mode; hardly game-changing stuff.

The Envy Inspire 7224e prints good, crisp black text and also copes well with diagrams and business graphics. Colours are bright and any graduations smooth, and there’s no sign of blotchiness or banding. The worst thing you can say about it is that the ink occasionally comes out slightly damp, though even then it doesn’t smear.

What we didn’t expect, however, is for the photo quality to be so good. This is a standard four-colour printer with a fairly normal 4,800 x 1,200dpi print engine, yet it still delivered excellent photos with natural colours, visible shadow tones and highlights, and respectable colour depth. Specialist photo printers will give you more clarity and dynamic range, but the Envy Inspire 7224e holds up well against other non-specialist inkjets, including the Pixma TS8350. It’s just a shame that it takes its time in doing so with the highest quality setting, taking 3 minutes and 27 seconds to output our 8x10in test print and 2 minutes and 5 seconds to print a smaller 6x4in print.

It’s a little faster when it comes to scanning and copying, at 20 seconds for a black-and-white copy, 25 seconds for a colour copy and 20 seconds for a 300dpi full colour scan. Colours in the copy were slightly flatter than those in the original, but fine for office purposes, while scans are detailed and colour accurate to the eye.

The final big question here is running costs. A set of 303XL black and colour cartridges will run for approximately 600 black and white pages and 415 colour pages and cost you roughly £51.66 ex VAT, putting the price per print at 8.61 per black and white page and 12.45p per colour page. That’s more than the Pixma TS8350 and a lot more than the bottle-fed Epson ET-5880. However, with HP+ and Instant Ink it gets more economical, not least because you get 9 months of Instant Ink included. You could opt for 100 pages per month for £4.49 per month or 300 pages for £9.99, and you’d see the price per page drop to 4.49p or 3.33p respectively, for either black and white or colour pages. HP’s pestering to subscribe during and even after setup is annoying, but it actually has a point.

There’s a lot to like about the Envy Inspire 7224e. It’s fast enough and print quality is great for a printer at this price point, whether you’re talking about text and business graphics or printing photos. Rivals are faster or cheaper to run, but providing you’re happy with the HP+ subscription model, it’s a rock solid choice for home office use.

HP Envy Inspire 7224e specifications

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘How to perfect your remote working setup'. To listen to the full episode, click here. We apologise for any errors.

Connor Jones

Hi, I'm Connor Jones.

Adam Shepherd

I'm Adam Shepherd.

Sabina Weston

And I'm Sabina Weston.

Connor

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast. This week, we're talking about the essential tech that you need for your remote working setup.

Adam

For many organisations, the initial shift to remote working at the start of the pandemic was sudden and unexpected, and many workers simply had to make do with technology and equipment that they had.

Sabina

More than two years on, however, there's no excuse for working hunched over your laptop on the kitchen table. There's a plethora of peripherals and devices that can improve your comfort and productivity while working from home. And adding a couple of key pieces of equipment can dramatically boost your experience.

Adam

So we're all currently working from home. We've been working from home for a number of years now even before the pandemic. But I think it's fair to say that perfecting your home working setup is something that is always going to be an ongoing process. I don't know about you. But over the past several years, I've been gradually tweaking and refining what my kind of ideal workspace looks like. So what does your ideal home office setup look like for you, Connor, do you want to kick us off?

Connor

So obviously we're techies, we look at CES, although we don't cover it too often. I'm sure you received...

Adam

I think I know what you're gonna say.

Connor

I think you do too; at least, there's at least one in every single CES, where it's these like super expensive, almost robotic gaming environments where they've got like a chair on like a pneumatically driven platform. It's like one of those sort of 4D immersive experiences that has like monitors out the wazoo, it's got like, you know, it's got like a bed, it's got like a Monster energy drink supply in the back of the chair and stuff like that, you know, that kind of, that kind of thing. Like, I want a full... I want something I can just live in, I don't I don't want to, I don't have to be able to move, something's just something I'm going to be in it for so long that it's going to create a Connor-shaped hole in the chair. But I think I think a little bit more realistically. For me, I always prioritise monitors like I couldn't, I would have enough monitors to, you know, satisfy every single Chrome tab I have open if if one my budget allowed or my electricity bill allowed. But yeah, I think if, if you're gonna if you're gonna prioritise one thing in an idealistic home working set up, it's got to be displays; more the better for me.

Adam

Yeah, I massively agree with that. I'm currently working off two displays. And I don't fully understand people who can get by just with a laptop screen.

Sabina

So, like me.

Adam

Well, that brings us neatly onto you, Sabina, then; what does your perfect home office setup look like?

Sabina

Um, you know, I think I need to, like, preface this by saying that, you know, your working setup is nothing if you don't have a reliable network connection. So making sure you have a good Wi Fi router. So if you don't have that you like, you know, that's, that's basically, I think that's the most important thing. So just making sure that you have a stable internet connection. Whatever means, you know, by whatever means necessary, I think that's the most important thing. And I know what I think I just like, live with the basics. So although you know what, with especially internet connection has proven extremely important for me, because I've moved twice since the pandemic began. And whenever you start a new contract with a new internet provider, you sometimes do need to wait a few days for your new router to be shipped. So it has definitely made me more creative in, in working remotely, whether it's from cafes, or you know, using my mobile data from my phone, but back to the main question, you know, what my perfect working space I think, would be just a monitor, an additional monitor to go with my laptop and a good desk. I feel like I do sort of like I do agree with Connor with I did go to a to an event recently which previewed all these chairs and desks, which you can adjust you know, just to like, what not only like the height but also like the angle of everything and yeah, literally it's, you know, it's really something and but these things are really expensive to be fair, and you know, especially if you move around a lot like me, I don't think there's like that's I think the my main reason for not getting these things is because it's an absolute you know, hell to to do move flats with additional monitors and you know, very fancy desks. But yeah, that would probably be my, like dream setup in the future.

Adam

Yeah, and the desk question I think is one that gets often overlooked, having enough space to, to spread out, not just kind of any monitors keyboards, etc, that you might want from like a productivity perspective, but also just having the space to, for example, have you know, some notes or you know, printed documents or whatever, on the desk next to you without having to kind of cram stuff in wherever it will fit is really, really important.

Sabina

Yeah, I think the moment I stopped, you know, being in education, I sort of like, didn't think about the whole desk issue, because I sort of accepted that, like, wherever you go, wherever you work from - and bear in mind, these were pre pandemic times - you, your company will provide you with a desk at your office, so you don't need that kind of thing at home. And yeah, and I don't know whether you remember the first six months of the pandemic, I was essentially working in front of a chest of drawers. So I did have where to put my notes, but I didn't have anywhere to put my legs because it wasn't like the thing where like, you sit at it, and your legs are underneath the table. Now I sat at a 45 degree for six months. So I have any medical issues that can all be traced back to that. Yeah, I think there's just honestly the bare necessities nowadays, I think. But at that point, we all thought that the pandemic would only last 10 weeks. So....

