The ScanSnap sub-brand has been around for a quarter of a century. Once owned by Fujitsu, and most recently part of Ricoh, it's always been focused on document scanners like the one we're testing here. The Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 is a compact A4 scanner, designed for desktop use, and capable of a claimed 45 pages per minute (ppm) performance.

While many scanners in this niche make do with a USB connection to a single PC, the iX2500 has both a wireless interface and a large color touchscreen. So equipped, it's suited not just to a single workstation, but as the archival and digitization hub for a small team. You can link this scanner to multiple devices, the users of which can create multiple shortcuts to scan and send jobs where they need them. With internet access, you can even connect to cloud services for easy sharing across teams and users.

There's nothing unusual about the rest of the Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500. Available in black or white, it follows the desktop scanner convention of a robust unit, roughly pentagonal in cross-section, and protected when not in use by its input tray. Unfold this, and the scanner automatically wakes up ready for its next job. You'll still need to withdraw the paper output, which tucks neatly into the unit's base when not needed.

As you'd hope, this scanner's trays feel almost bulletproof. The input in particular is very strong and almost flex-free, with paper guides that move smoothly from business card to Letter width. In contrast, the tip of the output tray does flex all the way down to desk level if you push it, but there's no suggestion it can't take the punishment.

With most day-to-day functions handled by its touchscreen, the iX2500 has just two buttons. One is dedicated to starting a scan, while the other releases the top section, which tilts forward by about 45 degrees. That's comfortably enough to get at any jammed paper, or occasionally blow away dust. After 200,000 images or so, it'll also give you access to replace the roller kit, which costs around £40 (ex. VAT).

Like other desktop document scanners, the Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 uses dual CIS sensors to capture both sides of each sheet in a single pass. In theory, this means it can capture up to 90 images per minute – quite a bit faster than we'd expect at this price.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Setting up

It should be fairly easy to find space for this small, light scanner on a regular desktop, or on any other bit of free space around the office. It's a compact device even with its trays fully extended – we measured a maximum depth of only 48cm. While you can connect it via USB-C, you'll need to join it to Wi-Fi to get the best out of it: if you're not planning to, consider the otherwise similar ScanSnap iX2400, or the Canon imageFORMULA DR-C350 instead.

Ricoh provides ScanSnap Home software for PCs and Macs, but there are also versions for Windows on Arm, Android, and iOS. Windows and Mac users can also download Tungsten (formerly Kofax) Power PDF editing software.

You'll need to install ScanSnap Home on at least one device to configure and save scanning shortcuts. These appear on the iX2500's touchscreen, from where you can activate them – for cloud destinations you needn't have a host device running when triggering the job. In a multi-user environment you can register the iX2500 to multiple devices: there's an option to enable Privacy mode, using which the shortcuts associated with a device only appear when that device is available.

We elected to join the iX2500 manually to a wireless router connected to our wired network. Ricoh's installer subsequently seemed to suggest we'd need to join our test PC to the wireless network in order to add this scanner, but after clicking Next it found and added it with no issues. After a firmware update – slickly handled as part of the installation – we were ready to go.

ScanSnap Home is – for the most part – a strong software package. You can use it to build straightforward scan workflows, choosing scan preferences and a job destination. These span the usual local suspects, such as a folder on the host device, but you can also save to a wide range of cloud services, including Google Drive and Photos, Microsoft OneDrive, or Dropbox.

At first it feels as though the software has been oversimplified. For example, you choose between normal, better, best, and excellent quality rather than the 150, 300, 600, and 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) that they represent – and we had to look online to even find that out. At the same time, it takes committed digging to find detailed page feed options covering de-skewing and double-feed detection. We couldn't find blank page skip settings at all.

As you'd expect, you get some control over the output quality through adjustable image compression. There's a choice of single or multi-page PDFs, with optional optical character recognition (OCR) for searchable results. Alternatively, you can save your scans as JPEGs, but not in PNG or TIFF formats.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Scanning

Any misgivings about ScanSnap Home were quickly dispelled once we actually started using it. It's responsive and fairly quick to process jobs, managing not to lag significantly behind the scanner itself on our modest test PC. Scanned jobs are displayed in a viewer, using which you can rotate or delete any rogue pages. Once accepted, there's a browser screen in which you can view recent jobs, filtering by document type, scan date, or any tag you've applied – for example, Invoice, Registration, or Remittance.

Whether or not you've enabled OCR for the full document contents, and depending on subject matter, ScanSnap Home attempts to grab enough text from the document to suggest a suitable name. The results here seemed inconsistent enough that we'd prefer to rely on manual or incremental naming to avoid confusion.

As you'd hope, this is a fast scanner. It could capture a single A4 page in less than seven seconds at 200 or 300dpi, but it dispatched a stack of 10 pages in just 18 seconds. It needed only 22 seconds to deal with a duplex scan of 12 pages, a rate of 65 images per minute. Selecting simplex or duplex scans made no difference to the engine speed – pages still passed through at the same rate. More unusually, selecting higher resolutions didn't slow things down by too much: at its 600dpi maximum this scanner captured a stack of 22 6x4" (15x10cm) photos in an incredible 15 seconds – the fastest we've ever timed.

Here, it's worth a direct comparison to Canon's ImageFORMULA DR-C350. This has a slightly faster claimed speed of 50 simplex pages per minute, and sure enough its physical scan times were slightly quicker in all but our photo tests. However, while the Canon required a few seconds' post-scan processing time, the ScanSnap didn't, often meaning that it fully completed jobs a couple of seconds earlier. Either way, the difference wasn't especially significant.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Results

While we needed to tweak some of the Canon ImageFORMULA DR-C350's settings, the ScanSnap iX2500 was bang-on using all its defaults. Scans were sharp and well-exposed, with office documents offering crisp text and graphics against a clean white page. Photos – despite the speed with which they'd been captured – were far better than we'd expect from a document-focused device. While not strong enough for professional imaging use, this scanner could work as a rapid way to digitize a large stack of conventional prints where exceptional quality wasn't the priority.

Just as significantly for a device that's likely to capture many thousands of pages over its lifetime, the ScanSnap iX2500 was absolutely faultless at detecting and correcting issues such as blank pages. While it's odd not to have a sensitivity setting, we found we simply didn't need it. One caveat is that, thanks in no small part to the excellent paper feeding, we didn't experience any crooked page feeding during our tests, so we couldn't test the de-skew feature.

The iX2500 was exceptional at dealing with page orientation. We present every document scanner with a torture test comprising a bunch of double and single-sided prints, along with thin and ageing double-sided magazine pages. Deliberately, some of the pages in this are upside down, but the iX2500 became one of very few scanners to consistently correct the orientation for the entire document. While most scanners are caught out by at least one graphics-heavy page, this one had no problems even when we repeated and jumbled the job many times.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Is it worth it?

When testing the Canon ImageFORMULA DR-C350, we complained it was necessary to spend time looking for advanced settings to optimise its performance. At first, it seemed like the Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 had the opposite problem: that advanced settings weren't even available. It turned out that they were mostly just well hidden, but also that we didn't need them. While we'd rather deal with proper resolutions in dots per inch rather than a nebulous scale where "Excellent" sits above "Best", it turns out that ScanSnap Home is good enough to get away with its simplicity – a trick that rarely comes off.

With straightforward and dependable software, together with a convenient touchscreen and Wi-Fi access, the iX2500 is easy for single users to manage, and incredibly so for a small team that all need a straightforward scanner. Throw in its decent speed, excellent image quality, and reasonable asking price, and it really is hard to find much to criticise.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 specifications

The Brother MFC-L8970CDW sits at the top of the Japanese manufacturer's updated range of color laser devices for workgroups and small businesses. It's one of three multifunction peripherals in the new 8XXX range – there are also two single-function printers, including the HL-L8570CDW, which we've also reviewed.

The MFC-L8970CDW has an enviable specification. On top, you'll find an automatic document feeder (ADF) that can handle no fewer than 80 sheets. It can duplex (double-side) scan each sheet in a single pass. Just in front of this, there's a color touchscreen so huge it looks like someone's left their tablet behind.

The scanner and display unit sit atop a color laser printer rated at 31 pages per minute (ppm), or 20 images per minute (ipm) when printing in duplex – 20 sides printed onto 10 sheets of paper each minute. This printer combines a 50-sheet multipurpose feed and 250-sheet cassette. That's the only slightly off-note in an otherwise comprehensively well-specced device – at this price we'd expect to be able to load in an entire ream.

Alongside its duplex print, scan, copy, and fax party tricks, this MFP supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless networks, and gigabit Ethernet connection. Its vast screen has plenty of room for mundane setup and operational features, along with space for up to 64 configurable shortcuts – useful if, say, people frequently need to make a double-sided copy of a double-sided original, and want to avoid having to dig around in the copy menu.

While it's a shame the MFC-L8970CDW doesn't have a bigger standard cassette, you can upgrade it to a maximum 1,340 pages with a combination of additional 250 and 520-sheet trays. There's no stapler unit or sorting bin, however, which rules it out of true departmental roles – it doesn't really have the speed for it anyway.

Brother says the MFC-L8970CDW is designed for a recommended 7,500 monthly pages or an 80,000-page maximum. It certainly feels well put together, with sturdy trays and impressively robust-feeling paper stops in the printer and ADF outputs. The usability is good, too, from the large display down to details such as the clearly displayed paper orientation icon in the main tray – helpful if you're reloading paper and need to know which will be the print side.

Things start to get more complicated when you look at consumables. The MFC-L8970CDW supports a dizzying range of no fewer than 16 different toners rated from 1,800 to 10,000 pages, on top of which there are drums and waste toner containers each good for 50,000 pages. Heavily used examples might find themselves needing a new fuser or transfer belt unit, too.

That's a lot to manage, particularly if you're used to competing devices that just take four combined toner/drum consumables. Nobody would blame you for signing up to a managed print service – Brother's start at around £7 per month – but if you are buying consumables and you stick with the biggest 10,000-page toners, you can get running costs down to less than a penny per page of black text, or 6.8p (ex VAT) for color. Factor in all the lifetime consumables, and these still only rise by fractions of a penny.

This isn't a cheap MFP, but it does arrive with XXL toners rated for 7,500 black and 6,000 color pages – these alone are worth a few hundred pounds.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Setting up

This isn't the ugliest laser MFP you'll see, but it has the misfortune to combine a comparatively deep and narrow laser printer with a wide and deep scanner unit. The result is some mushroomy overtones, plus the more practical need for more depth and width on a counter than you might expect. This is compounded slightly by vents on the right side and a USB slot on the left – the latter bizarrely under, and inset from the overhanging touchscreen in such a way that the casual user is unlikely to ever find it.

This device is bulky and heavy enough that it's a two-person lift over any significant height or distance. There's the usual amount of tape to extract, along with some orange plastic spacers for the toner/drum tray. While these were easy to remove on the HL-L8570CDW printer we tested, here the left-hand spacers were reluctant to part company with a metal pin at the front.

With such a large display, it's no surprise that this MFP is easy to join to a wireless network. It's easy to use and configure, too: adding a shortcut is as simple as tapping one of the plus icons and navigating through the menu to the feature you want to access. Overall the menu system feels more like a consumer device than a business-class one, and that's a good thing: too many enterprise printers bamboozle non-technical users with complex control panels.

As you'd expect, the MFC-L8970CDW includes various security features and protocols, including IP filtering, SSL/TLS encryption, secure boot, and user authentication. There's also an NFC reader, configurable for authentication and workflow personalization.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Printing, scanning and copying

At this price, we're slightly surprised Brother hasn't given the MFC-L8970CDW faster print speeds. It's always the case that a range-topping device can seem slow when it shares a print engine with more basic models, but we'd expect more than a modest 31ppm for this money. This is especially the case given this MFP didn't get all that close to Brother's figures, managing only 23.8ppm across 25 pages in our standard black text test. It was slower still on our color graphics test, although here its 21.5ppm is fair – our test document is graphics heavy, and few printers sail through it at top speed.

We often get faster results over long documents, as these minimize the relative impact of the time it takes a PC to prepare and send the job. Sure enough, tested over a 50-page text document, the MFC-L8970CDW hit 30.3ppm – laudably close to Brother's claim. Using the first 10 pages of the same document we timed duplex printing at 10.9ipm.

As we found with the HL-L8570CDW printer, this MFP defaults to 2,400x600dpi Fine print quality. Normal (600x600dpi) is no faster, so we completed our tests with Fine. The MFC-L8970CDW printed six 6x4" photos on three A4 sheets in 32 seconds, and needed 35 seconds to complete two 10x8" images on two pages. From standby it could print a first black or color page in 18 seconds, needing only another 3 seconds if we'd left it unused for an hour first.

This MFP is unusual among office-focused devices in that its scanner goes up to a very detailed 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) -- 600dpi is a more common maximum. It's very quick: we were able to preview an A4 page in just five seconds, and needed only six seconds to scan it at 150dpi. At 300dpi this job still completed in 10 seconds. Even when scanning photos at higher resolution, this MFP didn't hang about. It captured a 6x4" print at 600dpi in 13 seconds. At 1,200dpi the same job needed 52 seconds – that's much more competitive than it sounds.

The Brother MFC-L8970CDW isn't that quick off the mark when copying, returning a single black page in 13 seconds and a color one in 15 seconds. It's much more impressive when using the ADF, completing a 10-page simplex copy in 32 seconds whether in black or color.

This ADF's ability to capture both sides at once ought to make for rapid duplex copying, but the reality wasn't quite so impressive. While our original 10-page, 20-sided document rapidly fed through, the printer didn't kick into action until it had almost finished. There's not much wrong with a speed of 15.4ipm on this test, but it seemed like this MFP should be capable of more.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Results

With so many features to get right, it's not unusual for a multifunction to slip up in at least one area. The happy news here is that the MFC-L8970CDW doesn't, and in several ways it's extremely good. This MFP's main weakness across our tests was murky black photocopies in which darker shades bled together, leading to the loss of detail. We're not sure why, given that color copies were perfectly exposed and quite faithful to the originals.

Elsewhere, text quality was as good as you'd expect from a laser printer, with crisp characters that stood up to close scrutiny – only under magnification could we spot a tiny bit of stepping on some curved outlines. Color graphics were generally very impressive, particularly when it came to shade control: while many lasers struggle to differentiate shades and colors without bands of halftoning patterns, here the content shone through without obvious artifacts.

It is worth noting that this printer has something of a cool color bias, leading to less perky photos than you might get from some rivals. Skin tones could fall victim to this, particularly in illustrations where lighter skin tended to be rendered a little pale. Overall, however, all of our print results were strong.

If a color laser MFP is likely to fall short anywhere, it's in the scanner. But while the MFC-L8970CDW was in a hurry to get the job done, you'd be hard pressed to tell from the results. It captured among the best images we've seen from a business-oriented scanner, with well-judged exposure and sharp focus more than up to the task of archiving everyday office documents. More unusually, it was comfortable scanning photos at higher resolutions, displaying a wide dynamic range that allowed it to capture detail from among the lightest and darkest shades. This scanner managed to distinguish all but the darkest couple of shades on our Kodak Q60 test target – far better than the average for a business device.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW review: Is it worth it?

This multifunction offers a huge range of features, and while it might not have the fastest printer, it's generally quick enough to dispatch all the jobs it will encounter in busy workgroup use. The payoff for your patience is that it'll complete almost anything you want to a very high standard – it offers one of the best scan and print quality combinations we've seen.

On the flip side, a heavily used MFC-L8970CDW fleet might need stock of up to eight different consumables. Even if each is reasonably priced and comes with a long service life, that makes management more of a headache, and suggests this device might be best viewed through the lens of a managed print contract.

It's hard to shake the impression that this MFP might be overpriced. While sharing its print specifications with the HL-L8570CDW, it's twice as expensive -- its scanner and display are both good, but we're not sure they're worth that premium. And while it's good to see the MFC-L8970CDW arrive with such generous inbox toners, remember that the HL-L8570CDW gets those too. Overall, this is a strong MFP, but it might be worth waiting to see if its price drops before buying.

Brother MFC-L8970CDW specifications

Brother recently launched a new range of business color laser printers aimed at demanding workgroups and small businesses. The 8XXX range comprises three multifunction peripherals and two single-function printers. Here we're reviewing the HL-L8570CDW printer, which sits above the HL-L8430CDW. Both have a decent specification, centered around a 31 pages per minute (ppm) print engine also capable of 20 images per minute (ipm) duplexing.

Both single-functions in the 8XXX range come with a 6.8cm (2.7") color touchscreen and a USB slot for direct printing. This being 2026, both support both 2.4 and 5GHz wireless networks, or you can just connect them up via the gigabit Ethernet ports at their rear.

With many core specifications in common, the HL-L8570CDW is chiefly distinguished from the HL-L8430CDW by a wider range of consumables and expansion options. Neither printer's standard paper handling is exceptional out of the box, with a main cassette holding 250 sheets supplemented by a 50-sheet multipurpose feed. You can expand the HL-L8430CDW to an 800-page maximum by adding up to two 250-sheet cassettes – less convenient than a single 500-sheet unit. The HL-L8570CDW we're reviewing is more impressive, accepting 520 or 250-sheet cassettes up to a potential 1,340-sheet total.

It's a similar story with consumables. The HL-L8430CDW arrives with a fair 3,000 pages of black toner and 1,800 in color. It accepts replacements up to 7,500 black and 6,500 color pages. That's not bad, but the HL-L8570CDW turns up with these XXL consumables in the box – a generous starting allowance even at this price. It also accepts larger replacements rated for 10,000 pages of black or color.

While competing printers from the likes of Canon or HP tend to stick with a limited consumable set, that of the Brother HL-L8570CDW is truly staggering. It supports no fewer than four different toner sizes: standard, XL, XXL, and the super-jumbo 10,000-page items. In addition, there's a waste toner bottle and drum kit, each rated for 50,000 pages. As if that wasn't enough, you can also buy a replacement fuser unit and transfer belt – both nominally good for 100,000 pages. It's unlikely you'd need to replace any of these on a lightly used printer, and even a busy one might not need the fuser or transfer belt, but managing them all could be a pain. On the flip side, the fact that they're available may help extend a heavily used printer's life.

Many buyers of the HL-L8570CDW will opt for a managed print contract, but if you are buying consumables, stick to the biggest available. Do that, and you can expect toner costs of 0.9p (ex VAT) per black page, or 6.8p in color. Even with all the lifetime consumables priced in, per-page costs rise to 1p in black and 7.1p in color – competitive in this class, and significantly less than you'd pay with a cheaper workgroup printer.

Brother HL-L8570CDW review: Setting up

Brother says it's reduced the size of this range by up to 30% compared to the previous generation, but it's still not exactly svelte. The HL-L8570CDW weighs 21kg, and is significantly bulkier than a consumer-level printer. It feels nicely made, though: its main paper cassette slides on robust rails, and the paper guides within it feel like they're there for the long-term: not always an impression we've had from cheaper Brother printers.

We're not sure why Brother has put this printer's USB slot on its left-hand panel. Quite apart from the fact that it hides it away from those who might want to use it, it also means you can't place the printer snugly against a wall or cubicle divider on that side. You can't on the right, either, as there are two vents towards the back.

As with most printers, you may need access to the back of the Brother HL-L8570CDW to get at any paper jams in the duplexer, but most of the day-to-day features are at its front. The front panel pulls forward to form the 50-sheet multi-purpose input. Pressing a button on the top panel releases a bigger front section, allowing you to access the toner and drum assembly.