Connor

Can I just add a top tip for people with small desks is to get a monitor arm, a desk mounted monitor arm, the amount of space that saved when I invested in one was was night and day. Because I don't know about you, I don't know about your monitors, whether they're on arms or not, but mine used to be on quite a sizable circular stand, that in terms of like the desk estate probably took up the best part of half the the length of it, not the width, the length. So that obviously impeded mobility to just like chuck notes there, put even put my keyboard away, like in front of me when I wanted to get like a notepad out or do some light stuff on another device. But yeah, get a monitor arm. It's like the difference is really, really great.

Adam

Yeah, I would love to have a monitor arm. I'm slightly banjaxed in that by the fact that the desk I've got has kind of drawers like underneath. So it doesn't have a kind of place to clip a monitor arm properly. But for just kind of flat desks, yeah, monitor arms are really handy, especially the ones that you can get, which support dual monitors simultaneously. Yeah, I've kind of coveted those for a while. So on that subject, then, I think space is something that a lot of us have had to grapple with, in terms of remote working over the course of the pandemic, you know, Sabina, as you mentioned, most of us were kind of relying on office space, to have things like you know, proper desks and chairs and monitors and whatnot. And having to adapt, you know, your home environment to that I think can be very challenging from a space perspective. So, are there any kind of tips that that we can share for making that remote working setup easier and smoother if you don't have the space for a proper kind of dedicated home office?

Sabina

Yeah, don't work from your bed. Don't work from your bedroom at all. Just don't. It ruins... There's studies that were conducted, that it ruins your sleeping patterns. And then generally just just like ruins your work life... What's it called?

Adam

Balance.

Sabina

Work life balance. Exactly. So, so avoid that. Also, it just makes you feel like you're constantly, it just makes you feel like you should always be working, you know, and I think but especially in big cities, where you cannot really get like a proper flat or house that has, you know, a separate office. I know that's the case for you, Adam, but like, you know, in inner city, sort of like London, it's really challenging to get like a separate office so I feel like it is still better... I know that we are criticising people who work from the kitchen table, but I feel like that is still way better than working from, from, you know, I think that's one of the best choices that people have, unfortunately, in London. Yeah.

Adam

Absolutely. And it's important to note that working from your kitchen table or dining room table or whatever, is perfectly fine and perfectly kind of sustainable. But doing it just hunched over a laptop on, you know, a standard dining chair is very much not ideal. And there are absolutely ways to to make that easier and more pleasant, you know, for yourself over a longer period.

Sabina

Yeah, I mean, I think you're totally right, just if you're working from a dining table, at least get a proper gaming chair, office chair, but you can just swivel away once you're done with work, but yeah, do not work from a dining chair, that's ridiculous.

Adam

I mean, there's also a whole bunch of really interesting kind of accessories, if you like, that, that you can get to, to help with that. So for example, you know, just investing in some kind of ergonomic like supports and cushions and whatnot that you can just kind of slide in when you're doing like a full day's work, you know, from the kitchen table, or whatever, just to give you a bit more kind of support for that kind of long stretch of sitting there working. Also, portable monitors are super good for this kind of thing. You know, just connect via USB C, and you can pack them away and store them super easily when you're when you're done with them. And it gives you that extra real estate and it gives you a bit more flexibility without having to haul like a proper full monitor out of a cupboard and set it up on the kitchen table whenever you know whenever you need to use it.

Connor

Yeah, I don't I don't think I have really that much to offer on this because I was in a way quite fortunate. Because I defected out of London about two or three months before the pandemic took hold. So I defected up north to Manchester where naturally had a bit more space for my money. And since then, I've lived in two bed flats, and we've throughout those three flats I've lived in. We've always had a dedicated office. Well, the spare room's been an office. So yeah, we have like you said, Sabina, we have had that that separation between the workspace and the living space and the sleeping space, which I think has been like really invaluable. But yeah, I think just, I was having to think about this before and trying to cast my mind back see if I've had any experience with like making the most of small spaces. And the best I could think of was some Instagram ads I've been served in the in the past where you can get like, like pieces of like artwork, this is obviously dependent on what your landlord will allow you to install but um, you can get like artwork that attaches to a wall, and then you can sort of bring it so it unfolds into a desk with like a monitor mounted inside it. So yeah, yeah, then. So they're not like, I haven't seen them in real life, but only on Instagram. But if your landlord will allow it, I imagine that would be quite the space saver.

Adam

And there's tonnes of things like that. Just clever kind of storage solutions for this, this kind of this kind of scenario where you don't have a huge amount of space to play with. But you want to kind of get a bit more of a permanent feeling office space that doesn't actually have to sit there all of the time, taking up a huge amount of space. But so for your kind of home office connor, what are the kind of the essential elements that you've kind of taken from from move to move, you know, what's your kind of minimum requirements, if you like for your home office beyond the monitors that you mentioned?

Connor

Minimum requirements, I think, other than monitors. It's got to be a comfy chair. You know, it's like you said Sabina, like feasibly you can't you can't work for long periods of time on on kitchen and dining room chairs. There's just not, they're not built for it. They're not ergonomic enough and I'm getting older and my back's getting weaker and you know...

Sabina

Connor, you're 25.

Connor

Yeah, but yeah, I mean, my my, my back is waning and it deserves more. But other than that, I think one of the most one of the most valuable purchases I actually did make aside from the monitor arm was very cheap. It was like a £10 foot rest. And yes, I remember being served a foot rest back when I first started at IT Pro and thinking what what am I doing with this like, like, this just goes under and I'm just supposed to put my foot on it; what's the point? But I think comes back to I am I am ageing and my back is is getting is getting weaker. And I don't know what it is, maybe it's like an incompatibility with my non adjustable desk height with my chair or whatever. But as soon as I started using this foot rest, my lower back pain just went. So very, very quick, very easy, very cheap solution to back pain. If you're experiencing it and don't have one already. Yeah, by all means get a foot rest.

Adam

Well on the subject of kind of ergonomics and kind of preventing injury effectively. I'm a big advocate for external keyboards and mice for home working. Even if you're using a laptop, I think it's really really beneficial to have a dedicated keyboard and mouse that you can use even if it's just, you know, a cheap and cheerful Bluetooth set that you can just quickly get out and set up and work away on.

Sabina

That's very interesting take. And I completely disagree with its. To me it just creates clutter. Yes, I'm creating conflict on this pod.

Connor

Adam, I'm totally with you.

Sabina

Really? Wow.

Connor

100%.

Sabina

Must be a gender thing. I'm kidding. No, I hate it is just add some more clutter. And you know, and whichever keyboard I just found, I just, I just nothing beats the MacBook keyboard for me, I'm so sorry. And mice, I haven't used a mouse since 2004. So I probably won't go back to using mice; I just cannot get, no.

Adam

I find using mice so much more effective. Compared to using a trackpad kind of while typing. I just, my my brain is just much more comfortable with using using mice. And I just, I feel like I'm quicker. I don't know if that's just kind of psychosomatic. But I feel like I'm much more productive when I have a proper mouse as opposed to a trackpad.

Connor

Yeah, I went, I went to a mouse and keyboard set up mid pandemic; used to be I used to have a laptop in directly in front of me sat on the desk with the external monitor above it. But then I got the monitor arm which holds a laptop and one monitor. So I had to get an external keyboard and mouse. And it was a bit of an adjustment because in a way that you probably wouldn't expect because if you have like a laptop with a trackpad, then I think your shoulders are kind of like they remain. They remain sort of in a fixed neutral equal position. Because they're sort of they're just sort of working in front of you. But when you switch to a keyboard and mouse, the right shoulder, depend on what hand you are. I'm right handed. So my right shoulder took it. It was a very, I was noticing very, very much that my right shoulder was being extended more out to the side. So in order to reach my reach my mouse.

Sabina

See, I don't think my shoulder extends that far anymore.

Connor

Now who's getting old?

Sabina

Like just often not using mice for so many years. I just I just don't think it's possible, you know, like, yeah, no, but maybe I should try it. Maybe Maybe it's it's a it's a posture thing. You're right. But keyboards, I just I just I just cannot like it's, it just seems like I already have a keyboard. Why would I want another keyboards? Like I'm sure

Adam

That's fair.

Connor

What MacBook keyboard are you running? Because I'm running the 2017 Butterfly switches. And I think half of them don't work.

Sabina

One of the arrow keys keeps falling off.

Connor

Classic.

Sabina

But otherwise, otherwise, it's from scrolling up and down the page. But no, it's literally like the 2015 like MacBook Pro. Isn't it Adam; I think it's 2015 or 2016.

Adam

I believe so, yes.

Sabina

Because it's the extremely heavy MacBook Pro. Yeah, so I you know what, I just been always a fan of MacBook keyboards. And I just for me, I never found anything which was quite as comfortable as that. Maybe I'm just too used to it at this point. I know that Apple does do separate keyboards, but to me I'd just rather invest in like a monitor or you know, a better chair or a better desk. There's so many other things that you could spend your money on when you're working remotely in this setup. To me, to me personally, the keyboard isn't on the top of my priority list, but of course, you know, we have different opinions.

Adam

So, speaking of investment, then, how much of this kind of equipment do you think businesses should reasonably be expected to pay for for their remote workers? Personally, I think that every remote worker, if your business is going to offer remote working as an option, employees should have access to a monitor for home working, they should have access to a laptop. And ideally, they should have access to a proper desk and a decent chair. Now, that doesn't need to be, you know, a fancy high priced, you know, Herman Miller Aeron £3,000, you know, piece of loveliness.

Sabina

I disagree; I think it has to be exactly that.

Adam

Don't get me wrong, if, if my employer wants to, wants to pay for a £3,000 Herman Miller office chair for me, I'm not gonna say no. But equally, I think, you know, on a, on a practical level, a, a fairly basic chair is fine, as long as you're, you know, as long as you're giving employees something, so they're not having to kind of, you know, work from the sofa or work from their dining room or whatever, you're giving them the option of like a dedicated desk that they can have, even if it's just a little personal one.

Connor

Yeah, I think I don't think, for me, I don't think it's a checklist thing, I don't think it's like a case of you have to have a desktop, you don't have to have a monitor or anything like that. I think the simple one liner should be anything you can get in the office, you should have access to at home, be that an office chair, be that a desk, it should be it should be the same; you can't expect, because a business is going to invest in an office in the equipment that they feel is necessary for you to get the job done. And I don't think that rule, or the principle should be different any different for remote workers either.

Sabina

To me, I know that businesses, it's very well wish you know, it's it comes only from like, trying to help the remote workers, you know, deliver, you know, have a better working experience. But I think instead of instead of offering just standardised desks or standardised chairs, I think we should bear in mind that people just have different setups and sometimes the colour of the desk they're offering which looks like a desk from, that you had in school doesn't really fit with someone's interior design plans. Even though and then and it's awful when you have to choose between, you know, your back pain and your eye pain from staring at this weird desk in your room. So I think businesses I think businesses should basically give employees a budget. I think we've reported about companies, I'm pretty sure it was Google but I cannot say I'm it was it was some big tech giant. They gave their staff workers 400 quid to choose remote working equipment. And I think this is the best thing like maybe maybe don't give them 400 quid, you know, to their hands if you don't trust their employees. But I mean, obviously that would be great. But you know, just give them like a voucher or, you know, just make sure that they are allowed to expense like, like to this amount for for stuff because you know, ultimately, you just want people to choose stuff which is suited for them best and not be stuck with you know, yet another piece of furniture that they're just going to resent just offering your employees have standardised equipment is just not the way to go. I really hate that. And I'm trying not to sound ungrateful.

Adam

I think that's a very valid point, though, like, having a standardised set of kind of remote working, sort of tools and peripherals and whatnot, I think can be, you know, can be good, and it's certainly better than nothing. But I do agree that giving employees the freedom to sort of customise their their setup is a much more flexible and more productive approach to doing it.

Sabina

Especially now that I'm thinking a lot of people will say that this is gonna be expensive, but like if you think about it, if you're not actually using the equipment that you already have in the office, if you are going to spend that money anyway, on buying new equipment for your workers, you might as well let them choose because maybe they'll even be able to find something cheaper than what you found.

Adam

But it gives people the flexibility to say like for example, okay, I've already got a you know, an office chair in my flat that I'm perfectly happy with, but what would be really helpful for me personally, is, you know, a giant, enormous monitor that I can fit, you know, 18 spreadsheets on at once. Yes. So I'm just gonna pump all of that money,

Sabina

Job roles vary; there are people who use spreadsheets on Excel every day. And there are people who haven't seen an Excel spreadsheet in years. So you know, I think it really everyone like it really varies like on, you know, depending on like job role. And I think services, I think that's another good case of a good good argument for allowing, you know, workers to basically to essentially be given that kind of voucher and being able to choose for equipment themselves.

Adam

So we've talked about remote working a lot from the context of home working, but it's worth bearing in mind that remote working offers a lot more flexibility beyond that, Sabina, you mentioned earlier that you were doing a lot of work from coffee shops and cafes and whatnot. When you'd just moved and were waiting for your internet to be hooked up.

Sabina

Yeah.

Adam

So for remote working away from home, what are the kind of essential items that you would pack to kind of help you stay as productive as possible while out of the office; be that the office office or the home office?

Sabina

A laptop that doesn't weigh 60 kilogrammes would be great. Anything, anything, there's so many great lightweight options on the market nowadays, if you're going to, that applies to I think working from the office as well, if you're taking your equipment in honestly, just don't go for the heaviest laptop. That's an advice to myself as well. Yeah, because it's just a pain, you know, and I think you should also, that's just probably more when it comes to software, but probably take considerations for protecting your equipment from the evils of, of potential malware. Yeah, I wonder like, what do you do with all the spare keyboards and mice when you go and work from a coffee shop?