Business and enterprise printers are sometimes cursed with complex or unwelcoming interfaces – a mistake given the bulk of their users aren't likely to be technical. Fortunately, Brother's touchscreen menu mirrors its consumer printers with straightforward language and a sensible layout. One oddity is it doesn't support swipe gestures, but it's nice and responsive to taps.

Brother's software package for this printer installs a full-featured PC driver, supporting useful features such as watermarking and password-protected secure prints. Administrators are more likely to be interested in the wide range of wired and wireless network security features, and additional settings, including IP filtering and Active Directory/LDAP authentication.

Brother HL-L8570CDW review: Printing

This printer's 31ppm claimed print speed isn't exceptional for a workgroup laser, and it's towards the low end for a busy enterprise device. Good thing, then, that it didn't fall too far away from it in our tests. The Brother HL-L8570CDW delivered a first page of black text within 12 seconds of us clicking Print, although it needed a further nine seconds to warm up if it had first been idle for an hour. It went on to complete 25 copies of a formal letter in 56 seconds, a rate of 26.8ppm.

Our tests include the time taken to spool and start printing a job, which has less impact over longer jobs. We timed a 50-page text document at 101s – at 29.7ppm this was only fractionally below Brother's stated speed.

The HL-L8570CDW was a little slower when working with complex color graphics. Its 16 seconds time-to-first page reflected the additional processing time taken to prepare our graphics-rich 24-page document, and partially accounted for a slower 21.2ppm performance. That's still OK, but perhaps not on days where speed is everything.

This printer takes an unusual approach to duplexing, seemingly pulling two sheets of a job in to have their reverse printed, rather than one. Accordingly, it's some time before the first duplex page lands in the 150-sheet output tray, and paper stops being picked a couple of pages before the job itself is done. It didn't seem to harm the speed too much, with the HL-L8570CDW managing a fair 11.3ipm when printing a 10-page color document onto five sheets of paper.

We normally print our photo tests using a printer's best quality, which in this case is a claimed 2,400x600dpi. When we came to select Fine mode, we discovered this is in fact the default setting. Hopeful that dropping to 600x600dpi might result in quicker everyday prints we re-tried our text job, but the speed was identical regardless of setting. Using Fine, we timed two 10x8" photos printed onto A4 paper at 28 seconds. Six 6x4" photos on three A4 pages completed in 33 seconds.

Brother HL-L8570CDW review: Results

What this printer lacks in outright speed, it makes up for in quality. Text was about as good as you'll see, with characters across our tests showing neat outlines all the way down to tiny 5pt. Only under magnification was a tiny amount of stepping visible on curved lines, and even then, this only really showed up on bold characters.

This printer tended towards undersaturating photos, reproducing clear skies with a shade too much blue, and removing the zing from one test photo of brightly colored Australian currency. In illustrations this showed up as slightly pale skin tones.

This aside, the Brother HL-L8570CDW was great at printing photos and graphics. Illustrations were detailed and sharp, while color fills were uniform and mostly bold. This printer excelled with the shade progressions on our test presentation slides, smoothly transitioning across blue and red shades without obvious stepping as it moved through the dither patterns used to recreate them. Even color text – often a challenge – was crisp and neat. Here, this printer's extremely fine halftoning helped avoid the impression of jagged outlines, improving legibility in smaller color fonts.

Brother HL-L8570CDW review: Is it worth it?

This isn't exactly a printer to get excited about. While swift, it isn't fast, and while it's durable and maintainable, keeping a heavily used example running could involve the complicated juggling of consumables and accessories. Here, a managed print contract would undoubtedly help – Brother's own offerings start for less than £7 a month.

With the complicated consumables dealt with, the HL-L8570CDW quickly begins to look more appealing. It's reasonably specified out of the box, and can be upgraded to store a handy amount of paper – good for businesses juggling plain and header paper, or simply those trying to minimize the hassle of loading media. Ultimately, however, its strongest suit is its print quality. If you want good results at a fair pace, without punitive running costs, the Brother HL-L8570CDW is a strong option.

Brother HL-L8570CDW specifications

Canon's imageFORMULA DR-C350 is an A4 desktop document scanner. It's designed for general archiving and day-to-day document capture, with a compact size that makes it ideal for use in a reception or other customer-facing environment. It's not limited to that, though – with useful workflow software and decent specs, it's up to reasonably demanding archival in a busy small office.

This scanner's automatic document feeder can hold up to 100 sheets of paper and scan them at up to 50 pages per minute. As you'd expect, dual CIS image sensors mean it can capture both sides of each page, which makes for a maximum of up to 100 images per minute (ipm). Don't be fooled by its smallish size and comparative affordability: it's engineered for an 8,000 scans per day workload. That's 16 per minute every eight-hour working day. The final specification of note is a 600 dots per inch (dpi) maximum resolution – typical for document scanners.

Canon has moved away from providing multiple scan packages such as Kofax VRS. Instead, you get version five of its own CaptureOnTouch software. That's not such a bad thing; there's a bit of a learning curve, but once mastered, it's easy to create shortcuts for all the scans, settings, and destinations you want. The default warranty of one-year seems a bit stingy, though.

This scanner is chiefly aimed at document capture, but it also supports ID scans with help from the bypass switch on the front panel. Here you'll also find dedicated Scan and Stop buttons, alongside a basic LCD screen. We don't expect many users will find themselves needing to replace the original rollers, which are rated at 250,000 pages, but it's good to know you can buy new kits if you need them. While we're talking about reliability, you can open this scanner's top side by about 50°, giving easy access to any jams. Both the input and output trays feel quite sturdy, too.

Canon imageFORMULA DR-C350 review: Setting up

This is a small, light scanner, although it's worth mentioning it requires quite a bit more space when its paper trays are fully extended – we measured height and depth of roughly 290mm and 560mm respectively. The ImageFORMULA DR-C350 connects to a single PC via a supplied USB-C cable. There are no drivers in the box, and we had some issues installing from the lengthy web address given on the Setup Guide sheet. In the end, we downloaded additional drivers from the Canon UK site, which seemed to do the trick. Things are underwhelming at first; load a document, press the scan button, and you'll get a black and white simplex (single-sided) capture, saveable as a searchable PDF.

It pays to spend some time configuring CaptureOnTouch, where you'll begin with a single 'Save to folder' shortcut that does the same as pressing the scanner button. It's easy to add new shortcuts, editing them with the source, output, and quality settings you need. Before long you'll probably have several, which is where the scanner's screen and navigation buttons come in handy – if you know the numbers of the jobs you frequently use, you can select and trigger them without looking at the host PC.

As with many other document scanners, you might need to go digging to get exactly the options you want. For example, the main interface offers only a subset of the supported scan resolutions – you'll need to enable Advanced Settings to get to, say, 150dpi. That's also where you'll find more detailed settings for straightening and blank page detection.

One final feature of note is the DFR (double feed release) button. Hit this to make the scanner continue after it's detected a double feed, saving the hassle of restarting a job when it's not necessary.

Canon imageFORMULA DR-C350 review: Scanning

This is quite a rapid scanner, though it didn't match Canon's claimed 50ppm speed in our tests. At 150dpi it could capture 10 single-sided pages in 16 seconds, a rate of 37.5ppm. The difference is probably down to test methodology: we time from the moment we click to start the job, not from the moment the scanner starts moving. The short pause before starting becomes less significant the longer the job: the ImageFORMULA DR-C350 reached a peak of 40ppm over the longest job we timed, a 12-page document.

Happily, there's no measurable difference between the paper transport speed whether duplex or simplex scanning, so on duplex jobs you effectively get two sides for the speed of one. Both our duplex speed tests hit 80ipm, while this scanner even managed 60ipm on our 'torture test', a mismatch of yellowing, tissue-thin magazine pages, and single-sided prints. As we've come to expect from most document scanners, we had no mis-feeds, double-feeds, or skewed images during our tests.

It is worth mentioning that some processing options will add a little time to scan jobs. While de-skewing and automatic orientation happened in real-time, configuring a searchable PDF as the output added a second or so of processing time to the file save process – we'd expect this to vary depending on the host PC's specifications and workload.

We didn't love the quality of this scanner's initial results. Scans were a little too dark at the default setting, leading to loss of detail among darker shades in graphics. Fixing this required a trip into the advanced settings, which needed repeating for each new scan shortcut we made, but it did at least do the job. Other than that, image quality was generally quite strong, with sharp details and faithful colours. Even at 150dpi, captured documents were clearly legible, including important details like graphics, signatures, and reference numbers.

The ImageFORMULA DR-C350 was adept at spotting blank pages, deftly weeding them out of previews – it didn't mistakenly filter out any lightly printed pages, or include any blanks. It also seemed excellent at straightening crooked originals, although the document feed was so reliable that we only saw this happen once, with a flimsy magazine page.

However, it didn't excel at page rotation. Our torture test is deliberately jumbled, with a mix of single and double-sided originals arranged in different orientations. At 150dpi the ImageFORMULA DR-C350 didn't correct the alignment of all the pages. It performed better at 300dpi, but worse again once we lightened the exposure a little to compensate for dark images. At least you can make manual corrections in the preview window before saving.

Canon imageFORMULA DR-C350 review: Is it worth it?

There's no shortage of options when it comes to fast desktop scanners, and we're not convinced the ImageFORMULA DR-C350 is necessarily the best. It's definitely fast enough, and its image quality is excellent, but it's a shame you need to get to know it and delve into its software to optimise the settings. We couldn't work out how to combine consistently reliable orientation with the best image quality, which is a shame.

Still, this scanner offers plenty for front-of-house applications, where its ability to handle mixed media and thick ID documents could support a wide variety of workflows. It's compact, too, making it relatively easy to find room on reception desks or even alongside the departmental printer. If you don't mind investing a little time in getting it set up just so, the ImageFORMULA DR-C350 could still prove ideal.

Canon imageFORMULA DR-C350 specifications

If you’ve been following recent hardware market reports, you’ve likely seen the headlines: new printer and multi-function printer (MFP) shipments are slowing down. For partners whose businesses have long been tied to the rhythm of the three- to five-year hardware refresh cycle, this might seem like a cause for concern.

But what if this slowdown isn’t a threat, but a massive, hidden opportunity?

We’ve been speaking with our partners across the globe, and a consistent, insightful narrative has emerged, particularly from those in EMEA. They’ve pointed to a “renewal gap” created by the market disruption of 2020. This isn’t just a theory; it’s a reality backed by data.

The pandemic aftershock: Why 2025 is different

To understand the opportunity in front of us, we first need to look back five years. The common perception is that IT spending froze in 2020. That’s only half the story. While strategic projects were paused, they were immediately replaced by a frantic dash to buy technology for one reason: enabling remote work.

As almost all of our partners observed, this led to two very different stories for the hardware market. While the PC market boomed, the office-centric, multi-function device (MFD) market experienced the exact opposite. As your customers’ offices closed, the need for large, centralized printers evaporated overnight.

Partners tell us the same story. They noted that, while home printer sales surged, businesses stopped buying high-end office devices, and many reported that their customers had slashed their budgets.

As predicted by our partners, the consequence of this ‘missing’ cohort of MFDs from 2020 means that fewer devices are coming up for a standard five-year renewal this year. But this isn’t a dead end. It’s a pivot point. The conversation is no longer about hardware replacement; encouragingly, it’s about optimization, security, and solving the challenges of the modern workplace.

Three strategies to win in a slower hardware market

When businesses aren’t buying new hardware, they inevitably look to get more from what they already have. This is where the channel, armed with the right software solutions, can provide real, tangible value beyond the hardware.

First, you need to lead with fleet optimisation, not just replacement. Indeed, the slowdown in new sales is the perfect trigger to switch the conversation. This market shift highlights a critical customer need: a single solution to manage their existing devices while preparing them for the future, whether that’s a move to the cloud or adopting new security standards.

This market trend confirms that this work is critical. It allows you to approach customers with a compelling message: “Holding off on new printers? No problem. Let’s modernize the print experience you already have, making it more secure and easier to manage.” This changes your role from a hardware vendor to a solutions consultant.

This is where the flexibility of independent software vendor (ISV) solutions come into play. As a starting point, an effective print management solution will help to put the right printer onto a user's computer, depending on their location, access rights, job role, and so on. Such solutions enable you to demonstrate how you can add more value to your customers and end users, elevating your role from a software supplier to a trusted advisor and consultant.

Perhaps more importantly, print management solutions simplify the process for securing and managing a customer’s current fleet, while a subscription model provides a clear and simple migration path to cloud-based print solutions. This enables you to meet customers where they are now and guide them to the cloud at their own pace. This protects their current fleet investment - without a 'rip and replace' approach – and helps them sweat that asset just a little more.

Second, it’s important to own the entire fleet - every single device – and it’s here where a different approach can make a big impact. For years, the focus has been on the big MFDs. But what about the rest of the printers scattered around the office? The desktop print in the CEO’s office, the one in the legal department, the prescription printer in a doctor’s office - those are often unmanaged, unsecure, and create a frustrating experience for users.

With those examples in mind - and your competitors focused on the main MFD contract - you have a massive opportunity to lead with a story for a customer’s entire fleet. Be the one who asks about those forgotten devices. Powerful and flexible print management solutions enable you to bring every printer, from the oldest desktop model to the newest MFD, under one simple, secure print management solution. This will enable you to provide a consistent, secure, and modern print experience for every employee, no matter what devices they’re using, not to mention simplifying the process for tracking print costs.

Finally, help to solve the hybrid work puzzle, because the challenges of hybrid work are real and persistent. It’s no longer just about managing a single office location; it’s about supporting users as they move between multiple locations - the main office, a regional branch, their home, or even a co-working space.

This created a huge headache for IT teams trying to ensure everyone can print easily and securely wherever they are. By solving this complex logistical problem using print management solutions engineered from the ground up for this very scenario, you’re delivering value that goes far beyond the device itself.

From challenge to opportunity

As we’ve established, the market for new hardware sales is seeing a dip. But the underlying dynamics - the need to optimize costs, manage a mixed-age fleet, and solve the hybrid work puzzle - have created the ideal conditions for software-led solutions.

I believe that the channel and ISVs can work together to turn these market conditions into your biggest competitive advantage while adding value, boosting security, and simplifying print… wherever users are based.

Epson's EcoTank ET-4956 is an inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP) aimed at busy home workers and micro offices. It's a refillable device, meaning that instead of messing about with short-lived cartridges, it uses bottled ink that should last for several thousand pages. That's one less hassle in your own office, and a lot less if you're rolling out a fleet of printers to home workers. We're testing the ET-4956, which is white, but the ET-4950 is essentially an identical black version.

This is a compact and fairly attractive device, helped by its comparatively uncluttered control panel. Here you'll find a 2.4" (6.1cm) color touchscreen that looks after most of the day-to-day functionality. It's also where you'll encounter just about the only missing feature: this MFP has no USB host port, which limits what you can do without a computer. There's no wired Ethernet port either, just support for dual-band Wi-Fi, but this opens up various print-from and scan-to-cloud opportunities – arguably more flexible than USB host functionality anyway.

Regardless, the ET-4956 has just about everything else covered. In 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 only thing missing here is a second paper tray, but it's not a major misstep.

As a refillable printer, the EcoTank ET-4956 has tanks to hold its black, cyan, magenta, and yellow inks. These arrive in a set of bottles that Epson says will last for around 5,500 color pages, and a huge 15,100 in black-only. In theory, that could last the lifetime of a lightly-used home device, in which case you'll have paid around 5.6p ex VAT for every full-color page, or 2p per black page. With the MFP itself thrown in.

Finish the bundled ink and replacement bottles work out at 0.5p per full-color page. That's about as cheap as printing gets. As with all ink tank printers, the major caveat is that the device costs more to buy in the first place: occasional users who wouldn't get through all the included ink may get a lower cost of ownership with a cartridge-based device. It's also important to note that the standard warranty is only one year – while we've no doubts about Epson's build quality, we prefer the reassurance of a long warranty on ink tank printers, which gives users reassurance they'll have time to recover the higher up-front cost. Fortunately, this MFP is currently available with a five-year warranty upgrade from some retailers.

Epson EcoTank ET-4956 review: Setting up

Epson has been making refillable inkjets for long enough that it's arrived at a painless setup process. We backed out of the prompts on the control panel to view the online setup guides: getting started is basically as simple as removing some tape and emptying the bottles into each tank. You can't misfuel the wrong colors, and you can't spill any ink – provided you're not tempted to squeeze the bottles.

Inkjets – and especially refillable ones – often have a one-off priming process before they're ready for first use. The ET-4956 inflicts a common irritation on you: there's no opportunity to join it to a wireless network before starting. That means 10 minutes spent twiddling your thumbs before the control panel finally lets you get on Wi-Fi and start installing any software on your computers. It's perhaps not a big issue on a single device, but potentially a major frustration if you're getting a whole department's worth ready to go.

One possible block here is that Epson's latest installer requires location permissions to search for and add new printers. If you've turned it off, and your remote users only have standard user accounts, you might need to change the setting temporarily for them to complete the install.

Fortunately, there are no other problems. This is a compact, home-oriented MFP, so it's light, and easy to find a home for in the typical home office. Freshly installed and loaded up with ink, it could be months before a user needs to even think about maintenance. Windows in the tanks give a quick reckoner on the remaining ink, and the driver issues regular reminders to check the level.

Epson EcoTank ET-4956 review: Printing, scanning, and copying

If you're expecting blistering performance, prepare to be gently let down: the Epson EcoTank ET-4956 prints at a fairly relaxed pace, and its photocopies are strictly casual. It could wake up and deliver a first page of text in just 11 seconds, before going on to reach 16.0 pages per minute (ppm) over 25 pages – not too far off its rated 18.0ppm, and certainly not bad for this class. In Draft print quality it managed to nudge 18.1ppm, but here faint print quality means the results are strictly for your eyes only.

As you'd expect, the ET-4956 was much slower on our graphics-intensive 24-page color test, but it still reached a respectable 5.1ppm over 24 pages. Printing in duplex, it managed 3.4 images (sides) per minute on the same document.

Single copies weren't too slow, with a black page completed in 11 seconds, and a color copy over in 24 seconds. However, with its ADF loaded with 10 sheets, the ET-4956 needed more than two minutes for a black copy, and more than three in color. We timed a 10 page, 20-sided colour duplex photocopy, which took just under seven minutes to complete. In part, that's down to this MFP's ADF, which duplexes by reclaiming originals for a second pass like a printer, rather than having two sensors for a single pass. It's a slower option, but at least it's good to have the feature – duplex multi-page copying is surprisingly rare.

Happily, the EcoTank ET-4956 gets more of a shift on when it comes to scanning. It completed a preview in nine seconds, and needed 21 seconds to capture an A4 page at either 150 or 300 dots per inch (dpi). In higher resolution work, it captured a 6x4" (15x10cm) photo in 35 seconds at 600dpi, and in 57 seconds at 1,200dpi.

There's no real weakness in any of the output from this MFP, but it's not exactly class-leading. Black text was crisp enough for formal and professional use, but while color graphics were fairly bold and authoritative on the page, they didn't exactly 'pop'. As is common on inkjets, duplexed prints were less strong, as by default the printer cuts back on density to help avoid smearing – you can tweak settings for this in the driver. Graphical prints had almost no banding or other imperfections, although those with sharper eyes might notice a trace of grain in some color fills.