Adam

So I generally don't take, and I'm going to expose myself as a slight hypocrite here, I generally don't pack a portable keyboard when I'm travelling, or when I'm working remotely, mostly because I can't be bothered. But you know, portable mice and Bluetooth mice and, and whatnot, are something that I've been meaning to, to take with me more often, particularly when I'm going to conferences and things things like that. This The only slight problem with that is that does rely on you being able to work at a table of some kind, you know, it's quite hard to use a mouse when you have your laptop, you know, on your knees. That's not always ideal. But I think just on your point about lightweight laptops, I think battery life is also a really key consideration. You want to have a laptop that is going to last a good long amount of time without constantly having to run around looking for a power point, looking for somewhere to plug it in to stop it from dying.

Connor

And if you're not one of those people who and I don't understand; these people do exist and I don't understand how they manage it. But if you're not one of those people like me who can work with undue background noise...

Sabina

Noise cancelling headphones.

Connor

Yeah, and I did invest in my first pair this year. Some Sony XM4s and yeah, I just don't know how I don't know how I've gone without it to be honest. And just any any any level of noise any I don't even have anything playing most of the time. It's just the slight the the active noise cancellation, just blocking out just enough is fantastic. And I have a couple of colleagues I've got at IT Pro will know that I do take it a step further sometimes and listen to white noise. So if anyone is like me, and it does kind of make you go a bit insane after a little while. But if you really cannot stand if you cannot stand background noise then I do I do recommend the combination of a good set of AnC headphones and a good long white noise track.

Adam

Yeah. Honestly, noise cancelling headphones are, I think an essential purchase for anyone who is working from an office or who is working while travelling. I have had a pair of Sennheiser MB 660s for several years now and they are without exaggeration. I think probably my most cherished possession. They are just I never leave home without them. I am wearing them probably conservatively speaking about 80% of my working life.

Sabina

Yeah this is why you ignore what I whenever I'm speaking to you in the office you never hear me.

Adam

Yes, that's why...

Connor

It's the thing this is the thing, when I when I first joined IT Pro like it Adam would peek his head out over the over the monitor I'd be like saying something and I'd look at him dumbfounded after like for about like two seconds. We were like, can you hear me? And there's there must be some sort of setting you've got on your headphones because you like you always had them on but you could always just hold a conversation or just until I got my XM4s I was so confused about it.

Sabina

Hold a conversation with you maybe. I think Adam pretends that he cannot hear me. Yeah, just just based on what we've discussed in this episode, and maybe haven't discussed yet. What is the one one thing one piece of equipment that you would take with yourself take with you on a remote working remote island?

Connor

Remote working remote island; that sounds terrible.

Sabina

I mean, obviously you do work remote work remotely if you're stuck on an island, right like that is that takes remote working to an nother level.

Adam

The ultimate in remote working? Yeah. So one, one piece of essential remote working equipment that I genuinely don't think I could do without is an external monitor, whether that's a kind of portable monitor, or whether it's full on like, you know, 34 inch behemoth of a thing. It's just improves my productivity exponentially. And kind of I find it actively difficult to work without having that kind of real estate. So yeah, if I could, if I could keep one piece of remote working kind of technology. It's gonna be an external monitor every time.

Connor

Yeah, I'm torn. Whether because yeah, like you Adam. I've got my external monitor holds a dear dear place in my heart, and I don't it does pain me whenever I go on international press trips and stuff working from hotels and I am just like, like we said just hunched over on on the desk of off this 13 inch inbuilt laptop display. But I think for me as much as much as it does benefit my my productivity, I think my back is more important than then then all productivity. I'm sorry, my employer, if you're listening, it just is. So I'm gonna I'm gonna say a really comfortable, ergonomic desk chair for me.

Sabina

Yeah, I was debating between a desk and a chair. And to me, I think I think the chair wins. Definitely, like, out of all the tech and stuff. It's just, you know, like, even if you have the best laptop, even if you have the best monitors and the best noise cancelling headphones, if you're sitting on the cheapest IKEA dining chair, which I was sitting on for the first six months of lockdown. You're not gonna get any work done.

Adam

No, absolutely.

Sabina

And I'm talking about plastic, you know, the foldable...

Connor

Yeah. Oh, those ones. Wow. Yeah.

Sabina

And I will I literally will never touch one ever again.

Adam

I managed two weeks at the start of lockdown on one of those. Two weeks. And I was like, No, I'm I'm done. I'm getting a proper proper swivel chair with actual armrests. And just a little bit of cushioning. Yeah, at the very least.

Sabina

Yeah, yeah, so definitely, I think I'm gonna be boring. I'm gonna agree with Connor. Desk chair. Yeah. So much for being tech specialists!

Adam

Well, I think I think I think we've hit upon a very, a very valid point here, which is that, in a lot of cases, the things that make remote working viable, you know, for all we talked about, you know, hyper mobile laptops, and, you know, high speed connectivity, and, you know, webcams and microphones to make video conferencing really, really slick and really, you know, enjoyable. For all we talk about the tech side of things, really, it's the creature comforts that you get in an office, you know, good size desks, chairs with decent support, all of this kind of stuff.

Sabina

A monitor.

Adam

Well, exactly, that actually go the biggest distance to making remote working fun and sustainable over over the long term. And it's very easy to overlook, I think.

Connor

Sadly, that's all we've got time for today.

Adam

You can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website at itpro.co.uk.

Sabina

You can also follow us on social media as well subscribe to our daily newsletter.

Connor

And don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find your podcasts. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and review.

Adam

We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of IT but until then, goodbye.

Connor

Bye.

Sabina

Bye.

The question of whether we need to go back to the office has a polarising one, and one of the main arguments for reopening traditional workspaces has been that some employees aren’t equipped for efficient or comfortable home working. Hybrid working isn’t going anywhere though, and just a few minor tweaks can make your home environment much more suitable for remote working.

This week, we’re discussing our dream remote working setups, including our top tips for maximising the productivity of your space, essential items for working on the move, and whether employers should provide staff with additional equipment to enable home working.

Highlights

“A top tip for people with small desks is to get a desk-mounted monitor arm. The amount of space that I saved when I invested in one was night and day. Because I don't know about your monitors, whether they're on arms or not, but mine used to be on quite a sizeable circular stand, that in terms of the desk estate probably took up the best part of half the length of it. So that obviously impeded mobility to just chuck notes there, put my keyboard away when I wanted to get like a notepad out or do some light stuff on another device.”

“I think businesses should basically give employees a budget. I think we've reported about companies, I'm pretty sure it was Google but I cannot say - it was some big tech giant. They gave their staff workers £400 to choose remote working equipment. And I think this is the best thing ,,, because ultimately, you just want people to choose stuff which is suited for them best and not be stuck with yet another piece of furniture that they're just going to resent.”

“Portable monitors are super good for this kind of thing. You know, just connect via USB-C, and you can pack them away and store them super easily when you're done with them. And it gives you that extra real estate, and it gives you a bit more flexibility without having to haul a proper full monitor out of a cupboard and set it up on the kitchen table whenever you need to use it.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• How do I best support my remote workers?
• Remote workers spend more hours on the job, finds ONS
• Exposing Silicon Valley’s remote working hypocrisy
• 12 must-have tools for working from home
• Out of office - on forever: Meet the companies leaving the office for good
• How to keep your mobile workforce happy
• London-based employees most likely to work from home, ONS finds
• AOC I1601FWUX USB-C monitor: Portable, but not pretty
• Espresso Display 15 review: Lots of form, not enough function
• Lenovo ThinkVision M14 review: The leanest screen
• Best monitors 2021: Upgrade to a proper screen
• Buying a monitor: Ten key questions to ask
• Why I need a gaming monitor for work
• How to connect one, two or more monitors to your laptop, including USB Type-C
• Apple MacBook Pro 13in (2020) review: Powerful, portable – and almost perfect

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Canon’s MAXIFY GX7050 is an inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP) aimed at home offices, and at small offices and workgroups. On its front panel, clear windows give users a glance of its most important feature: refillable ink tanks that maximise service intervals and keep running costs to a minimum.

While Canon’s ‘Megatank’ system is the highlight, this MFP literally ticks all the boxes when it comes to features. Its paper handling is particularly impressive, with its two 250-sheet plain paper cassettes supplemented by a 100-sheet rear tray that supports a wide range of media. The printer, and the scanner’s 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), both support duplex (double-sided) operation. You can, for example, make double-sided copies of a double-sided original.

Canon hasn’t overlooked connectivity, meanwhile, with both Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet support. A front-panel USB host port supports walk up scanning and printing, controlled by a reasonably clear and responsive colour touchscreen. Capable of prints, scans, copies and faxes, the GX7050 has the potential to be a perfect small office workhorse. Does it live up to it in practice?

Canon Maxify GX7050 review: Setting up

The key draw of ink tank printers is that they require less maintenance and cost less to run than an equivalent cartridge-based inkjet, or indeed most laser printers. The MAXIFY GX7050 arrives with enough ink for 6,000 black pages, or 14,000 in colour, which helps to explain its high initial purchase price.

The GX7050 is about 60% more expensive than a comparable colour laser MFP such as Xerox’s C235dw, but that arrives with 500-page inbox toners only. Buy the C235dw and enough toner to match the GX7050’s initial yield, and you’ll likely spend more than £1,000 on top of your initial outlay. And when the GX7050 has used all its supplied ink, its ongoing running costs should be less than 0.7p excluding VAT per full-colour page, not the 7-11p typical of competing lasers.

If you’ve set up an ink tank printer before, you’ll know it’s a little more involved than simply shoving in a few cartridges. Our review sample had been used previously, so we didn’t have the pleasure of emptying the big bottles of supplied ink into its tanks, but the process usually takes a few minutes, and is followed by a one-off ink priming session that lasts several minutes more. Canon has refined its Megatank system, adding physical keying to prevent you accidentally mis-filling with the wrong colours. It’s better, but still seems a little less foolproof than Epson’s competing EcoTank design.

While bigger than a typical inkjet MFP, the GX7050 is on the compact side compared to the small colour laser MFPs that it’s gunning for. At 13kg it’s lighter, too. Its final advantage is that, with a peak power consumption of 27W, it’s likely to use less electricity and generate less heat than a laser equivalent.

Canon Maxify GX7050 review: Printing, scanning and copying

Of course, all this is for nought if the results are slow or poor, but happily Canon hasn’t dropped the ball. This is a swift text printer, delivering a first page in just eight seconds, and going on to complete a 25-page job at a rate of 21.4 pages per minute (ppm). Tested over a 50-page document, the GX7050 reached 25.4ppm - more than a match for many affordable laser devices. Speeds were almost identical in Economy mode, which Canon says uses 50% less ink.

Predictably, the GX7050 was much slower to print complex colour graphics, dropping to 6.1ppm on our 24-page test. While still rapid for an inkjet, here a laser would be much faster - the Xerox C235dw managed 13.1ppm on the same test. Using its rear tray, the GX7050 will print photos with borders on A4 or postcard sized paper. Each print took less than a minute, and the results were generally decent.

This printer’s pigment-based inks won’t deliver a high-gloss finish on photo papers, but they’re ideal for authoritative prints on plain paper. Sure enough, black text was suitably bold, and duplex prints had little bleed through on thinnish 80gsm media. Graphics were generally punchy, but in lighter shades it was surprisingly easy to pick out grain. We also noticed some subtle banding across large colour blocks.

The MAXIFY GX7050 packs a better scanner than you might expect for an office-focused device. Though limited to ‘only’ 1,200dpi, it proved adept at capturing a wide range of shade detail in both light and dark regions of an original. Impressively, duplex scanning via the ADF is achieved via two sensors - much faster and less prone to jamming than mechanically flipping each page over.

Connected via Wi-Fi, preview images took eight seconds, while a 150 dots per inch (dpi) A4 scan completed in 13 seconds. Upping the resolution to 300dpi meant a wait of 21 seconds. Where many office devices struggle to scan photos, the GX7050 was equally at home, completing a 600dpi scan of a 10x15cm print in 29 seconds. We appreciated the lip-less front edge of the scanner plate, which makes it easy to reclaim an original document without scrabbling against a raised plastic edge.

With no warm-up time, the MAXIFY GX7050 completed a single mono copy in 14 seconds, while colour copies took only a further second. Using the ADF we timed a 10-page copy at a minute in black only, and two minutes in colour. We made a colour duplex copy of a 10-page, 20-sided document in five minutes.

Canon Maxify GX7050 review: Verdict

While its colour print quality wasn’t perfect, it’s otherwise hard to fault the MAXIFY GX7050. It’s relatively compact, yet comes with a full array of features to automate and streamline common office tasks. These go beyond the basics, with assets like multiple paper inputs, a USB host port and duplex scanning enabling faster and more flexible work. Considering the target market, the only potential omissions we noticed were the lack of PostScript printing, or a hold print function - though you could always print confidential material directly from a USB stick.

The GX7050 won’t keep pace with a colour laser over colour print or copy jobs, and ultimately its prints lack the crispness of the best laser output. However, factor in running costs and it’s in a league of its own. If you’re not set on a laser, Canon’s MAXIFY GX7050 is a strong performing and flexible office MFP with brilliantly low running costs.

Canon Maxify GX7050 specifications

Original review: Since its release two years ago, the Brother MFC-J1010DW hasn't exactly won any awards. Everything from its name to its design is clunky and unglamorous, and it doesn't offer much quality at any particular speed. However, it does do a fairly decent job for those that have minor print needs.