This isn't a photo printer, but with dye-based inks it's capable of making a decent effort on coated papers. Prints lacked the definition and impact you'd get from a more creative-focused device, but they were still fine for casual and general-purpose use – such as running off a couple of family photos in between the usual diet of emails or documents. The exception to this was black and white shots, which lacked contrast, leaving them looking muddy and underwhelming. The ET-4956 is a competent copier, reproducing originals quite faithfully, but a little too dark by default.

Again, the best news comes from the scanner, which did a brilliant job of capturing both office documents and photos. In the former, effective exposure control enhanced the white of the paper, while capturing punchy colors and crisp text. Photos were also perfectly exposed, with highly accurate colors, and a wide dynamic range that saw detail preserved in the extremes of exposure.

Epson EcoTank ET-4956 review: Is it worth it?

Like other ink tank printers, Epson's EcoTank ET-4956 isn't really worth it if you print in very small volumes. With a higher up-front cost than a comparable cartridge-based inkjet, you'll only enjoy a lower cost of ownership if you'll print several thousand pages. However, many home printers will ease through that milestone during their lifetime, and one or two workers together in a micro office might comfortably print off a box or two of paper within a year.

This MFP is for them. 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: it's a decent printer, copier and scanner across the board, and it's well equipped for any home or micro office. Just be sure to buy it from a reseller offering the five-year warranty promotion.

Epson EcoTank ET-4956 specifications

The DCP-L1640W is one of a few new laser multifunction peripherals recently released by Brother. It's a cheap device, and its specifications are quite basic. The mono laser printer in its base is rated at a modest 20.0 pages per minute (ppm), and it doesn't support automatic duplex (double-sided) printing. You'll find no automatic document feeder (ADF) to help with multi-page copies – if you want one, consider paying another few pounds for the otherwise identical DCP-L1660W. Neither model has a touchscreen or USB host port, though.

To be fair, we wouldn't expect to find these features at this price, and the DCP-L1640W covers the basics well. It supports both wired Ethernet and Wi-Fi, for example, which could be handy. Typically, for a compact laser MFP, the scanner is slung low over the paper output tray. Here, that's a slight irritation, as you need to lift it to fully extend the paper stop.

Even though it's one of Brother's more affordable devices, the DCP-L1640W supports its EcoPro ink and toner subscriptions. That gives you an alternative to buying your own consumables, which would work out at about 3.2p per page (ex VAT), or 3.6p if you factor in a replacement drum every 10,000 prints. That's pretty high, and EcoPro doesn't necessarily lower it by much. Even the best value 'Frequent' tier works out at 2.7p per page (ex VAT), while the entry-level 'Light' plan is 3.3p. Still, it could reduce the cost and hassle of keeping the printer running.

Brother DCP-L1640W review: Setting up

Unpack this MFP, and you'll soon see reminders that it didn't cost you much. It comes with a captive power cable, which might be the first one we've seen on a printer. There are worse horrors in store: the DCP-L1640W might have one of the flimsiest-feeling paper inputs we've encountered. It's a simple fold-down tray, with unpleasant paper guides that don't feel like they'd necessarily last the distance. With no cover, plain paper could attract dust if you don't print too often.

While most laser printers these days arrive with their consumables already in place, here you have to unwrap and insert them. It's not difficult, but if you're sending out a fleet of printers to a home workforce, it's another step you could probably do without.

On the plus side, this simple MFP is relatively light and compact, so it's easy for users to move around and slot into a convenient space. With no ADF or complex control panel, it's uncluttered and not unattractive. It's also quite simple to use, with just a two-line LCD screen and some basic buttons. That said, this straightforward interface isn't the easiest to navigate if you prefer to enter wireless passwords by hand.

You'll find Brother's full software suite available online. During the install, you'll be prompted to update the device's firmware, for which you'll need the password printed on the device itself – an increasingly common security feature which is nonetheless irritating when you're setting up multiple devices. The installer asks if you want to disable sending data for the inevitable product improvement programme. Opt out, and you might be put out when the iPrint&Scan software asks if you want to stop sending your data the first time you start it. We hope that's a quirk of translation, rather than a result of ignoring you the first time.

Brother DCP-L1640W review: Printing, scanning, and copying

With a modest print speed, this would be a reasonably quiet printer to live with if it wasn't for an alarming clack every time it picks a new sheet of paper. Other than that, its fans pipe down quickly after printing, and they're not especially harsh. It's quick to spring into action, delivering a first page of text in 11 seconds, or 22 seconds if left unused for an hour or so first. It managed to hit 18.5ppm over our 25-page test; not bad considering we include the time the host PC takes to prepare and send the job.

Mono lasers usually aren't too discouraged by our complex graphics test, and sure enough the DCP-L1640W attacked it with gusto, narrowly beating its own text speed to hit 18.9ppm. We tested to see if it might get even closer to its 20ppm rated speed on a 50-page text document; its 19.5ppm was just a shade off.

This MFP has a quick scanner, which could preview or capture an A4 page at up to 300 dots per inch (dpi) in 14 seconds or less. Even at the maximum 600dpi optical resolution, scanning a 6x4" (15x10cm) colour photo needed just 17 seconds. With no ADF and only mono printing, our copy tests were quick and straightforward: the DCP-L1640W took 10 seconds to copy an A4 page.

Brother DCP-L1640W review: Results

This MFP's print quality was generally about average for a mono laser. Entirely predictably, text was near-perfect, being dark and extremely crisp. The Brother DCP-L1640W's graphical output wasn't bad, with some subtle half-toning and good shade control, however graphical and photo prints tended to be too dark, rendering them a bit gloomy.

This MFP had a better than expected scanner. It captured office documents nicely, with well-judged exposure that preserved text and kept graphics clear and legible. Photo scans were also quite impressive, with more neutral, accurate colors than we've seen from some Brother scanners in the past. Only with the very dark shades on our Q60 test target did it begin to struggle, with the last three grey shades out of 22 merging into one.

With a lack of bandwidth for very dark shades, and a printer prone to dark graphics, it's perhaps no surprise that this MFP produced quite dark and dingy photocopies. You can tweak the exposure to improve it, of course.

Brother DCP-L1640W review: Is it worth it?

This is a compact device that's easy to live with, and it does most of the basics pretty well. It's fast enough whether printing, scanning or copying, and its relatively low specification shouldn't necessarily be a problem for the typical home worker. It is a shame it doesn't have duplex printing, however: we think every printer should.

The flip side of a cheap purchase price is often expensive running costs, and that's potentially the case here. At 3.6p per page, the Brother DCP-L1640W will work out expensive to own with any significant volume of printing, unless you sign up to an EcoPro plan. Even then, it's not exactly cheap to run. Unless you print very occasionally, and you can live with so-so results, we'd look elsewhere.

Brother DCP-L1640W specifications

Canon's PIXMA range of inkjets generally has a bias towards home and creative users, but not exclusively so. The new Canon PIXMA TS7550i sits reasonably far up the range, and comes with an automatic document feeder (ADF) that suggests it's up for a bit of office work. At this price, and with Canon's pedigree, that makes it worth a good look.

In truth, this isn't an especially highly specified device. While it supports dual-band Wi-Fi, there's no wired Ethernet port, and no USB host port for walk-up prints or scans. The printer offers the convenience of automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, but the 35-page ADF is single-sided only: no effortless double-sided photocopies here. And while there's a helpful screen on the control panel, it's just 1.4" (3.6cm) across, and monochrome. Meanwhile, if you need fax, you'll be disappointed.

Nevertheless, the TS7550i is quite competitively priced, and it's well specified enough to deal with the bulk of printing, scanning, and copying a typical home worker might need. Being a PIXMA, it's also happy to take on more creative jobs, so it could be a decent all-rounder for families.

There's a problem, however. While many previous PIXMAs have used individual ink cartridges, and had reasonable running costs, the PIXMA TS7550i opts for two black and tricolor cartridges – a bit of a surprise at this price. The standard items last only for around 180 pages each, while at 300 pages, the high-capacity versions are stretching the definition somewhat. At the time of writing, using the best prices we could find online, a single black page would cost around 7.2p ex VAT, and a full-color (black, cyan, magenta, and yellow) print would be 14.8p. Using the standard supplies, this would be 18.6p.

Simply put, that's too much. While we recognize the reasonable spec of this model given its keen pricing, high running costs could soon make it more expensive to own than most competing cartridge-based inkjets – let alone a refillable one. It's perhaps a good thing that it's compatible with the PIXMA Print Plan service, through which you pay for a given allocation of pages per month. The best value tier charges £7.49 ex VAT per month for 200 pages, which works out at 3.7p. While that's quite competitive – especially in color – it's worth noting that, like all ink plans, it relies on you using all of (and not going over) your monthly allowance. In practice, per-page costs are likely to be at least a bit higher.

Canon PIXMA TS7550i review: Setting up

There's not too much to report about setting up this MFP. It doesn't have a lot of design flair, but aesthetically, we quite like its mono OLED screen. It's certainly easy to operate, although you're in for a fiddle if you prefer to manually join printers to a wireless network rather than using WPS or a smartphone. One benefit of not having a touchscreen is that you get dedicated buttons for the most common jobs, such as a mono or color copy – that's actually easier to use.

With just two ink cartridges to install, this is physically an extremely simple device. It's a shame it doesn't have a second paper input, as its standard 100-sheet one is somewhat basic for office work. The output tray is fairly basic, too, but it's fine for shorter print jobs.

Like many other consumer printers, the Canon PIXMA TS7550i directs you to either use a smartphone or the Windows store to download software. However, there's still a full suite of PC software available; we simply searched for the printer in the downloads section of the Canon UK website.

Canon PIXMA TS7550i review: Printing, scanning, and copying

Send a print job to the PIXMA TS7550i, and it's not in any great hurry. While it delivered a first page of black text in 10 seconds, it only reached 12.8 pages per minute (ppm) over a 25-page job. We switched to Economy mode and repeated the test, but the speeds were identical. Although slower on complex color graphics, it was a little more competitive, finishing our 24-page test at a rate of 5.3ppm. Duplex print speeds were about par for this class of inkjet, with a 5-page, 10-side color graphics job arriving at 3.0 images (sides) per minute.

The PIXMA TS7550i managed middling speed on photocopies. It duplicated a black page in 13 seconds, needing 21 seconds for the same job in color. At one and a half minutes for a 10-page copy, it was quite brisk over multi-page mono jobs, but the same task in color took almost two and a half minutes.

At low resolutions, this MFP had quite a fast scanner. Connected via 5GHz Wi-Fi, it sent a preview to a PC in just eight seconds, and needed only 15 seconds to capture an A4 page at 150 dots per inch (dpi). Things slowed down a little more than we expected as we raised the resolution, however. At 300dpi the same page took an uncompetitive 43 seconds. At 600dpi it needed 52 seconds to scan a 6x4" (15x10cm) photo, and at a detailed 1,200dpi this job took more than two and a half minutes.

It's very hard to find fault in the quality of this MFP's results. It's an accomplished printer on plain paper, its pigment black ink delivering darker, crisper text than you might expect to see from an inkjet. Graphics were exceptionally good, with a nice balance of strong, bold colors that dominated the page, and lighter, reasonably saturated shades that gave documents plenty of pep. Typically for an inkjet, duplexed prints had fractionally less intensity, but it was barely noticeable – a good thing, as there's no obvious way to tweak print density in the driver.

Family users needing an MFP for a wider range of projects could have no complaints about photo print quality on coated papers. The PIXMA TS7550i produced sharp and detailed prints with zesty colors. That said, it's a shame it printed our test black and white shot with a mild magenta bias. Scans were also ideal for detailed creative work, demonstrating a wide dynamic range and fairly strong color accuracy. However, exposure on office documents wasn't quite perfect, with a strange, processed effect creeping in on some large color text in one document – seemingly where the driver had tried and failed to apply subtle sharpening.

With a decent scanner and printer, it was no surprise that the TS7550i could deliver strong photocopies. Color pages in particular were accurately copied, with the original hues reproduced quite faithfully. Mono copies were more inclined towards being too dark, with a small loss of detail among deep shades.

Canon PIXMA TS7550i review: Is it worth it?

With no fax modem and just a single-sided ADF, the PIXMA TS7550i certainly isn't the workhorse for a busy home office. Its leisurely print and copy speeds don't particularly help there, either. Still, it has plenty to offer households who need a single device for work documents, everyday plain paper prints, and the occasional foray into glossy photos.

What a shame, then, that its reasonably short-lived and pricey cartridges effectively force users into a PIXMA Print Plan subscription: it's just too expensive to run without one. With one, its running costs are quite palatable, but only if you're on the right tier, and only then if you're using all the pages you're paying for. We'd be more enthusiastic if Canon didn't also make refillable inkjets like the MAXIFY GX7150 – a far better proposition if you're looking for a strong home business MFP, and don't mind paying more up front.

Canon PIXMA TS7550i specifications

The i-SENSYS MF667Cdw is one of a couple of new color laser multifunctions just released by Canon. It's the more fully specified of the two, with fax capabilities and significantly better automatic document feeder (ADF) than the slightly cheaper i-SENSYS MF664Cdw, but neither is bad for the money. For less than £300 both give you a 250-sheet paper input tray, Wi-Fi, and gigabit Ethernet connectivity, together with a big color touchscreen that helps you configure and use all the features.

The Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw we're reviewing here really does do everything you're likely to need. It's a four-in-one, supporting prints, scans, copies, and faxes. Its printer supports duplex (double-sided) printing and – unlike its MF664Cdw stablemate – so does its 50-sheet ADF. That means you can put your feet up while making, capturing, or faxing duplex documents, or even while making a double-sided copy of a double-sided original.

On its front panel, there's a USB host port supporting direct scans and prints – useful for office visitors, although there is also Wi-Fi direct if you prefer. It's at the front that you'll find the only significant disappointment; just a single-sheet bypass feed, rather than a second multipurpose paper input. Still, the i-SENSYS MF667Cdw offers a lot for the money – its duplex ADF alone is probably worth the £30 or so premium over the MF664Cdw.

Typically for a Canon laser printer, the MF667Cdw has four simple consumables combining toner and a drum. They're fairly compact, and the ones that come in the box are rated only for 700 black or 500 color pages. Replacements are rated at 1,400 black and 1,300 color pages, or you can splash out on high capacity alternatives good for 3,500 black pages, and 2,500 in color. That's likely to prove a headache if you're supporting this multifunction peripheral (MFP) in a remote office; consumables would need changing monthly or more with any significant volume of printing.

Unfortunately, it also makes for disappointing running costs. Calculated using Canon's yield figures and the best prices we could find for high-capacity supplies, you'll pay 2.6p (ex VAT) for every black page, or 13.2p for full color. With anything but very light printing, costs will rack up fast.

Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw review: Setting up

The Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw isn't big by the standards of color laser MFPs, but it's still a bulky, heavy device. At 21kg, it's within many people's safe lifting range, but in some cases it might be a two-person job. This is no compact desktop printer – it takes up significantly more space than an equivalent office inkjet. As such, it's perhaps not ideal for a home office, except where laser technology is a must.

As with all printers, there's a bit of setup to complete before it's ready. Once you've removed packing tape and loaded paper, you'll need to complete a few simple setup steps on its touchscreen. One of these is a color calibration, where you scan a printed color chart. As we'll see later, this turns out to be handy. This isn't the best screen we've used, tending to be a little oversensitive. We also couldn't work out how to disable the insistent input, error, and job completion beeps – eventually we did this via the Remote UI web interface. Otherwise, it's generally easy to use, and commendably quick to boot, finishing in seconds as opposed to the minute or so some printers make you wait.

The MF667Cdw seemed bamboozled by our dual-band test network, detecting the SSID twice. It wasn't clear which to join, and, shortly into our testing, we experienced some instability. Disconnecting and reconnecting to the other entry in the list resulted in stable performance. Of course, we could have used the wired port. It's good to have this option, although we're still not sure a small office printer needs gigabit connectivity.

Almost nobody bothers with setup discs anymore, but you get one with the Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw. Regardless, without an optical drive, we visited Canon's website and downloaded the comprehensive software suite. By default, this installs Canon's UFR driver, but you can specify PCL6 or PostScript 3 if preferred. This full installation also adds a TWAIN scan interface.

Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw review: Printing, scanning and copying

Canon says the i-SENSYS MF667Cdw can reach a modest print speed of 25 pages per minute (ppm) in black or color, and it didn't fall too far short in our tests. From standby, it could produce a first page of black text or lightweight color graphics in 11 seconds. The MF667Cdw needed no significant warm-up time when unused for an hour before printing.

This MFP managed to hit 21.7ppm over our 25-page text test, which includes the time taken for the host PC to prepare and transfer the job. Printers tend to get closer to their rated speed on longer print runs, which reduces the impact of this spooling time. Sure enough, the Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw reached 23.1ppm on a 50-page job.

It was fairly rapid in color, too, delivering our challenging 24-page mixed graphics document at 20.3ppm. We also duplexed the first 10 sides of this document onto five sheets of paper. It took 53 seconds, a rate of 11.3 images (sides) per minute.

This MFP's scanner has a maximum optical resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi) – a little low for creative use, but plenty for archival and other office jobs. It could complete a preview in 13 seconds, and scan an A4 page at 150dpi in 14 seconds. Upping the detail to 300dpi required 20 seconds, which is still quite competitive. The scanner also took 20 seconds to capture a 6x4" (15x10cm) photo at 600dpi.

Swift scanner and printer pairings usually make for quick copiers, and the Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw didn't disappoint. It completed a single black or color copy in around 11 seconds, while using the ADF to make a 10-page mono copy needed 32 seconds. In color, the same job took 39 seconds.

We were able to compare this MFP's performance to the MF664Cdw, which is based on fundamentally the same print engine. Other than a slower warm-up time, the two MFPs' speeds were almost identical across our tests. The exception came with our duplex color copy task, which the MF667Cdw completed in a minute and a half: the MF664Cdw doesn't support duplex copying.

The Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw produced exceptionally good prints and photocopies. Black text was essentially perfect, while color graphics were punchy and entirely free of any banding, grain, or other weaknesses. Color prints had a slightly warmer bias than rivals, which some – but not all – users might prefer.

Here, this MFP's color calibration step also paid off. While photos printed from the MF664Cdw were far too warm, with a strong magenta bias, those from the i-SENSYS MF667Cdw were just slightly warm, working well across a range of subjects. Our black and white test photo was also excellent, showing neutral shade reproduction and far better shade control than we'd expect from a laser device. Mono photocopies were excellent, if just half a shade too dark, but this MFP's color copies were the best we've ever seen – we struggled to tell their reproduced colors from the original shades.

This isn't the sharpest scanner we've seen from Canon, delivering subtly softer high-res scans than the company's best. That said, it's more than up to the demands of office work, capturing a mix of text and graphics with strong detail and accurate exposure. We use a Kodak Q60 input target to assess scanners' ability to reproduce color and shade detail: this MFP is one of just a handful we've tested that could distinguish every shade on the chart.

Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw review: Is it worth it?

If you want a color laser multifunction and you're not concerned by print costs, the Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw is excellent. It does everything you could need for a busy small or branch office, and delivers uniformly brilliant results. It's also quite impressive for the money – we wouldn't necessarily expect full duplex operation at this price, and you wouldn't always get direct printing and a big color screen, either.