And this isn't your average MFP; it can fax as well as print, scan, and copy – a rare set of capabilities at this price range ($99.99). For that low price, you also get the pleasant surprise of a 20-sheet ADF which provides fast bulk scanning. What's more, although the ADF isn't duplex, there is automatic two-sided printing capabilities with manual support for two-sided copying. Add in Wi-Fi and a color screen and you have a well stocked machine – a bargain at its original price just north of $200, an absolute steel now it's half of that.

Brother MFC-J1010DW review: Performance

However, features alone aren't enough to make a good MFP, and performance counts for a lot. Happily, the MFC-J1010DW is reasonably quick when printing black only, delivering 15.3ppm in our test, and spitting out an A4 copy in 13 secs, or ten mono copies in a minute and a half. It's much slower in color, though, managing only 3.7ppm in our graphical test. It needed almost 30 secs for a single color photocopy, and ten pages took more than four minutes.

Brother has fitted the MFC-J1010DW with a rapid scanner capable of capturing an A4 page at 300dpi in just 14 secs. It also needed only 24 secs to scan a 6 x 4in photo at 600dpi. Like many other Brother scanners we've tested, however, the results were only so-so: easily up to archival purposes, but lacking the sharpness and dynamic range of the best rivals. In particular, the MFC-J1010DW struggled to distinguish between darker shades.

While there's little to criticise about this MFP's print quality, there's little to love either. Black text and mono photocopies were fine. Photos were good enough for occasional use, but this printer's target market probably cares more about color prints and copies on plain paper. Unfortunately, these lacked saturation, seeming dull compared to the best inkjet rivals.

Things aren't all that much better when it comes to the cost of consumables, either. Brother makes an XL range of cartridges for the MFC-J10101DW, each with a useful 500-page capacity. Despite this, however, mono costs work out at an unimpressive 2.9p per page, while each color page costs 7.9p.

The Brother MFP-J1010DW is full of useful features and offers fairly decent performance. Though the quality isn't quite high enough to be viable for a busy office – this is more of a home office printer. The appeal here, then, is the pricing; the MFC-J1010DW is currently on offer for $79.99 on Amazon (including VAT).

Brother MFC-J1010DW specifications

Epson’s EcoTank ET-3850 is an inkjet multifunction printer (MFP) aimed at the home office. It’s a three-in-one machine, offering print, scan and copy functionality, but not faxing. It’s quite well specified, featuring a 30-sheet automatic document feeder, wireless networking and a small colour screen. In the base there’s an enclosed 250-sheet paper cassette, and the printer will print on both sides of a sheet of paper without you having to lift a finger.

All these are typical features for an MFP costing about a third of the price of the ET-3850, so why pay more? The answer, as we suspect you know by now, lies in Epson’s EcoTank system, which does away with cartridges in favour of large refillable tanks built into the printer itself. The ET-3850 arrives with a full set of colour ink bottles, theoretically capable of 5,200 pages, and two large black ink bottles that between them could dash off 14,000 pages of black text. As with other refillable ink devices, the supplied ink alone should make this MFP better value than its cartridge-based equivalents, provided you print at least a few thousand pages over its lifetime.

The ET-3850 is as easy to set up as any modern EcoTank printer. You simply place an inverted ink bottle onto the corresponding nozzle, and it will discharge its contents into the tank below. Everything is physically keyed to prevent mis-filling – take note, petrol pump manufacturers – and we’re yet to encounter any leaks or spills with this system.

The only obvious way you could improve the current generation of refillable printers would be by adding a reliable level gauge to the tanks, rather than relying on visual checks. Then again, we’d also prefer it if you could join the ET-3850 to Wi-Fi before beginning its ten-minute ink system priming process – that way you could get on with the software installation rather than twiddling your thumbs.

Epson is one of the few inkjet manufacturers to still bother supplying a setup disc, making this an easy MFP to set up... provided that you’ve still got an optical drive. Our initial print jobs were plagued by short pauses and slow performance, as though the printer was struggling with network communication, but the issue disappeared after we rebooted both the device and our host PC.

In normal use, the ET-3850 revealed itself to be usefully quick. It dispatched our 25-page black text test at 15.8ppm – slightly faster than Epson’s claimed speed – and this rose to 19ppm with the quality dropped to draft. Our graphics-heavy mixed colour test is less of a pushover, but even then the ET-3850 hit 4.6ppm; that’s a decent showing from what’s essentially a mid-range device.

The ET-3850 isn’t aimed at photo printing, and it’s not especially fast, with each 6 x 4in print taking more than two-and-a-half minutes. On A4 paper, two 10 x 8in prints took a little over seven minutes, which compares a bit better. For an “officey” printer, the results were pretty good, with accurate if understated colours, and plenty of detail across a range of shades. However, we noticed that black-and-white prints, and the darkest areas of colour photos, weren’t up to Epson’s usual high standards. On further inspection, it became obvious that the printer was using its pigmented black ink, which doesn’t play well with photo paper.

Happily, pigment ink looks great on plain paper, so the ET-3850 stamps out authoritative-looking black text. The ink was a little too impactful in mono copies, however, which were overly dark at the default setting. Otherwise, print quality was good, with accurate colours and no particularly obvious graining in everyday prints.

We’re yet to encounter a bad Epson scanner, and the one on the ET-3850 turned in a typical performance. While not the sharpest, images were accurately exposed over a wide dynamic range, with only the very darkest shades difficult to distinguish. This isn’t the fastest scanner, needing 28 seconds for an A4 sheet at 300 dots per inch (dpi), and nearly two minutes to capture a 6 x 4in photo at the maximum 1,200dpi.

Overall, this is a capable MFP with a good balance of features for the home, provided you don’t need fax capabilities. While expensive to buy, its bundled ink and exceptionally low running costs should more than make up for it over a typical lifetime. It’s a shame, then, that Epson doesn’t protect you from the higher upfront cost with a longer warranty, which would offer the reassurance that the MFP will last long enough for you to reap the benefits.

The Epson EcoTank ET-3850 specifications

If you’re looking for a home-office MFP, you’re unlikely to find one much cheaper than Epson’s affordable Expression Home XP-4100. It’s not just the price that’s miniature, either; its footprint is barely larger than the flatbed A4 scanner that sits on top of it.

Don’t be fooled, though; this unassuming little MFP may lack some of the bells and whistles of more expensive counterparts, but we’re still flabbergasted that Epson has crammed so much into such a small box.

Its features are hidden under flaps that unfold to reveal its functions, such as the 100-sheet paper tray at the back, the 2.4in tilt-out control panel and the (slightly flimsy) paper output tray that slides out from the front. It’s got both USB and wireless connectivity, which is about all you can expect for the price, and it can even do some fancy tricks that pricier printers can’t, such as print on both sides of a sheet.

The printer uses four cartridges, which is a better option than the HP Envy Pro 6432 and its inefficient method of combining three colours in a single cartridge. However, the cost of printing comes in at 5.2p per page for black and 12.8p for colour, and it quickly ramps up.

Those prices apply if you travel down the road of buying your own ink cartridges, which is why the Epson Expression Home XP-4100 is a prime contender for Epson’s cartridge subscription – we wouldn’t consider this printer without it. It should bring the cost of printing down to between 3.3p and 4.3p per page, depending on how much you print. Ideally you should print close to your contract’s target page number, but even if you’re a bit out it should still work out cheaper than buying cartridges yourself.

Don’t expect stunning prints in standard mode – we saw faint lines across almost everything. It clearly wasn’t a problem with the printhead alignment, though, because printing in high quality mode eliminated it.

As well as eliminating these lines, the high quality setting also produced good-looking photo prints. The four-colour cartridge system can’t compete with the prints produced on the Canon Pixma TS8350, but they compared well with HP’s pricier inkjet models.

We didn’t expect to see a printer of this price top any of the performance charts, but Epson knows how to get a single page into the output tray at top speed, and this printer equaled the Epson ET-2750’s speed record of ten seconds. It surprised us by producing copies at speed too, managing a mono copy in 13 seconds which puts it close to the top of the table.

Despite the name, then, this capable all-in-one printer makes an excellent option for remote workers with modest day-to-day business printing needs. It can deliver speedy black and white documents at a perfectly reasonable quality, and you can crank the output quality up for when you really need to impress. The high cost of consumables would be our biggest concern, but that’s easily addressed with Epson’s subscription service. If you’re short on either space or cash, the XP-4100 is an attractive buy.

Epson Expression Home XP-4100 specifications

If you’ve recently been looking to buy a new printer cartridge, you might have found yourself scratching your head in confusion at the different types on offer.

One of the most important decisions for you to make is whether you want to invest in a compatible or genuine ink cartridge.

There’s no need to fret, however, as we’re here to help and explain the differences between compatible and genuine ink and help you choose which best fits your needs.

Compatible vs genuine cartridges

The difference between compatible and genuine ink all comes down to the cartridges the ink is provided to consumers in.

You have genuine, or original, cartridges provided by the same brand that manufactured your business printer, and these tend to be on the more expensive side. These are sometimes called OEM, Original Equipment Manufacturer, which simply means that the producer of the cartridge also made the printer.

As you might have guessed, compatible cartridges are provided by a third party company. They should fit your printer, as long as you select the right one, and may be slightly cheaper to buy.

When you boil it down, it’s the difference between buying an HP cartridge manufactured by HP for your HP printer, or buying a printer cartridge from a different company for your HP printer.

Is compatible ink as good as original ink?

As long as you buy your compatible cartridges from a reputable source, they should be just as valid as genuine cartridges. The only difference between them is whether or not the company that made the printer made the cartridge.

Genuine cartridges are where a manufacturer can make more of a profit. Since manufacturers invested so much into research and development of their products, they need to somehow make their money back.

Compatible cartridges makers, on the other hand, don’t have the same research and development costs on the line. This means they can charge lower prices.

Do compatible ink cartridges damage printers?

In short, no, compatible ink cartridges do not damage printers. However, there seems to be a myth that they do, which is why some people continue to buy the cartridges straight from their printer’s manufacturer.

Despite this, you might want to be wary if the price of a compatible cartridge seems too good to be true. Only buy from reputable sources, otherwise you might find yourself purchasing a low-quality compatible cartridge that may affect your printer due to its shoddy quality. Stick to good quality cartridges and your printer will be fine.

Some users may be worried that using a compatible cartridge may affect your printer’s warranty. Usually, using a cartridge of this nature shouldn’t affect your warranty but to be on the safe side, check your printer’s terms and conditions.

It’s always worth checking what kind of cartridges a printer accepts before buying it. Some manufacturers have prevented their customers from using compatible cartridges by inserting chips into their original cartridges. Their printer only accepts these cartridges and doesn’t recognise compatible ones, locking users into the manufacturer’s cartridges and ink.

For example, in January Canon announced it would sell chip-free cartridges to help customers using its products as the company tried to deal with the global chip shortage. It said that the chips communicate information like toner level, to confirm the toner is a genuine Canon product. The company released instructions on workarounds to bypass DRM warnings and how to install the new chip-less cartridges.

Canon’s Pixma TS6250 is a three-in-one inkjet multifunction aimed at both general and more creative uses. While it doesn’t have business features such as a fax or automatic document feeder, it can duplex print, which is handy for saving paper or producing more professional-looking multipage documents. The TS6250’s wireless connection makes it easy to share with multiple devices, and it enables a wide range of mobile and cloud-based applications. Control comes via a useful 7.5cm colour touchscreen, although there’s no front-facing USB or SD card slot for direct photo prints.

Made from classy-looking black plastic, the TS6250 is smart enough to install in public-facing areas. It’s fairly compact, although pushing it back against a wall will block the rear paper feed, which you can otherwise use for up to 100 pages of plain or 20 sheets of photo paper. In the base, the regular tray handles up to 100 sheets of plain paper only. Loading paper is simple, but be aware that the printer won’t feed from the rear if you’ve forgotten to push down the guide rollers.

This printer uses Canon’s five-ink system, which combines the usual cyan, magenta and yellow with both a pigment black ink for plain paper and a dye-based black for photos. The former allows for bold black text and graphics, while the latter means photos print with a true black, rather than one composed of cyan, magenta and yellow.

The consumable range is available in three sizes – standard, XL and XXL – with a page of mixed text and graphics costing about 8.6p when using the largest and best-value supplies. Mono prints come in at 2.8p per page, and both are a touch more expensive than would be ideal, but not dramatically so.

The Pixma TS6250 is slightly less sophisticated than its sleek looks suggest, however. When printing, there’s a faint but persistent wheezing noise, as though the heads are gently scraping the paper as it passes through. It’s not the fastest, but at 12.7ppm for black text and 3.9ppm in our complex colour graphics test, it won’t keep you waiting for too long. While it took nearly 11 minutes to print two 10 x 8in photos on A4 paper, each borderless 10 x 15cm print shot out in about 40 seconds.

Canon’s venerable scan interface has barely changed in a decade, but it’s our favourite, offering a basic mode for quick work and an advanced mode for more precise control. The latter offers a full range of useful features such as descreening and dust and scratch removal, but remains intuitive and easy. An A4 preview completed in just seven seconds, while a scan at 300dpi needed 16 seconds. Both times are competitive, if not the fastest, but it took us 31 seconds to scan a 10 x 15cm photo at 600dpi, and a minute and 40 seconds to do the same at 1,200dpi – many competitors are quicker.

This MFP’s touchscreen isn’t the sharpest or the most responsive, but its menu system generally lets you get the job done without frustration. Photocopies are easy to manage and quick, with a mono A4 copy needing just 12 seconds and a colour page 22 seconds. Cloud support includes printing photos from a Facebook or Instagram account, or scanning documents to (and printing them from) file services including OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox.