All of which makes it a shame about the running costs. They're certainly not outrageous, but it's hard to unequivocally recommend this MFP when even its high-yield consumables need changing every couple of thousand pages, and each full-color page could set you back around 13p. If you're likely to print in reasonable volumes, and running costs are a concern, we'd recommend opting for a refillable inkjet like Epson's excellent EcoTank ET-4956. If you want greater speed and quality, though, the i-SENSYS MF667Cdw might prove worth the premium.

Canon i-SENSYS MF667Cdw specifications

If you want a mobile device that prints on normal A4 paper, you're limited to a portable inkjet. While Epson, Canon, and HP can all sell you one, it's essentially that: a choice of three printers, including the Epson WorkForce WF-110W, HP's venerable OfficeJet 200, and the Canon MAXIFY BX110 reviewed here.

Despite its tiny size – a little smaller than a ream of paper – Canon's new 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. You can either connect the MAXIFY BX110 with a USB-C cable or join it to a Wi-Fi network.

As a mobile printer, though, the MAXIFY BX110 also comes with a removable, rechargeable lithium-ion battery. This lets you take it wherever you want and still print a claimed 330 pages. Back 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. Other mobile-friendly tweaks include 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.

Of course, this mobile-focused feature set means you miss out on a couple of big printer features. Those covers double as a paper input tray limited to only 50 sheets, and a rudimentary flap rather than an output tray: printed pages simply end up on the desk, hotel bed or car seat. There's also no room for duplex (double-sided printing), although the driver helps you do it manually. Typically for mobile printers, there's also no soft travel pouch included to provide protection in transit.

This printer's tight packaging means there's no room for big ink tanks. The supplies are good for 200 black, or 260 color pages. That means you might find yourself changing cartridges more often than you like, but reasonable color pricing means that an A4 page of mixed text and graphics will cost just under 8p (9p inc VAT). That's very reasonable considering, although bear in mind that almost half of this figure comes from black ink: at 3.5p (4.2p inc VAT) per page, you might want to limit text printing only to what's strictly necessary, and catch up when back in the office.

Canon MAXIFY BX110 review: Setting up

There's really not much to getting this printer up and running, but you do have to fit its print heads. It's an extra step, but no more complex than fitting ink tanks, which you do immediately afterwards.

Unless you're just using the BX110 as a compact desktop printer, you'll also want to fit the battery. This is secured to the printer's back by a robust plastic cover, held in place by a strong thumbscrew at each end. You need to remove the battery port cover to fit it – while there's a thoughtfully provided place to clip this into the cover, we can imagine it's a part that will eventually get lost. Once fitted, the battery's charge gauge is visible at the top rear of the printer – it's an easy way to get an idea of the charge state without having to turn the device on.

As you'd probably expect, you can get PC and Mac drivers for this printer from Canon's website, and it's supported by both iOS and Android devices.

Canon MAXIFY BX110 review: Printing

Inevitably, the Canon MAXIFY BX110 isn't as fast as a typical home or small business inkjet. Still, it's not so ponderous that you'll be cursing it while waiting for contracts, reports, or boarding passes to print. It managed 8.5 pages per minute (ppm) on our mono letter print test, with a first page appearing in a reasonable 13 seconds.

Color printing was slower, though, particularly on our complex test, which includes several challenging, graphics-heavy pages. Here, it could deliver only 2.2ppm – we'd expect it to reach significantly faster speeds on more typical, predominantly text-based documents.

This printer isn't optimized for photo printing, but it's happy to give it a go. We timed six borderless, postcard-sized prints at just over 10 minutes. Canon says that the tricolor ink cartridge should last for around 102 photos at this size – that would mean reasonable costs of around 10.6p (12.7p inc VAT) per print. It went on to produce two 10x8" (25x20cm) prints in six and a half minutes.

Importantly, we recorded the same print speeds whether the MAXIFY BX110 was operating on mains or battery power. That's a boon for mobile workers, who don't have to put up with slower speeds just because they're away from an external power supply.

It's important to note one significant downside of this printer's compact packaging, however. With no paper output tray, printed pages simply drop out in front of the device. That works fine on a desk where, provided you don't nudge the stack with an elbow, they stay settled until you're ready to collect them, but when mobile, you may need to catch pages quickly before they drop in a footwell or under the bed.

There's no difference between the quality you get from this printer and what you'd expect from a typical Canon inkjet. Text was bold black and very crisp by inkjet standards. There was virtually no bleed-through through even on thinnish 20lb Bond (80gsm) paper, and once dry, characters smudged only very slightly under a highlighter.

Graphics were similarly impressive, with strong, authoritative colors dominating the page, making illustrations, charts, and other images pop. The only downside here was some banding appearing in very dark areas of color fill, but we suspect most regular users would never notice.

If you occasionally need to print photos, you'll be happy with the results from the MAXIFY BX110. Our test prints were quite detailed and crisp, with only a trace of noticeable grain. The printer delivered a true gloss finish on Canon's own photo papers, and was happy to print without borders on sizes up to and including A4. Photo prints were a touch warm, most noticeably on skin tones, which ended up a shade too pink. It did a good job on our black and white test print, though, producing a nuanced, high-contrast image, with just a hint of sepia rather than purely grey shades.

Canon MAXIFY BX110 review: Is it worth it?

This printer is slower than a full-sized inkjet, and a bit more expensive to run – especially when printing in black. It's also missing useful features like duplex printing, and scan, or copy functionality. However, these are all compromises forced by its small size, and if that's your priority, then the MAXIFY BX110 is a cracker, producing strong print quality at reasonable speeds.

It's in the details where the Canon MAXIFY BX110 beats our previous favorite mobile inkjet, Epson's WorkForce WF-110W. The BX110's paper tray has more than twice the capacity, and the Canon is significantly cheaper to run – one of our biggest criticisms of the Epson. A single charge of the BX110's battery is good for several times as many pages, and helpfully, you can charge it straight from a car or anywhere else that has a free USB port. Together, the Canon MAXIFY BX110's features and performance make it our new favourite mobile printer.

Canon MAXIFY BX110 specifications

There's no shortage of choice when it comes to inkjet multifunction peripherals (MFPs) for a home or small office, so new entrants need to stand out. Brother's MFC-J4550DW sits high in the Japanese manufacturer's Mini Business range, meaning it's optimised for home office setups. This is quite a well-specified multifunction, offering two paper trays with a 400-sheet total, along with an automatic document feeder (ADF) to simplify multi-page jobs. It can print, scan, fax, and copy, covering everything the typical office is likely to need.

This MFP is controlled by a 2.7" (6.8cm) color touchscreen, set in a smart-looking, tiltable control panel. It connects via USB, wired Ethernet or Wi-Fi, although it's limited only to the 2.4GHz frequency range. There's also a host USB port, allowing users to print directly from, or scan directly to, an inserted thumb drive – good for security and convenience.

It's not all perfect, however. While the printer supports automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, the ADF is single-sided only. That means you can't automate double-sided copies, scans or outgoing faxes – arguably a misstep on this class of device. It can also handle only 20 pages – rivals can often do 35, or even 50. And while it's handy having two trays, they can't quite accommodate a ream of paper between them. There's no additional multipurpose feed, so if you'll print photos, you'll need to unload any plain paper from the top tray to load photo paper, or keep a supply in there permanently.

This printer arrives with a set of cartridges good for 350 full-color pages. You can buy extra-large replacements rated at 3,000 black or 2,000 color pages, but these weren't yet available at the time of our review. Still, even when calculated for the standard supplies' 1,300 black and 900 color pages, this printer's running costs are a reasonable 1.5p (1.8p inc VAT) per black page, and 5p (6p inc VAT) in color.

Brother MFC-J4550DW review: Setting up

With two paper cassettes, the MFC-J4550DW is a bit chunky, but Brother has done a good job of keeping it as compact as possible. The scanner is inset at one side from the body, which looks slightly awkward, but saves space, weight, and plastic. This MFP is a bit lighter than it looks, and comfortably light enough for most people to lift.

Open up the paper trays, and you'll see where some of that weight was saved. Characteristically for Brother inkjets in this class, each tray feels a bit cheap and clattery, with comparatively simple paper guides. They can also be a bit obstinate when sliding in and out of the printer, as can the output tray that sits atop the top cassette. One possible frustration is that this MFP's power and data ports are located on its left-hand side, rather than the rear, which might restrict how snugly you can fit it against a wall or partition.

Brother has refined its setup process with its most recent devices, attempting to drive users to a mobile-assisted setup. That works fine if you're happy with it, but things have got more involved for those of us who prefer to manually join a device to the network, then have the PC install program find it. First, you have to insist on a manual setup on the printer control panel, which tries to direct you to use the app. Once the printer is joined to Wi-Fi, the PC driver package now asks you to specify which model you're installing at the start. Woe betide you if you enter a similarly named device by mistake, as we did: it took us half an hour to understand why the installer insisted there was no such printer available on the network.

This gripe aside, Brother's PC and mobile apps remain as user-friendly as always. The full PC software includes a TWAIN scan interface, but you can choose to download iPrint&Scan, which offers some simple workflow management features.

Brother MFC-J4550DW review: Printing, scanning and copying

Whether printing, scanning or copying, this is a reasonably quick MFP. It spat out a first page of text in just eight seconds, and went on to hit a decent 18.3 pages per minute (ppm) over a 25-page job. It managed the same speed in 'Ink Save' mode, which produced noticeably fainter text. The MFC-J4550DW reached 7.2ppm on our taxing color graphics test, which is faster than it sounds. It was also reasonably quick – for an inkjet – when duplex printing, delivering 10 sides onto five sheets of paper in exactly two minutes, a rate of five images per minute (ipm).

We were impressed by this MFP's scan speeds. Connected via a strong Wi-Fi signal, it could deliver a preview image in nine seconds. It could also capture an A4 page at 150 dots per inch (dpi) in nine seconds, needing 13 seconds at a more detailed 300dpi. We switched to a 6x4" (15x10cm) color photo and upped the resolution to a detailed 600dpi. This job completed in 23 seconds, although at the maximum 1,200dpi it needed 77 seconds – that's still quite fast compared to most MFPs.

With a quick printer and scanner, it's no surprise this MFP produces quick copies. We timed a single mono A4 page at 12 seconds, with color copies completing in 14 seconds. Using its ADF, the MFC-J4550DW completed a 10-page mono copy in 77 seconds, needing 94 seconds in color.

Only when printing photos did this MFP seem a little slow. It delivered two 10x8" (25x20cm) prints in six and a quarter minutes, and needed 10 minutes for six borderless 6x4" photos. It doesn't support borderless printing on A4 paper.

First, the good news: this is a strong printer on plain paper. It produced fairly bold black text, with quite crisp outlines – if not the best we've seen from an inkjet. Color graphics were also good, with strong colors and no trace of banding or other inkjet foibles.

Inkjet printers often use slightly less ink when duplex printing to help avoid smearing and reduce bleed-through on thinner papers. That's noticeable here only when comparing the same content printed single and double-sided, but even on the latter the quality remained very good. Photocopies, whether mono or color, were excellent, with near-perfect exposure, and much better than average color reproduction.

This isn't a photo printer, and it showed. Its pigment inks sat up on the surface of glossy paper, producing prints with a sheen, but far from a glossy finish. They also marked particularly easily on light contact from solid objects like fingernails – a hallmark of pigment inks on glossy papers. That said, prints did have reasonable color accuracy and detail. Our black and white test print was almost impressive.

We were disappointed by this MFP's scanner. While it did a decent job on text documents – essential for everyday office use – it struggled with moderately dark shades, tending to group them all together in a black sludge. This affected parts of illustrations in office documents and shaded areas in photo scans, which also suffered from a slightly warm color bias. On the plus side, images were sharply focused and free of the digital artefacts that plague some rivals' results.

Brother MFC-J4550DW review: Is it worth it?

This isn't a bad MFP, particularly if you're mostly interested in plain paper printing. Stick to that and you'll enjoy dual paper trays, duplexing, rapid speeds, good print quality, and quite reasonable running costs. Photocopies aside, however, it's less impressive elsewhere, with the best rivals comfortably beating it for scan and photo quality. Ultimately, the Brother MFC-J4550DW doesn't do enough to distinguish itself in a competitive market. If you're looking for similar features and performance, we'd recommend HP's OfficeJet Pro 9135e.

Brother MFC-J4550DW specifications

Regular readers will know that we do love a refillable inkjet. At a stroke, ink tank printers do away with years of complaints of stingy cartridges and high running costs, replacing wasted plastic and high maintenance requirements with simple, cheap bottles of ink and extended service intervals. Canon's MAXIFY range is geared towards home power users and busy small offices; the Canon MAXIFY GX7150 is its latest range-topping refillable multifunction peripheral (MFP).

The MAXIFY GX7150 is about as fully featured as inkjet MFPs get. It's a four-in-one, combining print, scan, copy, and fax. On top, you'll find an automatic document feeder (ADF) happy to juggle 50 sheets of paper. Behind it, there's a 100-sheet multipurpose paper tray. Look in the base and you'll find 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.

You can connect this printer via USB, wired Ethernet, or Wi-Fi, although the latter only supports the 2.4GHz band. Everything is controlled by the 2.7" (6.9cm) tiltable color touchscreen and a smattering of dedicated buttons. The only omissions are a USB host port for walkup scans and prints, and the lack of SME-grade options such as extended trays, staplers, or NFC readers.

We're sure you're familiar with the refillable inkjet concept by now, but it's always worth explaining the specifics. The GX7150 may have a fearsome-looking price tag, but it arrives with enough bundled ink to print around 6,000 black or 14,000 color pages. Dividing its purchase price by 6,000 gives you a cost per full-color page of around 7.3p (8.8p), which is on a par with the running costs of competing cartridge-based inkjets – and at that point you'd still have enough color ink left for around 8,000 further pages. That's good, but when the supplied ink runs dry, ongoing refills work out at just 0.2p per black page, and 0.4p in color – a tenth or less the cost of running a conventional inkjet.

Because you're paying more up front for the promise of lower overall costs over time, it's important to be sure you're likely to print at least as far as the included ink will take you. For this reason, we always prefer refillable printers to offer a decent warranty period. The MAXIFY GX7150 comes with three years, giving plenty of time to print thousands of pages and be up on the deal overall.

Canon MAXIFY GX7150: Set up

The Canon MAXIFY GX7150 is on the big side for an inkjet, but it's within most people's safe lifting range. Its two paper cassettes are useful, offering the flexibility of storing either plain and headed paper, or just a whole ream of plain paper, but neither of them accepts photo paper. If you're likely to use that or other special media, it's best to keep it nearby and load it into the rear feed when needed.

This MFP arrives with its print heads fitted, so setting it up is just a case of removing some tape and filling up the tanks. This had already been done on our review sample, but our previous experience with refillable MAXIFY devices has been straightforward. Each bottle has a different opening to prevent you fitting it to the wrong tank; you simply invert the bottle and push it gently onto the spigot, then wait while gravity empties it into the tank.

It's worth noting that most inkjet printers, and especially refillable ones, must prime themselves with ink before you first use them. Again, we didn't need to go through that with our pre-used example, but it usually takes up to 10 minutes. It can be a frustrating process, as most printers don't let you join a wireless network while it's ongoing, meaning you can't get on with installing PC or mobile software.

Other than that, setting up the MAXIFY GX7150 is free of frustrations. Canon's mobile software is simple enough to use, and covers the main print and scan features you're likely to want. The full PC driver suite includes a TWAIN scan interface that offers a great balance of usability and features.

Canon MAXIFY GX7150: Printing, scanning, and copying

Start using the MAXIFY GX7150, and it soon becomes obvious that it's a solid performer, particularly when printing with black ink. It's rapid when printing text, needing 13 seconds to produce a first page, then hitting 20.8 pages per minute (ppm) on our 25-page mono letter test. Switching to Economy print quality was no faster, but it didn't result in obviously inferior text quality – worth noting, as Canon says you'll get 50% more pages from your ink that way.

We were less impressed with its color print speeds. Our test document is a challenging, graphics-rich collection of presentation slides, and web and magazine pages, but given the GX7150's fast text prints, its 5.7ppm here was a little underwhelming. We test duplex printing by repeating the first 10 pages of this document, again in color. The GX7150 paused mid-job for some housekeeping – likely to be a bit of ink priming or head cleaning – resulting in an unimpressive 3.1 images per minute (ipm) performance.

This isn't a photo printer, and it doesn't support borderless printing, even on 6x4" (15x10cm) photo paper. Its pigment inks aren't ideal for glossy photo papers, on which they dry to a semi-gloss finish rather than a fully glossy shine. Still, it was quite quick here, managing two 10x8" (25x20cm) prints in three and a half minutes, and needing little more than five minutes for six postcard-sized prints.

Our photocopy tests underlined the difference in speed between black and color work. The MAXIFY GX7150 could copy an A4 page in black in just 11 seconds. Using the ADF it copied 10 pages in 52 seconds. Switching to color, the same tests took 14 seconds and 101 seconds, respectively – the latter twice as slow. This printer can make duplex copies, with its impressive ADF capturing both sides of a double-sided original in a single pass, rather than mechanically flipping the page over. Even so, 20-sided (10-page) color copy needed seven minutes – we've seen much faster results than this.

Happily, network scan speeds were good. This MFP completed a preview scan in seven seconds, and could capture an A4 document at 150 dots per inch (dpi) in 13 seconds. The same job took 21 seconds at a middling 300dpi resolution. Capturing a 6x4" photo at 600dpi also took 21 seconds. Typically, switching to the maximum 1,200dpi – four times as much detail – was much slower, completing in a minute and 46 seconds.

The Canon MAXIFY GX7150's color touchscreen makes its direct functions easy to control, for the most part. We're not sure why there isn't a single menu option for duplex photocopying; instead, you have to separately select duplex scanning and duplex printing. The screen provides helpful information, such as the number of pages left to print during a multi-page job. This indication is for pages, not sides, however, so duplex jobs have further to go than you might at first realize.

During our duplex copy test, the first tray ran out of paper. The GX7150 seamlessly switched to tray two mid-job. Not only that, it allowed us to refill the first tray, all without interrupting the ongoing printing. This MFP doesn't support multitasking, though; for example, we couldn't start a scan job while the printer was busy on another task.

This MFP isn't tailored towards creative uses like photo printing and scanning, but it's not a bad performer. We mentioned photo prints' semi-gloss finish and white borders; they were otherwise fine for occasional use. Photo scans, on the other hand, were excellent, with exemplary color accuracy and extremely impressive focus – at 100% zoom we could make out individual dots in scanned inkjet photos.

The Canon MAXIFY GX7150 is tailored for office use, however, and here it really delivers the goods. Text prints were as sharp and dark as you'll get from an inkjet, while color graphics were excellent. While many inkjets use less ink when duplexing to avoid smears and bleed-through, the GX7150 seems to favor longer drying pauses. Our timed tests confirm that that's a slower approach, but the exceptional quality of our duplex prints showed the value of it.

While photocopies were perhaps half a stop darker than ideal, losing a little detail from dark regions of the page, they were better than average in black or color. Finally, the scanner faithfully captured office documents, producing legible text and reproducing images well.

Canon MAXIFY GX7150: Is it worth it?

We'd forgive you for baulking at the steep asking price for this MFP. It's a lot of money, and frankly, not worth it if you're unlikely to print more than a few hundred pages a year. However, if you'll get through the bundled ink – and particularly if you expect to print much more – the Canon MAXIFY GX7150 should prove exceptional value, with ongoing running costs of well under a penny per page. Add in the protection of a three-year warranty, and you can be confident you'll probably have time to recoup the investment.

Happily, it's not all about running costs. This is a versatile printer covering everything a small office needs. It's well featured and well up to the demands of several users doing a variety of work. The GX7150 perhaps isn't ideal as the bedrock of a creative agency, regularly printing on glossy paper, but for plain paper and general office work, it's ideal.

Canon MAXIFY GX7150 specifications

Xerox's VersaLink C415 is a fairly highly specified color laser multifunction peripheral (MFP), aimed at teams of 2-10 people. That puts it in contention for small offices and workgroups, but it doesn't rule it out for home workers who expect to churn out a lot of printed material. While bigger than more entry-level devices, this isn't unduly large or heavy, so it could fit into a variety of professional scenarios.

This MFP's specifications are a bit of a mix. It has a fast printer, rated up to 40 pages per minute (ppm). Naturally, this is duplex capable, so you can print both sides of a page without needing to shuffle stacks of paper around. On top, there's an impressive 100-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), which also duplexes. Working together, printer and scanner can make double-sided copies of double-sided originals, which is a great way to save paper and produce professional-looking results.

Xerox also throws in a fax modem, plus there's an inbuilt email feature that lets you send scanned documents. You can print from cloud services including Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive. There's a USB port for direct printing and scanning, too.

This is a robust printer, with a recommended volume of up to 10,000 pages per month, and a 125,000-page maximum duty cycle. It's fitted with long-life imaging drums, rated for an impressive 125,000 pages. That said, it comes with only 2,000-page color toner cartridges, and 2,400 pages of black, but you can replace these with high-capacity alternatives. The largest color toners are rated at 7,000 pages each, while the black is rated for a healthy 10,500 prints. Many VersaLink C415 MFPs will be on managed contracts, but if you buy consumables yourself you can expect to pay around 1.4p (1.6p inc VAT) per black page. A color page will set you back around 9.0p, or 9.3p if you also factor in the cost of replacement drums. That's more expensive than ideal for this class.

It's worth mentioning a few missing features we'd expect to find as standard. The model we're testing comes with wired networking only – wireless is an extra-cost option. More significantly, the VersaLink C415 has only a 250-sheet paper cassette – at this price, we'd expect to be able to load up a whole ream. And while there is a multipurpose feed, it's only a single-sheet bypass slot tucked into the front of the tray.

Still, if you've the need and the budget, you can line up a few useful upgrades. You can add a 500-sheet tray, a 500 + 100-sheet tray, or both, to bring the total paper capacity up to 1,450 sheets. There's a choice of stapler units, a 500GB disk upgrade, and optional AI features that include auto-redaction and summariser apps. Xerox provides a huge 17.8cm (7 inch) touchscreen, which ought to make controlling everything straightforward.

Xerox VersaLink C415 review: Setting up

As we mentioned, this multifunction isn't quite as big or heavy as you might expect for its specifications. It's probably still a two-person job to lift it into place, however. The VersaLink C415's ADF overhangs the printer body at the back and left side, and it requires a little space reserved at the rear for when you open the scanner lid. This printer's consumables are in a drawer on the right-hand side, so you'll also need access there to install replacements.

Xerox ships this MFP with a liberal smattering of tape, spacers, and other shipping material: you'll need to work your way around it removing them all. It's a painless process apart from the two spacers in the front compartment, which are poised to ping out like elasticated nunchuks and smack into whoever's pulling on the release tape. With all packaging removed, it's a case of loading paper in the clearly labeled tray, connecting up an Ethernet cable, and switching on.

This printer takes a remarkably long time to boot. If it's the first time, it'll guide you through the region and language selection, then give you the option of continuing via Xerox Easy Assist, a mobile app designed to help accelerate the rollout and setup of Xerox printers. Alternatively, you can continue manually, or even clone an existing VersaLink C415 configuration via an inserted USB key.

Our US-sourced sample came with a driver CD in the box, but these days it's just as quick to visit a manufacturer's website and download the relevant software, in this case via Xerox Smart Start. This gives you a choice of the recommended PostScript driver or the slightly less fully featured PCL driver, but it wasn't immediately obvious how to install both. It's worth noting that TWAIN scan drivers aren't installed by default – remember to select them in the Advanced installation if they're likely to be needed.

As you'd expect, you can access this printer's settings via its touchscreen, or the embedded web admin interface. Xerox continues to promote the security of its printers with digitally signed apps and system software, and support for features including multi-factor authentication. There's a tendency toward locking things down by default – for example, you'll need to enable remote start for scan jobs if you want users to have access from their own PCs.

Xerox VersaLink C415 review: Printing, scanning and copying

The Xerox VersaLink C415 is rated at 40ppm in black or color but, in our tests it fell some way short. This was mostly down to slightly slow spool times, which we typically include in our tests as they give a more realistic impression of true speed. The C415 delivered a first page of black text in a reasonable 16 seconds, before going on to hit 28.3ppm over our 25-page letter test. It took longer to spool our 50-page document test, leading to a comparatively slow 26.8ppm performance.

This printer's color speed was disappointing. It could manage only 16.0ppm on our taxing, graphics-heavy 24-page job, about two-thirds the speed of some other printers in this class. It duplex-printed 10 sides of color graphics onto five pages in 70 seconds, which works out at a not especially impressive 8.6 images per minute. To be clear, these aren't slow results, they're just a bit more stately than we'd expect given this printer's specifications.

The VersaLink C415 can print at 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) when the need arises, which halves its engine speed. We switched to this High-Resolution mode for our photograph tests, during which the C415 needed 39 seconds to print two 10x8" photos on A4 paper, and 43 seconds to print six 6x4" photos arranged on three sheets of A4 paper. One frustration to mention, common to all print jobs, is that sheets emerge backwards from the front of the printer into a slightly confined output tray – it can be tricky to reach in and extract them.

We experienced some issues with this MFP's TWAIN driver, which proved very slow to respond on our test PC. As such, we conducted timed scan tests via the Xerox Workplace Android app, which offers a simplified workflow for day-to-day jobs. We were able to scan an A4 page in just seven seconds, at either 150dpi or 300dpi. A 600dpi scan of a 6x4" photo was completed in a rapid 14 seconds.

Both the Android app and Xerox's TWAIN interface offer something of a simplistic scanning experience, with limited opportunities for common tweaks like adjusting levels or rotating pages. We did like the simplicity of being able to share scans directly into Google Drive, however.

If the VersaLink C415's scanner is rapid, its ADF is absolutely ferocious. During 10-page copy tests it urgently pulled through a stack of originals within just a few seconds, leaving the printer struggling to keep up. In this way the C415 could copy a stack of black or color originals in just 28 seconds. Switched to duplex color copying, this MFP duplicated a 10-page, 20-side job in 74 seconds. As always, this slower output is down to the overheads from duplex printing.

During our copy tests we began to uncover annoyances with this MFP's touchscreen. It's huge, but at times it was frustratingly slow to respond, particularly when scrolling down through a long list of options. If you leave it for too long the device enters sleep mode, forgetting which sub menu you were on and any changes you made. You have to press the power button to wake it back up, which takes a few seconds longer than you feel it ought to.

One positive thing to note is that the VersaLink C415 isn't as loud as we'd expect for a printer in this class. It also transmits virtually no vibration, and no clunks or thunks into the desktop. As such, it could share a large desktop or table with users without becoming overly irritating.

You won't be surprised to learn we have no complaints about this printer's text quality. In fact, all of its black and white prints were excellent. Text was sharp and black, while graphics and even photos were richly detailed with plenty of contrast. Mono photocopies were perhaps half a stop too dark by default, but still way better than average for laser multifunctions.

Unfortunately, we can't be anything like as positive about our color printing results. Graphics were generally quite good, with smooth color fills and progressions, and no obvious banding, blocking, or other laser artifacts. All the same, as they emerged we could see that their color accuracy wasn't always perfect, with a slight tendency towards darker prints with a mild red bias.

Color photos, on the other hand, were poor. Initially using the PCL driver, skin tones were far too dark and bronzed, while color progressions were rendered with a degree of blocking, as though the printer didn't have enough shades available for smooth transitions. Some features came up too dark, while one blue sky had aquamarine notes.

With limited tweaks available in the PCL driver, we switched to PostScript, which at its default settings offered a slight improvement. Switching to Vivid RGB in the driver's Image Options tab was far worse, though, with lighter skin tones now looking horribly sunburnt. We got the best results by manually tweaking the contrast and colors, which produced a more natural-looking print, closer to the original.

This experience left us wondering if our test PC had an issue, although we had obtained similarly poor results from another computer. However, our color photocopies were bad enough to put our minds at ease. Working with darker source material, these generally had a reddy-brown bias, while lighter pages came out exaggeratedly bright and oversaturated. We used the advanced settings to reduce the saturation to its minimum but still weren't entirely happy with the results.

Unfortunately, we weren't enamored with our scan results, either. The C415 managed to 'blow out' the lightest shades in photos, losing subtle detail from bright parts of the original. At the same time it couldn't preserve heavy shading, either: the darkest eight shades from our Q-60 input target were indistinguishable. In photographs, skin tones looked overly ruddy. Our 300dpi document scan was too dark, with the loss of detail from part of an illustration. At 150dpi, small text characters from the same original page began to look spidery and less legible.

Xerox VersaLink C415 review: Is it worth it?

Overall, this MFP simply isn't good enough. While the VersaLink C415 has most of the features a small office or workgroup could want, and can be upgraded to add the others, it's not an especially keenly priced machine. It's frustrating then that it isn't particularly cheap to run, that it couldn't get closer to its rated speeds in our tests, and that we experienced underwhelming color print, scan and copy quality.

Xerox VersaLink C415 specifications

Epson, HP, and Canon have been offering refillable inkjet printers in the UK for several years, so it was perhaps inevitable that Brother would eventually join them. The DCP-T780DW is very much a typical Brother inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP), but it's the first to feature ink that comes in bottles. This MFP arrives with two black containers, good for a claimed 15,000 pages' printing, and a single set of color inks rated for 5,000 color pages.

That's far, far more than you'd get from the typical startup cartridges in any regular inkjet, and in some cases, it could even last the life of the printer. Brother's suggested retail prices for refills are competitive; when you run out of bundled ink, you're likely to pay around 0.5p per full-color page (0.6p inc VAT).

We'll come back to the ink, but it's worth a quick look at the rest of this MFP's specifications. It's a three-in-one, covering print, scan, and copy, so you can't use it to send or receive faxes. At the front, there's a tiltable control panel with a small color screen, but you interact via direction and other buttons -- no swish-touch actions here. The DCP-T780DW connects to wireless, but not wired networks, and it has a USB port, but not a USB host port for walk-up prints or scans.

In its base you'll find a 250-sheet paper cassette with a simple output tray above it. On top there's an automatic document feeder (ADF). The printer supports duplex (double-sided) operation, but unfortunately, the scanner doesn't, so you can't make automated double-sided copies or scans.

Still, that's a good set of features overall, especially so given that there's a tendency for some manufacturers to 'decontent' their refillable printers. To Brother's credit, the DCP-T780DW feels exactly like one of its mid-range cartridge siblings. Importantly, that extends to its size; it's comfortably compact enough to fit alongside you on a medium desk.

This MFP launches alongside the entry-level DCP-T580DW, which is similar save for the lack of an ADF, a more basic control panel, slower color printing, and less black ink (7,500 pages) in the box.

Brother DCP-T780DW review: Setting up

Inkjet manufacturers have settled on fairly similar designs for their refillable printers. You'll typically find four tanks incorporated into the main body, with separate stoppers at the top. That's the case here, but Brother's tankbenefit system uses a slightly unusual design for the bottle and tank. The tank openings sit at an angle, which ought to help the bottle fully disgorge its contents. We found it a little trickier here to fit the ink bottles to the tanks and, after filling all four, we'd spilled a drop or two each of black, blue, and yellow ink. Still, at least each ink is physically keyed to stop a disastrous mis-filling.

One appreciable difference in Brother's system is that the color ink bottles are physically smaller than we've seen on comparable tank printers. Still, 5,000 pages is a competitive amount of color printing to get in the box – it's about twice what Canon's Maxify GX2050 arrives with, and not much less than the HP SmartTank 5105. Like most regular inkjets, this MFP's print heads are already fitted.

You can join the Brother DCP-T780DW to Wi-Fi before filling and priming its ink system, which is rare, but it should be standard: it lets you get on with installing PC and other software while the printer is busying itself with its one-off initial priming. In this case that's relatively quick at only four minutes, but we've seen other inkjets pump away for 10 minutes – that's a lot of frustrating thumb twiddling, particularly if you're installing more than one device.

Brother's setup program is straightforward, installing the usual drivers along with the iPrint&Scan app, which lets you create some basic scan workflows. This also gives you oversight of the printer's settings, and supports maintenance including firmware updates. When everything is done, the MFP shouldn't need anything except blank paper for several thousand pages – that's a great way to reduce management overheads if you're rolling printers out to home workers.

Brother DCP-T780DW review: Printing, scanning and copying

It's immediately obvious that, despite its compact dimensions, the DCP-T780DW is a swift printer. It was very quick to start printing, delivering a first page of text in just seven seconds, even after sitting idle for quite a long time. Only after having been left unplugged overnight did it require a few minutes to clean itself before getting going. This printer went on to deliver 16 pages per minute (16ppm) of black text, although it was no faster in draft mode.

Inevitably, color printing wasn't as quick, especially on our taxing 24-page graphics test. All the same, the DCP-T780DW managed 7.1ppm, which is very strong for a compact home inkjet. Its 4.9 images per minute (ipm) duplex performance was also comparatively good.

While this absolutely isn't a photo-focused printer, it's quite happy to print without borders on photo media up to A4. It took seven and a half minutes over six postcard-sized photos, and delivered two 10x8" photos on A4 paper in 13 minutes and 20 seconds. That's not too shabby by small inkjet standards.

Tested over Wi-Fi, the DCP-T780DW's scanner could preview an A4 page in nine seconds, or capture it at 150 dots per inch (dpi) in 10 seconds. At a middling 300dpi the same job was completed in 14 seconds. Capturing a 6x4" (15x10cm) photo took 24 seconds at a high 600dpi, or 80 seconds at the maximum 1,200dpi – that's a slightly faster than typical result.

Combining a swift printer and scanner usually results in rapid copies, and that was mostly the case here. The DCP-T780DW delivered single mono copies in 14 seconds, and color ones in 21 seconds. Using the ADF, a stack of 10 mono copies was completed in 86 seconds, although in color the same job needed three minutes.

Brother's inkjet printers don't typically produce class-leading print quality, and the DCP-T780DW was no exception. It appears to use dye-based inks, which can struggle to stamp their authority on plain paper. Black text wasn't as dark as we'd expect from the best pigment-based inks, while color graphics lacked impact, looking slightly faded even when freshly deposited on the page. Using an eyeglass we could see that text outlines weren't especially crisp, but they did seem fine to the naked eye.

Although photocopies exhibited a similar lack of impact to graphics, they were generally quite well exposed. Color accuracy in particular was above average.

We were surprised by this MFP's photo quality. For a business-focused, four-ink device, it produced excellent prints on glossy media. Although colors were a little too warm – most evidently in skin tones – prints were crisp and detailed, with exceptionally strong black shading. This was evident in our black and white test print, which had neutral grey tones and an impressive amount of contrast.

We were also quite happy with this MFP's scan results. Again, colors were a little warm in photographs, but even at 1,200dpi, images remained quite sharply focused and true to the original. At the more prosaic resolutions typical of office work, documents looked fine. Even small text was fully legible at 150dpi. Our one real complaint here was that the DCP-T780DW struggled to capture differences among the darkest shades, leading to a loss of detail in dark areas of photos or graphics.

Brother DCP-T780DW review: Is it worth it?

The Brother DCP-T780DW is a competent home office MFP, enhanced by the lower print costs and reduced hassle of a refillable ink tank system. While tankbenefit may not be as fuss-free as some competitors, it's easy enough to use, and should result in lower costs and longer service intervals – both are broadly comparable to those from equivalent Epson, Canon, and HP models, although at launch this printer has only a one-year warranty.

Notably, this MFP's ink system feels like an added benefit to a decent MFP, rather than something you have to sacrifice features or performance to get. Although the DCP-T780DW isn't the best multifunction we've tested, 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.

Brother DCP-T780DW specifications

HP has announced two new AI features that will be integrated on select members of its printer lineup, continuing the firm's effort to rejuvenate the legacy tech with generative AI.

The company set its sights on bringing AI to the world of printing last year and it has unveiled recent strides on this front at its Amplify conference in Nashville.

First up is 'Scan to Email', which will leverage generative AI to modernize what has become an antiquated and tedious process that has plagued businesses of all sizes since its inception.

The feature will be available on all LaserJet Pro MFP 3000 and 4000 series printers.

This will use optical character recognition (OCR) in combination with LLMs to create relevant titles, subject lines, content summaries, and searchable metadata for scanned documents users want to share via email.

The infamous 'scan.pdf' files generated by traditional scanners are almost indistinguishable from one another, and when trying to share multiple documents this can quickly lead to confusion and slow down administrative workflows.

Speaking on stage at the Amplify conference, Anneliese Olson, president of imaging, printing, and solutions at HP, said simplified printing is a priority for the company, and AI enhancements like this are part of this journey towards making printing a more seamless part of their workflow.

"Simplifying print... This is the number one request that we get from customers, 'please make it easier', because printing should actually fit more seamlessly into how we do things."

For businesses that often have to scan documents that contain sensitive information, HP is introducing 'Guided Redaction', which promises to automatically redact personally identifiable information (PII) as it is being scanned.

Users can select from a list of the specific types of PII they want to redact, from social security numbers to addresses, and leveraging OCR the printer or multifunctional will delete the pixels, ensuring the redaction is not reversible.

Unlike HP's scan to email feature, this redaction takes place on the printer itself, leveraging compute from an additional card they can equip their LaserJet Enterprise Flow series printer (models 500 – 800).

This ensures none of the sensitive data ever leaves the printer, and is the latest example of how HP is looking to bring AI enhancements beyond its PC line-up and build out a portfolio of devices that can take advantage of LLMs at the edge.

During his opening keynote, HP chief executive Enrique Lores laid out the company's vision to deliver AI at the edge across a range of devices in its portfolio and help customers take advantage of the benefits local AI compute can bring.

"We are focused on bringing AI to the edge and making sure that our customers can run AI models on their PCs [and] on the rest of the portfolio to get the advantages of those: lower cost, higher privacy and security, and faster [latency]."

Canon's i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw is a fairly big, no-nonsense color laser printer, rated at 38 pages per minute (ppm). It's aimed at small offices and workgroups with moderate printing needs, and it comes with a strong specification that makes it well suited to the role.

Printer name spotters – we can't be the only ones – will know that the 'w' in this model name stands for wireless printing. The LBP732Cdw supports 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz networks, but it also has a gigabit Ethernet port, giving you flexibility in how you connect. The 'd' denotes automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, which is a must for any serious office device.

This printer's 550-sheet cassette is a big step up from the 250-sheet trays found in lesser devices. There's a further 100-sheet multipurpose feed, although it's on the right-hand panel – worth bearing in mind if you intend to jimmy this printer into limited space. On top, printed pages float into a deep 200-sheet tray. It's face-down, which might help if you're printing something confidential and don't want passersby to get a glimpse.