This MFP’s true strength lies in the quality of its results. On plain paper, black text was crisp and dark, while graphics were bright and punchy, without any inkjet bugbears such as grain or banding. That’s less true for duplex prints, however – by default they’re printed with less ink to prevent smearing and are thus more faint, but you can adjust the setting. Photocopies exhibited reasonable colour accuracy and preserved plenty of detail.

The TS6250’s sharp and detailed photos were generally excellent, but their warm colour bias suited certain subjects better than others. Scans were sharply focused with accurate colours, and their high dynamic range preserved details across the full range of light and dark shades.

While it’s not the fastest device, the TS6250 is quick enough across all its functions. It’s also smart to look at and easy to use, whether from a PC, mobile device or its touchscreen. With great results and acceptable running costs, it’s an easy MFP to recommend.

Canon Pixma TS6250 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.

There is a reason the Canon Pixma TS8350 is a stalwart of the mid-range multifunction market of printers and that's simply due to it being the best of its kind. This doesn't mean it's a flawless machine or the best printer around, but it does produce fantastic-looking prints for the price.

Canon Pixma TS8350 review: Setup

Canon's setup process is a simple thing; you start by navigating to ij.start.canon, where you'll enter the printer's name – Pixma TS series – and from there you pick the relevant model from the drop-down list.

You'll be guided through each step of the process with options to increase how detailed the instructions get, such as removing the packing tape that stops the components rattling around in transit. You can skip through it if you've got the experience, but there are lots of effective explainer videos and animations for those who need them.

For the hardware itself, the Pixma TS8350 is a stylish black box with a textured finish that has a classy sheen. The front is comprised of a 4.25in color touchscreen, which is embedded in a panel that tilts. This is very handy as it ensures you can see it whether you're sitting in front or standing above.

The rest of the unit is, sadly, a little flimsy with fold-out trays that feel very fragile. If your office is a peaceful place with gentle employees then the Pixma TS8350 is sturdy enough – but we would question its suitability for more livelier places of business.

Aside from build quality, however, the Canon Pixma TS8350 is an inkjet we recommend, largely due to the prints it produces. With its six cartridges – which include "photo blue" and a larger secondary black cartridge – it shoots out glorious finishes. Photos that are rich and bold, with deep blacks and crisp text.

Admittedly, we found it lost some of its depth when printing on both sides of a sheet, but beyond that the Pixma TS8350 is a true multifunctional workhorse that more than copes with any task you can chuck at it.

Canon Pixma TS8350 review: Is it worth it?

The overall cost of running the printer is surprisingly reasonable – as long as you opt for Canon's XXL cartridges. With these, the main color ink cartridges should print around 800 pages, with the black lasting 600. This works out to 3.4p per page for mono prints and 6.2p for color. It's pricier than ink tank printers like Epson's EcoTank ET-5880, but it isn't far off what you'd get from Epson or HP's subscription services; note you don't get the ecological benefit of recycling your cartridge, though. While Canon did offer a recycling service previously, it's currently suspended.

FAQs

The printer is relatively nippy. It takes 11 seconds to print its first page from the moment the Print button is pressed, which is among the fastest we’ve seen. Standard printing tasks were more middling, but it was incredibly quick at printing our batch of 6 x 4in photos (while also producing some outstanding-looking prints). It was similarly quick off the blocks when producing copies from its scanner, both in mono and colour.

With its superb colour prints and stylish curves, the Pixma TS8350 is clearly aimed at creative types, and it works with a good range of Canon’s interesting media consumables, from CD covers to vinyl nail art. Don’t be fooled, however, because this printer can cope as admirably with boring office jobs as it can with photos and entertaining craft projects. You need to look elsewhere if an automatic sheet feeder is essential to your copying jobs, but for a mid-priced printer this model is the pick of a colourful bunch.

Canon Pixma TS8350 specifications

Canon’s ImageFormula R10 is a compact, portable document scanner that’s ideal for mobile workers and home-based staff seeking a fuss-free scanner which doesn’t require acres of desk space. It has a footprint of just 285 x 95mm, and at 900g it’s light enough to carry around with you – although it would have been nice if Canon had included a protective pouch.

There are no accessories to worry about, either. The R10 doesn’t need a battery or an external power supply – it gets all the juice it needs over the supplied 1.7m USB 2 cable. Nor, for that matter, are there any drivers or applications to install: when you plug the R10 into a host computer running Windows or macOS, a USB-connected drive appears containing the embedded CaptureOnTouch Lite scanning app, which you simply double-click to start scanning.

Though small, the scanner is impressively capable. It delivers mono and colour scan services at claimed speeds of 12ppm and 9ppm respectively, which isn’t bad at all. The main feeder can handle paper weights up to 128gsm, with a dedicated front slot for scanning embossed cards up to 1.4mm thick, and since it’s a duplex mechanism it can scan both sides of a page in one pass. The design even includes a 20-page automatic document feeder (ADF) – something we wouldn’t have expected from a scanner this small. Just note that the one thing that’s lacking is an output tray, so you’ll need to leave some space in front to catch your documents after they’ve passed through the scanner.

Canon’s software is easy to get on with. Like most scanning suites, it uses document profiles to store combinations of settings, including colour or mono scanning, resolution, single- or double-sided capture, blank page skipping and image rotation. You can fine-tune the output by adjusting brightness, contrast and background smoothing, and save your presets for future use. These are stored on the scanner itself, so they’re always available, no matter what device the scanner’s connected to.

Scans can be saved in all the most useful output formats, including JPEG, TIFF and searchable PDF; however, the software is only able to scan to local locations. If you want to scan to the cloud, you’ll need to select a local sync folder as the destination and wait. There’s no way to store documents on the scanner itself, either, though from a data-protection standpoint this is arguably a good thing.

In our tests we found performance wasn’t quite up to Canon’s claims: duplex scans of 20 bank statements at 200dpi came out at 10ppm in greyscale and 7ppm in colour, dropping to 9.5ppm and 4.4ppm at 300dpi. Paper handling was a mixed bag too; during our bank statement tests, the scanner occasionally grabbed multiple sheets and stopped with paper jam errors.

These aren’t deal-breakers for a device such as this, though. Speeds are perfectly usable for a lightweight scanning role, and there’s no need to use the higher quality settings for everyday documents; we found scans at 200dpi were perfectly clean and sharp, with 6pt text correctly converted into searchable PDFs. And needless to say, the R10 had no problem with single-page scans, nor with our till receipts and courier waybills.

Card scanning went smoothly, too. Once you insert a card into the slot, the scanner draws it in, scans both sides and spits it back out the front. We tested this with a range of materials and found laminated driving licences, plastic loyalty cards and credit cards posed no problems.

In all, the ImageFormula R10 is an impressive machine. Its small size, minimal weight and clever embedded software means you can easily take it to wherever it’s needed and digitise your documents without having to install a thing.

Canon Image Formula R10 specifications