Many workgroup and enterprise class printers are getting touchscreens, but the i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw makes do with a five-line backlit mono display. It's paired with directional and alphanumeric keys, so data entry isn't the hassle it could be – for example, it's easy to enter a Wi-Fi password. This decent display also allows for walk-up USB printing, although the host socket is again on the right side of the device.

This printer offers a host of security features including user management, IPSec, and IP and MAC address filtering. You can also lock down the ability of service personnel to access stored user data and security settings, closing down one further avenue for potential data loss. Canon will provide security support for this printer until January 2031, which should help to make it a good long-term choice.

Among the usual sleep settings, you can also define hours between which the printer will automatically sleep, potentially giving you slightly greater energy savings. There's also support for Canon's iW Enterprise Management Console, allowing for centralized management of a fleet of printers.

Canon i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw review: Setting up

As you'd probably expect, the Canon i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw is a big beast, but it's not exceptionally so. Its 458x464mm footprint shouldn't be too tricky to accommodate in the office, although you'll need to allow 717x785mm for full access to its multipurpose feed and main paper cassette. It's worth noting, too, that there are vents, power, and data connectors on the left-hand panel, which could be a problem if you're hoping to fit it into a corner. Perhaps more significantly, this printer weighs 29kg unboxed, which strictly speaking is above the safe lifting limit for a single worker.

If that makes physically manhandling it a two-person job, at least the rest of the process is fairly simple. This printer arrives with its consumables in place, and there's little packing material to remove before it's ready to get going. Canon provides a choice of three drivers for the PC: PostScript, PCL, and its own proprietary UFR driver – we tested using the first two.

Set up this printer and you'll notice some welcome details. Both paper trays are clearly marked with the correct paper orientation, and the stickers aren't obscured once you load paper – a simple, but incredibly useful improvement over the usual cursory stamp in the tray floor. There's a satisfying, engineered feel to the main cassette, which lends credence to Canon's stated 80,000-page maximum duty cycle: the recommended level is a more leisurely 2,000-7,500 pages per month.

Connecting the i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw to wired Ethernet is predictably simple, but there is an oddity if you're using Wi-Fi. Leave the printer in its default Low power sleep mode and the wireless interface is turned off, too. That might not be an issue if you're using both wired and wireless connections, or if you've scheduled a sleep timer that wakes the printer in time for the daily grind, but if you're relying on Wi-Fi, you'll have to change the sleep mode setting to High power, and accept the slightly raised energy use.

In practice, we didn't get on brilliantly with this printer's onboard menu, which is some way less intuitive than the best touchscreen systems. It's hard to design user-friendly menus for advanced products, and Canon hasn't completely nailed this one. It's not always easy to track down the options you want, and the way settings are confirmed and applied can be a bit of an irritation. Even something as simple as paper selection is complicated by needing to choose from multiple weight categories for each size.

We preferred to make configuration changes from the printer's web interface, which is certainly comprehensive. There's also support for various service management packages and other add-ons – this printer has 15GB of available storage for apps, add-ons, and user data. With a solid 1.6GHz dual-core processor, it's unlikely to struggle if you do load it up with extras.

The i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw has plenty of scope for upgrades. Aside from extras including font packs and a barcode printing kit, you can add up to three further 550-sheet paper feeders for a total 2,300-page input. There aren't yet any output options, however, such as a stapler unit or sorting bin.

This printer arrives with a 6,000-page black cartridge and 3,200-pages of each color. These consumables combine both toner and drum, which helps simplify maintenance and reduce the number of items you need in stock. High capacity replacements are good for 13,400 and 10,400 pages, which could give replacement intervals of a few months if you're printing towards the lower end of Canon's recommended monthly volumes. The only other consumable is a waste toner bottle, rated for 54,000 pages.

Many customers for this printer will be on managed print services, but if you're buying your own consumables the LBP732Cdw compares fairly well. Calculated for the high-yield supplies, you could expect each black page to cost 1.1p (1.3p including VAT), or a full-color page to set you back 6.9p (8.3p). While that's far more than a refillable inkjet, it's fair for a color laser, particularly if you'll mostly print in black.

Canon i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw review: Printing

The Canon i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw is no slouch. It's unusually quick to get going, delivering a first page of either black text or simple color graphics just 11 seconds after we clicked print. Importantly it's no slower to get started after sitting unused for an hour, meaning it should prove competitive even for short print jobs, and even when there are times when it's idle.

This printer produced 25 pages of black text in 49 seconds, which works out at 30.6ppm. Our tests include the time taken to prepare and spool the print job which is more realistic, although it does mean printers rarely reach their rated speed. On a 50-page black print job, the LBP-732Cdw reached a best of 33ppm – a little short of Canon's 38ppm specification, but not too shabby.

Its speeds were more impressive in color. We test printers with a complex color document, containing a mix of web graphics, illustrations, and presentation slides. It's a challenging job that invariably results in a slower performance than simple black text printing. That said, the LBP-732Cdw reached 24.8ppm over 24 pages, which is excellent for this class. We use the same document to test a printer's duplex performance: here this printer managed an impressive 14.6 images per minute (ipm) – that's just shy of 15 sides every minute.

Unusually, switching to the maximum 1,200x1,200 dots per inch (dpi) print resolution didn't seem to slow this printer's engine down. The LBP-732Cdw delivered two pages of color photos in 21 seconds, and reproduced six postcard-sized prints on three A4 sheets in just 24 seconds. Its fans aren't particularly harsh or loud, and they shut down immediately after each job, so this is an easy device to share office space with.

This printer delivered excellent text. Even when viewed with an eyeglass, character outlines were clean, without jagged diagonals or tears, all the way down to five-point size. This was particularly true when using the PostScript driver, which produced slightly darker letters, and slightly better resolved characters at very small sizes – text print times were identical whether printing with PCL or PostScript, so we'd favor the latter.

The LBP-732Cdw made an unusually good job of mono graphics. Many lasers render black and white photos as a dark sludge where all shade detail is lost, but here our test print was superb. To the casual eye it almost looked as good as a strong inkjet print, with a deeply impressive dynamic range.

Color graphics and photos displayed a similarly impressive range, with carefully rendered shading preserving an unusual depth of detail among shadows and highlights alike. Graphics were almost entirely free of banding, and the printer's dithering was generally imperceptible – leaving the impression of smooth shades and progressions, rather than blocky or stepped areas of color.

Our one criticism is that by default, the i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw printed graphics with a mild blue bias. This wasn't especially evident in typical prints, to the extent that we didn't immediately notice it until we compared the output from other laser printers. On most jobs it wouldn't be an issue, and on some – such as a photo of an astronaut framed by the blue of the earth – it actually improved the outcome. It was less flattering to skin tones, however, with some subjects looking washed out and pale.

We experimented with both the PCL and PostScript driver, using the various color options to try and get a more neutral result. Unfortunately, it wasn't easy to markedly improve photos, leaving this something of a weakness in the printer's otherwise impressive quality.

Canon i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw review: Is it worth it?

This is a strong printer for small businesses or workgroups that need to print moderate quantities of color. It's fairly swift, outpacing most inkjets and lesser lasers over longer jobs. Even when printing infrequent, short jobs, its quick first page out times keep it competitive with inkjets, which often have an advantage here. However, when you need to print in greater volumes, it can churn out text or complex graphics at a decent rate, whether it's printing on one or both sides of each sheet.

If you are buying for larger firms, the LBP732Cdw offers the security features and long-term support to help put your mind at ease. It also supports centralized management, and expandability – both through optional services and via basics such as additional paper trays. With reasonably long-lasting consumables that integrate toner and drum, it shouldn't rack up high running costs, or cost you too much time in maintenance and housekeeping.

All of this would be for nothing if this printer's results weren't up to scratch, but it produced great text and graphics across most of our tests. Only on some photos was it a little disappointing, and even then not everyone would notice or care about the coolness we detected in certain skin tones and subjects. Even with it, the LBP732Cdw still prints unusually good photos by laser printer standards.

Canon i-SENSYS LBP732Cdw specifications

Looking at its specifications, Brother's MFC-L2980DW appears the perfect small business multifunction. It's based on a rapid mono laser printer capable of 34 pages per minute (ppm), paired with a flatbed scanner equipped with a substantial 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). Both the printer and scanner are capable of duplex operation, so you can sit back and relax while making multi-page, double-sided prints, scans, copies, or faxes.

As you'd expect, this multifunction peripheral (MFP) supports both wired and wireless networking. Like Brother's other latest printers, this includes support for 5GHz protocols, which could potentially help with stability and transfer speeds. In the base, you'll find a 250-sheet paper cassette, bypassed by a single-sheet multipurpose slot, concealed behind a flap. Sandwiched between the printer and scanner there's a 120-sheet output bin, likely to be plenty for a busy small or micro office.

The MFC-L2980DW is controlled by an 8.8cm (3.5") color touchscreen. This might not be the sharpest, but it runs a simple and user-friendly menu system giving access to basic functions like copying. You can also scan to, or print from cloud services, but there's no USB host port for walk-up prints and scans. That could be an issue if you need to print sensitive documents like pay slips, and would rather be sure that nobody else is around to see them.

This multifunction uses separate consumables for toner and the imaging drum. In theory, that's a good way to limit waste compared to rivals that use a single consumable, combining toner and drum. That said, it can complicate maintenance a little, which isn't ideal if you're shopping for a low-upkeep workhorse for a branch office. The MFC-L2980DW arrives with a full capacity 15,000-page drum and a decent 3,000-page starter toner. You can replace the latter with either a 5,000, 3000, or 1,500-page supply.

We always work out running costs using the highest capacity consumables. In this case, each black page will cost 1.7p excluding VAT, or 1.8p once you factor in replacement drums. While that's hardly excessive, it's a little higher than ideal in this class of device.

Brother MFC-L2980DW: Setting up

Despite its comparatively small footprint, the Brother MFC-L2980DW gets wider towards the top. Its scanner overhangs somewhat at the back and each side, so it takes up more desk space than you'd expect. You need access to the front to load paper, and the top to open and use the scanner, but you'll only need to get at the back to clear paper jams. This isn't a heavy printer; it's an easy lift for a reasonably fit person.

There's not a huge amount of packaging to pull out here – you'll have this MFP ready to go in just a couple of minutes. We're a big fan of Brother's comparatively straightforward software installation. You can simply download a full PC driver package, and install it with the minimum fuss – a welcome contrast to brands who would rather stick with simplified smartphone-style apps. That said, mobile and PC users can install iPrint&Scan, which makes it easy to use the main functions from a mobile device.

It's around this point that you might discover this MFP has an inexplicable loudspeaker, which beeps and clicks whenever you interact with the screen. Fortunately, you can turn it down, or off if you prefer. We like the way you can add custom shortcuts to the menu, giving you quick access to the features you use the most.

Brother MFC-L2980DW review: Printing, scanning and copying

Mono laser printers don't usually hang about, and the MFC-L2980DW is no exception. It could deliver the first page of text in 15 seconds, after which it completed a 25-page print at 26.8ppm. While that's a little off its stated speed, our tests include the time taken to spool the job – take this off and it's almost bang on the rated 34ppm. Printers usually prove faster over longer jobs, where the job preparation has less of an impact, and indeed the MFC-L2980DW hit 30.0ppm on a 50-page document.

Printers are usually significantly slower on our graphical test, which involves challenging PowerPoint slides and magazine pages. The Brother MFC-L2980DW wasn't unduly troubled, completing the 24-page document at an impressive 24.8ppm. Next, it managed to duplex print the first 10 pages of this document at a competitive rate of 11.5 images per minute (ipm).

This MFP proved to be a quick photocopier. It could complete a single page in eight seconds and needed only 34 seconds to copy 10 sheets loaded into its ADF. A duplex copy of 10 double-sided pages was completed in about a minute and a half. This decent performance was helped by the dual-sensor ADF, which can scan both sides of each sheet without needing to physically flip it over.

Our scan tests confirmed the overall impression of a fairly quick device. Connected over Wi-Fi, the Brother MFC-L2980DW completed a preview in 13 seconds, and could scan an A4 page in 14 seconds at 150 dots per inch (dpi). It needed only a further second at a more detailed 300dpi. At 600dpi, this MFP captured a 6x4" photo in 23 seconds, although it needed 74 seconds for the same job at the maximum 1,200dpi.

Our tests revealed an MFP that's easy to set up and use, and rapid across the board, so it's disappointing that the MFC-2980DW didn't deliver better results. There's nothing wrong with its black text, which is as sharp and dark as you'd expect from a laser printer. It's another story on graphics, which had significant banding – subtle light and dark stripes on the printed image.

This printer struggled to reproduce the shades used in the background of our lightest presentation slide. Rather than a smooth progression from light to dark, there were visible steps between intensity, many of which had noticeable dithering patterns – used by printers to create different shades. Some other graphics and photos had visible jagged lines where we would expect less pixelation.

Photo prints from the Brother MFC-L2980DW were much too dark, with the loss of details that were visible in dark areas of the originals. Unfortunately, this problem extended to photocopies, which were also too dark at the default setting.

Happily, scans were an improvement, featuring strong color accuracy and fairly good exposure. We could distinguish all but the darkest three shades on our Kodak Q-60 color target, which is comfortably good enough for an office device. Document scans in particular were crisp and highly legible, making this a decent MFP for archival and digitization.

Brother MFC-L2980DW review: Is it worth it?

The MFC-L2980DW is nearly three times the price of Brother's equivalent single-function laser printer (the HL-L2865DW), so it's harder to excuse its dingy prints and the banding we saw on our results. It's all the more disappointing given that this tendency seems to win out over a promising scanner to produce dark photocopies. While this is a fast and likable MFP, it seems a little overpriced. It's not helped by higher-than-ideal running costs, either.

Brother MFC-L2980DW specifications

HP's Smart Tank 7005 is the latest model in the company's range of refillable ink-tank inkjets. It's a reasonably basic device, aimed at micro and home offices. In its base you'll find a 250-sheet paper input cassette, while on top there's a flatbed scanner. This MFP can print, scan, and copy, but it doesn't have a fax modem. There's also no automatic document feeder (ADF), so you can't make multi-page copies or scans without shuffling the paper around yourself.

The Smart Tank 7005 doesn't have a wired network port, but it supports both 2.4 and 5GHz wireless networking, which should be more than good enough for you to share it among a small group of users. Its small mono display means there's a limit to the jobs you can control from the MFP itself; you're mostly limited to mono, color, and ID card copies.

While competing refillable inkjets are often extremely basic, the Smart Tank 7005 deserves some credit for its fully enclosed paper tray, and the fact it supports automatic duplex (double-sided) printing. More importantly, though, it offers extremely cheap printing.

The Smart Tank 7005 arrives with three bottles of color ink, and two of black. They're full supplies, so you get an impressive 8,000 color prints or a huge 12,000 black pages in the box. That's incredible value, equating to roughly 2.3p per page – with a printer thrown in. Get through the supplied ink and you'll pay only 0.1p per black page, or 0.3p in color – only other refillable inkjets get close.

HP Smart Tank 7005: Setting up

Refillable ink tank printers often involve a little more setting up than a standard cartridge-based device, and that's certainly the case here. The HP Smart Tank 7005 arrives with empty tanks and no print heads, and it's up to you to fill and fit them.

It's no bother to remove the stopper from the print head carrier and insert the two print heads, which are essentially standard HP ink cartridges with a fill nozzle on top. The tanks' lids are concealed under the scanner bed and covered by flaps. They're filled by inverting the ink bottles and placing them onto the relevant spout, but you need to exercise caution – there's no physical keying to make sure you get the bottles the right way around, and a mistake would mean thousands of pages of wonky color.

Unlike rival ink tank systems from Epson and Canon, HP's is pre-primed, so you don't lose much of your starter ink to filling up the pipes. That also means no lengthy wait before you can start installing software and join the MFP to your network. It's a good idea to photograph the printer PIN, found under the scanner near the print heads, as you'll need it to add the printer to your devices.

HP seems determined to steer users towards the HP Smart app, rather than its more traditional full PC software bundle. In many cases, this isn't a problem, with HP Smart handling basic print and scan duties from smartphones or PCs, but users who need a TWAIN scan driver will need to search out HP's Easy Start package and opt for the full software install.

HP Smart Tank 7005 review: Printing, scanning and copying

You can't count on the HP Smart Tank 7005 for breakneck text printing. It delivered our 25-page test at exactly 13 pages per minute, or 13.8ppm when we switched the print quality to Draft. It's pretty slow – even for an inkjet – when printing color graphics, reaching just 3.6 pages per minute on our challenging test. We use the same graphics-heavy document to test double-sided print speeds: here the Smart Tank 7005 managed just 2.2 sides or 'images' per minute (ipm), which is about as slow as duplexing gets.

Oddly, this MFP isn't that slow when it comes to printing photos. It dashed off six borderless 6x4" prints in about seven and a half minutes, which is roughly one every 76 seconds. It also completed two 10x8" photos on A4 paper in four minutes and 16 seconds.

The Smart Tank 7005's copy performance wasn't especially quick, but at 18 seconds it wouldn't leave you waiting too long for a single black A4 copy. In color, it needed 27 seconds for the same job. Similarly, scan times were acceptable if not particularly quick. The 7005 completed a preview in 10 seconds, and it could capture an A4 page at 300 dots per inch (dpi) in 17 seconds. It completed a 600dpi scan of a 6x4" photo in 44 seconds, but needed two and a half minutes for the same job at the maximum 1,200dpi.

We experienced a couple of paper misfeeds during our first duplex printing test, leading to some badly printed and overlapping pages. We had a similar problem when we tried loading coated photo paper on top of plain paper for our A4 photo tests. Removing the plain paper fixed the latter problem while shuffling and reloading the plain paper seemed to get rid of the first.

Like other HP scanners we've tested lately, the Smart Tank 7005 has a lipless platen, where the scanner glass lies flush with the surrounding plastic on two sides. It's a simple change, but it makes it trivially easy to recover your originals after you've scanned them, and much less likely you'll accidentally scrunch or damage the edges of valuable documents.

There's plenty to like about the results from the HP Smart Tank 7005. It prints great text for an inkjet: bold and black, with relatively crisp outlines. It's also competent when printing graphics on plain paper, managing fairly strong colors without falling victim to common inkjet problems like graining or excessive banding. Photocopies were good, too, with well-judged exposure, and reasonably faithful color reproduction.

Things began to go a little awry when it came to photo printing, though. Our test prints tended to have a yellow bias, causing yellows and oranges to pop far too strongly, and giving some portrait sitters a dose of fake tan. Our test black and white print had a greenish tint, and in the darkest areas it was very lacking in contrast and detail. Still, with most likely users more interested in office tasks, poor photo printing wouldn't necessarily be a show-stopper.

Unfortunately, the Smart Tank 7005 was a disappointing scanner. We've often complained that HP scanners seem to apply digital sharpening to photos, resulting in a processed look and a lack of detail at 600dpi and above. That same problem was evident here, but there was also an issue we hadn't seen before with lower-resolution document scans. At 150dpi, areas of strong contrast, such as around text, were plagued by what looked like compression artifacts. Viewed at 100%, these were significant enough to distort magazine text, slightly impacting its readability.

HP Smart Tank 7005 review: Is it worth it?

It's a shame the HP Smart Tank 7005 isn't a stronger performer, as it's hard to argue against it from a value-for-money perspective. While it's more expensive to buy than a competitive cartridge-based device, it's far better value, provided you'll print your way through all or most of the ink that comes in the box. To help you, HP's currently offering it with a three-year warranty, which requires registration. Activate it, and you'll have added reassurance that the printer will last long enough for you to get the most from its lower running costs.

For us, however, it's just not quite good enough to support a booming home or micro office. Canon's MAXIFY GX2050 isn't quite such sensational value, but it combines better results with a slightly richer feature list. Given the choice, we'd go for the GX2050.

HP Smart Tank 7005 specifications

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, it covers every office need. The 9135e doesn't just address the basics, though. Its scanner is equipped with a 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) to handle multi-page scans, copies, and faxes. Both its scanner and printer support automatic double-sided (duplex) operation, so you can set up a double-sided fax or copy, then go and make yourself a cup of tea while it finishes.

This MFP's impressive specification continues elsewhere. It has two 250-sheet paper trays, allowing you to load an entire ream of paper, or mix a stock of plain paper with photo or headed paper, reducing the amount of shuffling and reloading you'll need to do. There's support for wired networks, along with Wi-Fi standards up to 802.11ac.

With a large 10.9cm (4.3") color touchscreen, it's easy to control the range of direct features available on the MFP itself. These include scans to, or prints from a network drive, or a USB stick inserted in the USB host port. You can also scan or print from Google Drive or OneDrive, but you'll need to use the HP Smart app for that.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e uses cartridges, rather than HP's refillable Smart Tank system. The largest 'EvoMore' supplies are rated for 2,500 black pages, or 1,650 for each color, which is pretty generous for a cartridge inkjet. At the time of writing, color running costs worked out at a reasonably keen 6.0p per page, but black prints cost 2.0p. That's not unreasonable, but it's a little higher than we'd expect in this class – and far off the ultra-low costs you'd get from a refillable printer.

Previously, HP's top band of Instant Ink subscription could rival that price, but the Business tier now works out at 3.6p per page, and only if you print your 700-page monthly allocation in full. Unless you print a lot of color, cartridges are likely to prove cheaper.

HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e review: Setting up

This might be a great printer, but it feels like HP needs to reconsider its setup process. At least this is physically straightforward: the OfficeJet Pro 9135e is on the bulky side for an inkjet, but it's lighter than a laser and easy to lift into place. With no vents or hatches on either side, it's happy to share desk space with shelves, computers, and the like. You'll need room on top to access the scanner, and you may need to reach the back if there's a paper jam.

For us, other aspects of the install process were annoying. HP has updated its touchscreen menus, and the new system is less helpful than the last. During the initial setup, the screen displays a QR code that leads to an online quick-start guide. That sounds like a great idea, but it's not as practical as just showing animations or instructions on the screen itself.

Experienced users will be happy to insert the four startup cartridges without guidance, and may be irked that there's no obvious way to clear the QR code and access the main menu, for example, to manually join the printer to a wireless network. It is possible, via the help icon.

For some time, HP has been deprecating its full software install in favor of the HP Smart app. This works well on smartphones and tablets, but for PC users it feels oversimplified. Crucially it also doesn't contain TWAIN drivers, which you'll need to import scans directly into most imaging programs. The full software package is still available, but you'll need to search for the HP Easy Start installer instead.

One other potential irritation stems from what seems like HP's obsession with protecting its cartridge business. Users have to bat away offers to join HP+, which offers some benefits in exchange for an agreement to only use HP supplies for the life of the printer, and notifications about security measures that the printer uses to block third-party supplies. It's not that we object to using OEM supplies – in fact we recommend it – but HP's up-front approach can be an intimidating start to your ownership experience.

HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e review: Printing, scanning and copying

Happily, such frustrations are easily forgotten once you start using the HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e. It's immediately obvious that it's very fast for an inkjet in this class; it delivered the first page of text in 16 seconds and went on to reach an excellent 22.1ppm on our 25-page job, whether printing in draft or normal quality. It also reached a brilliant 8.0ppm on our very challenging color graphics test, which is as quick as small office inkjets get.

Like all inkjets, the 9135e has to slow down during duplexing to allow drying time so that ink doesn't smear. Accordingly, it managed only 3.7 images per minute (ipm) when printing 10 sides of graphics onto five pages. That's much slower than a laser printer, but again it holds up very well against the competition.

Copies were all fast by inkjet standards, with single-page copies quick by any measure. The HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e completed a single mono A4 page in eight seconds and needed just 11 seconds for the same job in color. Using the ADF, 10-page versions of these tests took 50 and 75 seconds respectively.

It's great that this MFP can make double-sided copies of double-sided originals, helped by a dual-sensor ADF that captures both sides of the page in one pass. Duplex printing again limits the speed here, but the 9135e still completed a 20-side, 10-page color copy in a little over four minutes.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e has a particularly quick scanner. It was able to finish a preview in seven seconds, with no further scanning necessary in order to save images at 150 or 300 dots per inch (dpi). The 9135e also dispatched a 600dpi scan of a 6x4" photo in seven seconds, but most impressively it needed only 21 seconds for a 1,200dpi photo scan – that's a job that ties up most MFPs for at least a minute.

It's a shame that this scanner can't automatically detect the size of your original; it's annoying having to manually select photo sizes when rivals from Epson and Canon pre-crop the image for you. Still, when you're done scanning, you'll appreciate the "easy slide-off glass", which is HP's way of saying there's no lip on two sides of the platen. It's so much easier to retrieve original documents that it makes you wonder why all scanners aren't like this.

We wouldn't expect HP to drop the ball on quality, and sure enough, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e produces thoroughly satisfying results. It's an excellent text printer, producing bold black characters with exceedingly crisp outlines. We couldn't tell the difference between standard and draft text which, taken with the identical speed at which they appeared, suggests there probably isn't any. Color graphics weren't the punchiest we've seen from an inkjet, but they were good and mercifully free of common bugbears like banding or grain.

Perhaps surprisingly, this isn't a bad photo printer. Its pigment inks tend to sit up on the surface of glossy papers, producing a semi-gloss finish, but otherwise, prints had accurate colors and a reasonable amount of contrast and fine detail.

The OfficeJet Pro 9135e delivered sharp and well-exposed document scans at lower resolutions, making it a good device for office archiving. Higher resolution photo scans were serviceable, but like other HP scanners, images from the 9135e showed signs of digital sharpening. You can't switch this off, but it's only likely to be an issue for creative uses where fidelity is paramount.

With a good scanner and excellent printer, it wasn't too surprising that this MFP turned out excellent black photocopies, with almost perfect exposure. Color copies shared this strength, but unfortunately suffered a little from dour, desaturated hues.

HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e review: Is it worth it?

Yes, HP's software and setup can be a little frustrating, but it's easy to forgive when the OfficeJet Pro 9135e is so good at almost everything else. It's much faster than most inkjets in this class and excels across all the jobs that are so important to everyday office life. We'd like the 9135e even more if HP could lower its black ink costs to 1.5p per page or less, but if you prize quality and flexibility above long-term value, we can't think of a better small-office MFP.

HP OfficeJet Pro 9135e specifications

You may have thought that digital transformation would spell the end of printing, but it's 2024 and we are still very keen on a sheet of paper or two.

There are many reasons for this – some are personal preferences, some are job-related – but there is also a great benefit in having physical documents. Some even argue that it's actually better for you.

However, the printer and the print industry are about to get the generative AI treatment courtesy of HP and its ideas to revolutionize the legacy technology. At Imagine 2004, the firm unveiled HP Print AI, a service designed to make printing frictionless by eliminating common challenges from setup to support.

One of its main features, 'Perfect Output', which is in an exclusive beta program, uses generative AI to fix issues like unnecessary white space, issues with image size, or the inclusion of unwanted web ads.

HP says Perfect Output "bridges the gaps between what people see on the screen and what they intend to print" and the feature can detect unwanted content, printing only the text and images the user desires, thereby saving time, paper, and ink.

The thinking behind this is relatively simple; printers are complicated and a huge frustration for users. HP, one of the world's leading manufacturers of printers agrees.

The company's president of image, printing, and solutions, Taun Tran, even says so. And that's why the company is turning to AI.

"We think AI helps us simplify the printing experience, that's our number one, and that's what we want to focus on," Tran said on stage at HP Imagine 2024.

"I think if we do that, the rest of the industry will follow. I can't figure out what Espon and those guys want to do, but for me, I'm focused on enabling great experiences for HP printers, first and foremost."

Will AI breathe new life into printing? ITPro put this question to Aurelio Maruggi, president of office print solutions at HP. He suggested that AI will simply remove frustration and wastage. In turn, this will get more of us back to printing.

"I think there is still a lot of waste that is generated by the fact that there is not enough intelligence in transforming digital documents into physical documents," Maruggi said.

"This brings frustration, this brings waste, and then the consequence, when you are frustrated once, twice, what happens? You stop using the printer."

Maruggi is a 38-year veteran of the printing industry and he remembers being mocked at college about going into print when the paperless office was going to be the future. What HP is offering today, however, will end years of frustration for him.

"It has been a long, long time since I printed an Excel spreadsheet because I get very frustrated with it," Maruggi said. "And I like print. PowerPoint I print all the way because what I see on screen I will get in print, guarantee."

Why do we still like physical paper? For one thing, you actually retain more information. A recent study from the neuroscience department at Columbia University's Teachers College found that for 'deeper reading' there was a clear advantage to reading text on paper over screens.

Taking this argument into the office and people will generally prefer to read and annotate spreadsheets and documents physically – sure, we want to create, edit, and collaborate on screen, but reading it that way isn't all that comfortable.

We also still print off our photos, drawings, and event invites. Companies create imagery for billboards, for posters, for all kinds of physical spaces. Art is made iconic through prints.

If HP can get the industry moving toward AI, the paperless office could be the thing resigned to history.

A3 paper is twice the size of A4, and A3-capable printers are often similarly bigger than their A4 competition. Fully A3-capable multifunctions are huge, which is a strong reason to consider Brother's MFC-J5340DW. An office-focused inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP), it's essentially a compact A3 printer, topped off with a regular A4 scanner.

This bottom-heavy combination has allowed Brother to shrink this multifunction's overall size considerably– it's much easier to live with than most fully A3-capable MFPs. Of course, the downside is that it can't scan, fax, or copy an A3 original, although you can enlarge an A4 document onto A3 paper.

The MFC-J5340DW's other highlights include a host USB port and color touchscreen, along with support for both wired and wireless networking. Its 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) can handle A4, Legal, and Letter sizes, although unfortunately, it doesn't support duplex (double-sided) scanning, copying, or faxing. And while the printer can duplex, it's not available for A3 paper, which could prove a limitation in a small number of applications. We should also point out that this printer can't handle larger A3+ paper.

For the price, this MFP's single paper input cassette is acceptable, but it does mean you'll need to unload your existing stack of paper when you want to switch from A4 to A3, or vice versa. Unusually, you load A4 paper with a landscape orientation and A3 in portrait, but switching to the latter means extending the input and output trays to their full extent, which adds a little complexity. If you just need to dash off one sheet on a different paper format, you can use the rear bypass. This also accepts up to A3 paper, but it's a shame it isn't a full multipurpose tray.

Brother ships the MFC-J5340DW with a full set of standard capacity cartridges, rated for 550 pages each. You'll lose some of this to the one-time ink priming process, but that's still fairly generous for a device in this class. The XL cartridges are much more useful, lasting for 3,000 black or 1,500 color pages each. Stick to these and running costs work out at an impressive 4.9p (ex VAT) for a full-color page, or just 0.9p in black only.

Brother MFC-J5340DW review: Setting up

Brother's inkjets are usually simple to set up, and the MFC-J5340DW is especially so when compared to other A3-capable devices. At 17kg it's much lighter than you'd expect and fairly easy for an able person to lift into place. Unlike laser MFPs, it doesn't require room for ventilation on either side, which makes it easier to accommodate on a worktop. While this definitely isn't a small device, it's only about 30% wider and 16% deeper than a typical A4 Brother inkjet MFP, giving it a footprint only 1.5 times as large. It's only about five centimeters taller, too.

There's not too much tape or other packaging to remove from this MFP before it's ready to go. You do need to install the supplied ink cartridges, and wait while the ink system is primed. In the meantime, you can set the date and time, but unfortunately not join the MFC-J5340DW to a wireless network – you need to wait for priming to finish first. If you're connecting via USB or Ethernet, you'll find the ports secreted away under the scanner bed, a longstanding Brother inkjet quirk that in this case swallows up the first 50cm or so of a connected cable.

After priming, this MFP prints a nozzle check page and prompts you to align its print heads – achieved by printing and scanning a single sheet. Join it to the network and it will check for firmware updates, after which you're ready to start installing user software. This comes in two principle flavors: for PCs, you can download a full install pack containing print and TWAIN scan drivers, along with Brother iPrint&Scan. This handy workflow manager helps streamline various frequently used tasks, such as scanning to SharePoint or a cloud service.

Confusingly, Brother seems to have abandoned the iPrint&Scan mobile app, with new devices instead requiring Brother Mobile Connect. This handles the usual printing and scanning functions and adds copying control, but this is a little limited – you can't change much other than the document size.

Brother MFC-J5340DW review: Printing, scanning, and copying

Brother says the MFC-J5340DW can print at up to 28 pages per minute (ppm), a claim we'd usually take with a pinch of salt for an inkjet. However, it got extremely close to this in our tests, managing a best of 26.8ppm when producing 25 copies of a single text page in Economy mode. Given we include the time taken to spool the print job, it's extremely unusual for a printer to get this close to its stated speed.

The MFC-J5340DW was fast in Normal print quality, too, delivering a first page of black text in just 11 seconds, and going on to hit 24.2ppm over 25 pages. Curiously, it wasn't as quick when printing a single copy of our 50-page document. Momentary pauses between each page slowed the print rate down to a more pedestrian 13.1ppm.

Things were much less impressive when it came to printing color graphics, however. This MFP reached 5.0ppm on our complex test, which includes a mix of presentation slides, web and magazine pages. While that's not awful for an inkjet, it's much slower than a basic color laser printer. Conversely, the MFC-J5340DW duplex printed at 5.0ipm, which isn't too bad by affordable inkjet standards.

We tested A3 printing with a scaled-up version of our A4 text document and a single graphics-heavy color page. This MFC delivered the first text page in 16 seconds and needed only 44 seconds to print five copies. It took 36 seconds to complete the first page of graphics, with all five emerging after 77 seconds.

This MFP's scanner may be limited to A4, but there's nothing wrong with its speeds. It completed a preview in six seconds and could capture an A4 document at 150 dots per inch (dpi) at the same rate. It needed only nine seconds to scan A4 at 300dpi. We use a single, 6x4" (15x10cm) photo to test higher-resolution scanning. The MFC-J5340DW captured it in 11 seconds at 600dpi, and 29 seconds at the maximum 1,200dpi – both very competitive times.

With a fast printer and scanner, it's no surprise this MFP was a quick copier, too. It needed 10 seconds to copy a single black page, and only 11 seconds to repeat the job in color. A 10-page black copy completed in 34 seconds, while in color this job took 52 seconds – both very strong results for an inkjet. ADF copying accounted for the peak power use we measured, which was only 37 watts. This MFP used 5W when in standby, and when sleeping its power use fell below our meter's 1W minimum.

This MFP's print quality is its biggest weakness. It produced acceptable text, but character outlines were a little jagged even to the naked eye, meaning you might not want to use it on formal letters or other materials where a good first impression counts. Color graphics were generally a little poor, without the firm blacks and vivid colors you get from the best office inkjets – let alone a laser. Sharp-eyed viewers might be likely to spot subtle graining in regions of solid color, while we also noted some banding in large color fills.

Typically for most inkjets – which must strike a balance between ink density and drying time to avoid smearing – duplexed prints were noticeably more faint than single-sided ones. This left color graphics looking even less authoritative on the page.

However, while this isn't a photo printer, it did a decent job when printing at Best quality on coated inkjet paper. Color photos looked more nuanced than you'd get from a laser, while our black and white test print showed a good amount of contrast except in its very darkest areas. We could make out a significant amount of grain in all our prints, though, particularly in lighter regions.

Unfortunately, photocopies were very disappointing. Though legible, fine black text looked patchy and distorted in both mono and color copies. This multifunction reproduced color particularly poorly, with the browns of our test page inheriting a strange purplish bruise – we had to double-check none of the ink cartridges had run out mid-job.

This MFP's printer isn't solely to blame for its disappointing copies – our scan test results weren't brilliant, either. While photos were captured quite faithfully, we noticed that details were lost from dark areas of images and graphics. Office documents were generally good enough for archiving, but colors were too drab for more artistic uses. Our Q-60 color target revealed a scanner with a limited dynamic range: it couldn't distinguish the six darkest grey shades, and the darkest greens in particular congealed into a murky sludge.

Brother MFC-J5340DW review: Verdict

Our disappointing results were especially so because this MFP is otherwise very strong. It's affordable, compact, and quite well-specified, and its A3 print capability could be a great feature for small offices who need it, but who don't have the space for a dedicated printer. It's impressively fast on everything except color prints, too.

We also can't complain about the MFC-J5340DW's value. It's quite keenly priced, and offers very reasonable print costs provided you stick to the larger supplies. That's particularly true in black, with its penny-a-page cost keeping it suitable even for medium-volume applications.

Unfortunately, it's all undone by prints, scans, and copies that were all below the standards we'd expect from a good office inkjet. If you're looking for good speeds and features, and can accept sub-par results, the MFC-J5340DW is still worth a look, but if you can live without A3 printing, consider something else from our best all-in-one printers guide.

Brother MFC-J5340DW specifications 

Brother's MFC-L8390CDW sits near the top of the Japanese manufacturer's refreshed range of SMB color laser devices. It's a multifunction, covering prints, scans, copies, and faxes. With a 30-page-per-minute maximum speed and a recommended 4000-page monthly volume, in theory, it could be the only printer you need in a small office or business.

Although it's not an especially high-end device, the MFC-L8390CDW has some excellent features that make it even more suited to the role. Its enclosed input tray can hold only 250 sheets of paper, but it's supplemented by a 30-sheet front multipurpose feed, which adds a bit of flexibility when it comes to headed and other media. Duplex (double-sided) printing comes as standard.

This MFP becomes more impressive when you consider the 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) fitted to the top, which also scans in duplex. Together with the printer, this lets you make double-sided prints, scans, copies, and faxes without lifting a finger, saving on paper and hassle, and helping produce more professional-looking reports and other handouts. This scanner could be particularly helpful in offices handling plenty of correspondence, where its 32 images per minute (ipm) duplex scan speed is enough to make light work of a hefty mailbag.

Wired and wireless network connectivity makes the MFC-L8390CDW easy to share in the office, but they also enable support for various network and cloud services including SharePoint, Google Drive, and Dropbox. These are configured and accessed via a large and user-friendly color touchscreen, on which you can create shortcuts to your most frequently used features. There's also a USB host port, supporting scanning to, or printing from, an inserted thumb drive.

This MFP's final specification flourish comes in the form of the comprehensive security options accessible through its web config menu. These include intrusion protection, secure encrypted communication, and user-level access control through passwords or NFC cards, read on the integrated NFC pad under the display. That's a lot of very business-friendly features for this price.

Brother MFC-L8390CDW review: Setting up

These days many colour laser printers arrive almost ready to go, but the MFC-L8390CDW is protected by a liberal application of blue transit tape. Its consumables are shipped in place, but you'll need to open the supplies compartment and pull out each toner in turn to remove plastic shipping material. There's also a large desiccant pack in the paper cassette. This isn't an especially big printer by color laser MFP standards, and at 22 kilos it's not too difficult for a single able person to lift into place.

Brother has stopped shipping driver CDs, but it's easy to download and install a full software installation from its UK website. We're quite enthusiastic about Brother's print driver, which provides a full suite of options over several easily understood tabs, but its TWAIN scan driver is perhaps too simple, missing out basics including any ability to tweak colors in a preview before committing to a full scan.

If you prefer you can use the iPrint&Scan app, which lets you print or scan documents. You can also define basic scan workflows, such as sending documents to the cloud, an application, or a particular PC. Confusingly, this MFP isn't compatible with the Android and iOS versions of iPrint&Scan – instead, you must use Brother Mobile Connect. This is still a decent app, however, offering straightforward print and scan support.

Brother MFC-L8390CDW review: Printing

Brother claims to have made its new line of laser printers significantly quieter, and it certainly makes less of a racket than we'd expect. For a reasonably quick printer, it's surprisingly shushed, and mercifully free of any particularly harsh wines or major clunks or vibrations. That's great for this MFP's target application, where it might find itself placed centrally among a small group of workers.

The MFC-L8390CDW compared reasonably well to Brother's stated speeds in our tests. From standby, it could wake up and deliver a first page of mono or color content within 18 seconds. After an hour in deep sleep, the same tests took about 10 seconds longer – not bad for a laser, and helping to keep this printer competitive across short and infrequent printing.

Our print tests include the time taken for a host PC to process and spool the print job, so printers rarely hit their rated speed. The MFC-L8390CDW produced 25 pages of black text at 23.4ppm, while this rose to a strong 28ppm over a 50-page document. It hit 19.2ppm on our complex color graphics test, rising to 23ppm over a less challenging 20-page job. It even reached a decent 11.2ipm when duplexing black text. In short, it wasn't at all far off Brother's 30ppm and 12ipm claims.

The swift results continued throughout our scan tests. Connected wirelessly, the MFC-L8390CDW delivered a preview in just seven seconds and scanned each A4 page at 150 or 300 dots per inch (dpi) within nine seconds. At 600dpi it captured a 10x15cm color photo in 11 seconds, and even at the maximum 1,200dpi this challenging job was completed in 30 seconds.

With a fast scanner and printer, it's no surprise that copying was quick. Single black pages completed in 11 seconds, while it cloned 10 black sides in 31 seconds. There was an odd pause between scanning and printing a single color page, but this still completed in 22 seconds, with 10 color pages done in just 37 seconds. Inevitably, double-sided copying was slower, but the MFC-L8390CDW replicated 10 double-sided sheets in just under two minutes.

Happily, the results were fairly strong all round. Sharp black text is almost a given from a laser printer, but this device also produced above-average graphics. Colors in some photos and illustrations were perhaps a touch warm, but this suited skin tones particularly well. Solid color fills and transitions weren't without traces of banding, but this wasn't too pronounced, while on all prints, the toner was finished with a soft luster.

We've been disappointed by some Brother scanners, but the one fitted to the MFC-L8390CDW is quite strong. It captured accurate colors across office documents and photographs. While its focus wasn't quite the sharpest we've seen, documents were amply good enough for archival. It displayed a good dynamic range, easily preserving and distinguishing lighter colors like the blue of a sky, and only struggling with the three darkest shades in our test target.

The only real disappointment came with photocopies. While color copies were fine, monoprints were too dark at the default intensity, leading to the loss of shade detail from darker regions of the original. We could correct this through the on-device settings, but unfortunately these reset between copy jobs – it's a shame you can't permanently change the default exposure.

It's worth mentioning a couple of small but excellent details that add to this MFP's versatility. You can effectively stack some jobs, for example, starting five color copies of a document, then asking for three black and white copies of the same original while the first job is still underway. It also supports multitasking, for example letting you scan, copy, or fax while the printer is busy servicing a print job. That last in particular could be an important way to reduce queueing for a well-used office device and prevent productivity bottlenecks.

Brother MFC-L8390CDW review: Is it worth it?

There is, unfortunately, a 'but'. Brother ships the MFC-L8390CDW with 2,600-page black and 1,400-page color startup toners, which aren't unreasonable at this price. However, even using the 4,500-page black and 4,000-page color 'Super High Yield' replacements, running costs work out at a fairly high 10.3p (ex VAT) per full-color page, of which the black component is about 1.8p.

That's for toner alone. While the additional imaging drums and occasional transfer belt or waste toner bottle add almost negligibly to the cost, they do make this MFP more complex to maintain and mean that you could need to source up to seven separate consumables (the drums come in a pack of four only) to keep it running.

Together, that's a strong argument in favor of exploring Brother's PrintSmart Essential managed print offering, which ranges from 500 to 1,000 pages per month in a 50:50 split between color and mono. This has the advantage of automated supply ordering and delivery, but only lowers the mono cost per page to a minimum 1.4p, or 9.1p in color.

That's a shame. This is a compact, capable, versatile MFP. It's fairly swift and delivers quite strong results. For the price, it has an excellent specification that ticks all the boxes for any busy small business looking for a single all-rounder. What a disappointment, then, that its running costs make it a poor value ownership proposition for all but very light-duty printing.

Brother MFC-L8390CDW specifications

The ET-14100 is the latest A3-capable printer in Epson's EcoTank range. It's a refillable device, which means it comes with a set of bottled ink, and promises much lower running costs than an equivalent cartridge-based inkjet or laser printer.

Epson positions the ET-14100 as a device for the busy office, but it's certainly not designed to take on the brunt of printing duties. Despite its relatively high asking price, it's not an especially well-specified printer. For around £500 you get wireless networking, but there's no wired Ethernet port. There's only a single paper input tray at the rear and automatic duplex (double-sided) printing isn't available either. As you'll see from the pictures, there's no display, and there are few on-printer controls to speak of.

What you do get is a supply of ink to last about 6,400 black A4 pages, or 5,600 in color. Once that's used up, replacement bottles should go for 4,500 black or 7,500 color pages, yet they cost less than £10 each. Do the sums and running costs work out at a minuscule 0.15p per black page or 0.25p for color (ex VAT) – one of the lowest costs per page you'll find on any printer.

Epson doesn't provide A3 yield figures, but going by surface area, an A3 page will work out about twice as expensive – still less than a penny per full-color page. Of course, you'll use far more ink if you're printing photos, but buying it in bottles is still the cheapest.

With a standard four-color setup, the ET-14100 isn't strongly focused on photo printing. That said, it will print without borders on sizes up to A3, and will even print with borders on huge A3+ paper. It's worth noting that it uses Epson's 104 range of dye-based inks, which is something of a strange choice in the office. While dye inks are ideal to get the most from glossy photo papers, they don't tend to stand out as well on plain paper.

This printer's bundled ink and exceptional running costs mean that it's likely to work out much better value than a cartridge-based alternative, but only if you print enough pages during its lifetime to make up for its higher asking price. For this reason, we always recommend choosing refillable inkjets with a long warranty, yet the ET-14100 has a limp 12-month/50,000-page cover as standard. Unless you'll use it very intensively, you might want to consider paying another £100 or so to extend the warranty to three years.

Epson EcoTank ET-14100 review: Setting up

In many ways, the ET-14100 is a four-color variant of the EcoTank ET-18100, and like that printer, it's quite compact for an A3+ capable device. At least, it is until you fully unfurl its paper input and output trays, necessarily huge to cope with larger paper sizes. Doing so more than doubles the desk space you'll need to use the printer – it's not a device you can tuck alongside a typical workstation.

Epson's EcoTank system has been around for several years and is just as simple as using cartridges. This printer comes with five bottles, including two black bottles which allow you to completely fill the larger black tank. There's no chance of getting the colours mixed up, and no chance of spilling ink unless you unwisely squeeze a bottle. 

It's a shame the ET-14100 doesn't have a wired Ethernet port, but Epson has at least answered our prayers when it comes to wireless setup. Use its new Smart Panel app and you can join the printer to Wi-Fi while it's still priming the ink system – a tedious, one-time, inkjet process that usually locks out a printer's control panel. That's not such a big deal if you're installing one printer, but it's a blessing if you're rolling out a fleet of them and don't want to spend as long twiddling your thumbs.

That said, Smart Panel isn't all good. We didn't get on with its verbose faux chat interface, and the weird way it included a short pause after user inputs. We weren't sure if it was processing the conversation remotely, or whether it had been designed to give the impression it was.

Refillable inkjets are generally less hassle once you've set them up, going for thousands of pages between top-ups. That said, the EcoTank system doesn't include level detectors, so it's reliant on users visually checking tank levels. You're unlikely to forget, as the PC driver pelts users with reminders at regular intervals.

Epson EcoTank ET-14100 review: Printing

The EcoTank ET-14100 may not be bristling with office features, but it puts in a decent performance on office-typical print jobs. It delivered the first A4 page of text in 12 seconds, going on to a reasonable 14.0 pages per minute (ppm) over 25 pages. Switched to draft mode it hit 16.5ppm. It narrowly upped this to 16.8ppm at normal quality over our 50-page test, although with 100-sheet paper trays, it's not really designed for long jobs.

It is designed for color printing, yet here the ET-14100 was disappointing. It dropped to just 4.5ppm over 24 pages of challenging colour graphics: a fair bit slower than we'd expect. Even when producing text with simple graphics, it topped out at just 5.7ppm over 20 pages.

The ET-14100 wasn't especially fast on plain A3 paper, delivering a first text page in 28 seconds, and managing just 3.7ppm over a five-page job. Color A3 graphics inched out at 2.1ppm.

This printer wasn't any faster on photo paper. At the highest quality setting, each borderless 6x4" (10x15cm) photo took two and a half minutes, while a borderless A4 print needed five minutes and 46 seconds. It completed a borderless A3 photo in eight minutes and 20 seconds, while the same image finished in eight minutes and 20 seconds with borders on A3+ paper.

Epson doesn't market this as a photo printer, but on glossy paper, it produced excellent results for a four-ink device. Its prints were sharp and quite detailed, with punchy and realistic colors. The ET-14100 reproduced particularly convincing skin tones, although it wasn't great at preserving subtly different shades in the lightest part of some images. Our black and white test prints had excellent contrast, but they suffered from a slight greenish bias.

On plain paper, this printer struggled to make as much of an impact. Color graphics were again very detailed, but Epson's dye-based inks didn't stand up from the paper like the pigmented ones you get in most office inkjets – let alone the toner of a color laser. Graphics were free of banding or the other minor irregularities you sometimes see in inkjet prints, although those with sharper eyes could pick out some subtle graining in some prints. Black text was fine for general use, though again sharp eyes could pick out slightly granular outlines in places.

This printer was at its best when printing graphics onto matte inkjet papers. These allowed it to express its graphics capabilities while enhancing the color and impact of its inks. That makes it suitable for reproducing designs or other illustrations up to A3+ – it's a reasonably narrow niche, but one the ET-14100 would be happy to occupy.

Epson EcoTank ET-14100 review: Is it worth it?

Epson's positioning of the ET-14100 as an inkjet for busy offices is a little confusing. Despite excellent running costs, it's certainly not designed to be a volume workhorse, and it lacks the other features needed for the role. Its plain paper print quality isn't all that great, and its color printing speeds in particular are disappointing.

It's a much better photo and graphics printer, turning out excellent pictures and illustrations provided it's loaded with the appropriate specialist media. Here, its low running costs and long maintenance intervals suit it to churning out lots of good quality prints for in-house designers, planners, or project managers, although its single paper input isn't ideal if there's a regular switch between photos and matte graphics.

Ultimately, however, the ET-14100 is hard to place. It's not a brilliant plain paper printer. It is good on coated papers, but not much cheaper than the EcoTank ET-18100 which is a little better. If you want the lowest possible running costs from an A3-capable graphics printer, it's a good choice. Whereas if you're printing lots of photos and don't mind paying slightly more overall, the ET-18100 is the more convincing option.

Epson EcoTank ET-14100 specifications

Anyone setting up a small business, or looking to kit out a home office, is almost spoiled for choice when it comes to multifunction peripherals (MFPs). Among the usual gaggle of inkjets and lasers, there's a growing number of business-focused inkjets with refillable ink tanks, and they're getting increasingly affordable.

Take Canon's MAXIFY GX2050, a four-in-one multifunction costing £300 or so. For that, you get wired and wireless networking, a touchscreen, a 250-sheet paper tray, and a scanner with a 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). And if that doesn't strike you as great value, consider that it also arrives with a full set of ink bottles.

Like other refillable printers, the GX2050 costs a little more up-front than comparable cartridge-based inkjets. But with ongoing running costs of around 1p per page (ex VAT), there's a good chance it'll prove cheaper to own in the long run. There's a chance it's better value out of the box – with another printer you'd likely spend around £200 on cartridges or toners to match the 2,500 pages or so you'll get from the GX2050's in-box ink.

You'll only see the value from a refillable printer, though, if it lasts long enough for you to benefit from the included ink and lower running costs. Canon specifies a decent 27,000-page maximum duty cycle for the GX2050, and backs that up with a three-year onsite warranty upgrade provided you register within 30 days of purchase.

So, the GX2050 looks like good value, but it does miss a couple of tricks. Most obviously there's only one paper input, so users might need to unload it to print on different media. And while the printer is duplex (double-sided), the ADF can't flip pages to capture both sides in one operation. That's a shame as it makes jobs like a full-duplex multi-page photocopy more of a hassle.

This printer's color touchscreen control panel is welcome, especially as it runs a user-friendly menu, but we wish its hinges were a little stiffer – we found it kept folding back when we tapped it. You can connect this MFP to cloud services like Google Drive to make prints or store scans, but it's a bit odd that there's no USB host port, which would be useful for direct prints and scans. It would also be handy for keeping jobs confidential in a small office that handles multiple accounts or spans several teams.

Canon MAXIFY GX2050 review: Setting up

If you're not familiar with Canon's MegaTank-branded refillable inkjets, allow us to bring you up to speed. Like most of the range, the GX2050 arrives without ink and print heads. You fit the latter first, after which you upend the supplied ink bottles into the relevant tank – there's physical keying to prevent you from misfuelling it. With this done you'll need to twiddle your thumbs while the printer primes the ink system, after which you'll be able to join it to a wireless network and get on with installing software.

Although the GX2050 comes with full-sized bottles, you'll lose some of their 3,000-page capacity to the one-time priming process. Replacements cost around £8 each, so this printer's ongoing costs are in the region of 1p (ex VAT) per page. There are even cheaper refillable inkjets, but that's still far less than any comparable lasers or cartridge inkjets.

This is a squat MFP, but it's hardly the best looking thanks to an awkward step between the printer base and the slightly inset scanner unit. And while we're grumbling, it's a shame Canon hasn't copied HP's lipless scanner platens – it can be much more of a fiddle to retrieve original documents off scanners like this one with a raised surround.

Physically the MAXIFY GX2050 isn't likely to pose any problems. It weighs only eight kilos and is compact enough to fit on most desktops or shelving units. You'll need clearance above it in order to lift the scanner lid or use the ADF, but there are no cooling vents or hatches to worry about on either side.

Canon MAXIFY GX2050 review: Printing, scanning and copying

If you're after a screaming-fast printer for a very busy office, look elsewhere. The GX2050 is only rated at 15 pages per minute (ppm) in black and 10ppm in color, and it didn't match that in our tests. It was reasonably quick for its class when printing text, producing a first page in 13 seconds, and going on to 13.4ppm over 25 pages. It actually beat Canon's stated speed over a 50-page document, reaching a fair 15.8ppm, but it's easy to find quicker printers.

Much the same was true over our color tests, where the GX2050 struggled to a best of just 5.3ppm when printing a simple page of text and graphics. It delivered our more demanding 24-page document at 4.8ppm which, while not embarrassing, is certainly not class-leading.

This printer uses pigment-based inks. These are good on plain paper where they offer bolder prints with less bleeding and running, but they tend to sit up on the surface of glossy photo papers, leading to less vibrancy and gloss than you get with dye inks. The GX2050 can't make borderless prints, but it delivered each 6x4in (10x15cm) photo in a little more than a minute and completed an A4 print in two and a half minutes.

This MFP put in a more convincing performance when scanning. It completed a preview in nine seconds and needed just 14 seconds to capture an A4 document at 150 dots per inch (dpi). It scanned a 6x4in photo at 600dpi in 30 seconds, needing 93 seconds for the same job at a maximum 1,200dpi.

Inkjets aren't usually the quickest copiers, but the GX2050 was quite sprightly in black, completing a single page in just 10 seconds, and 10 pages in a minute and a half. It needed 20 seconds for one color page, and a little over two minutes to copy 10 pages from the ADF.

Our results from the MAXIFY GX2050 were something of a mixed bag. It made strong photocopies that were particularly well exposed – avoiding the common failing of losing detail from darkly shaded regions. Mono copies were excellent, while the colors were reasonably accurate without any noticeable bias. This multifunction's scans were deeply impressive, too. Office documents were sharp and nicely exposed, with clear text and detailed graphical reproduction. But even high-resolution photo scans were impressive, revealing an excellent dynamic range that captured the maximum detail from an original.

Our test prints were just a bit disappointing. We were pleased with the GX2050's dark black text, but the graphics suffered from a degree of banding. This was most noticeable in areas of solid color fill and in color progressions such as you might have in a slide deck background. We couldn't spot any difference between simplex and duplex print quality, however – all color prints were reasonably bold if a touch undersaturated.

The GX2050 may not be set up for glossy prints, but it'll give you decent matte photos on suitably coated paper. We particularly liked its detailed black and white photo prints, especially as they didn't suffer from the color cast you often get from a four-color inkjet.

Canon MAXIFY GX2050 review: Is it worth it?

This isn't an expensive device by the standards of refillable inkjets and, even though you don't get a vast supply of ink in the box, it should work out cheap to own. It's not badly specified, either, although with no USB host port or duplex scanner it isn't quite as versatile as we'd like. It's certainly not in too much of a hurry, either, although it's probably fast enough for the home and micro offices in which it's likely to be pressed into service.

For most users, the GX2050 will likely produce more than good enough results. It's certainly a great scanner and copier, while its prints aren't bad. It's a good multifunction, then, but it just doesn't quite do enough for us to recommend it unreservedly.

Canon MAXIFY GX2050 specifications

Inkjet printers have become an increasingly credible alternative to lasers in recent years, particularly with the arrival of cheap-to-run, refillable tanks. Canon's MAXIFY GX5550 is perhaps the ideal example: a 24-page-per-minute (ppm) refillable color inkjet, aimed at reducing print costs in a small but busy office.

Provided you don't need to scan, fax, or copy, the GX5550 is brilliantly specified for the role. It's particularly adept at paper handling – automatic duplexing is standard, but there are also two paper cassettes in the base, with a third multipurpose tray at the back. You can load up to 600 sheets of plain paper, or split the inputs between plain and headed or other media.

Connectivity is covered by both wired and wireless networking support. There's a touchscreen control panel with a simple menu system, although here the GX5550 misses a trick: it has no USB host port for walk-up printing.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a color laser at this price that could match the GX5550 for features, and you almost certainly wouldn't find one that came with the same amount of ink. Canon ships this printer with a full set of bottles, rated for 6,000 black or 14,000 color prints. You'll lose some of that during the one-time ink priming process, but you'll still get thousands of pages just from the bottles that come in the box.

When they're empty, a full set of bottles will set you back around £60 (ex VAT), leading to ongoing running costs of just 0.5p per page. Laser printers in this class are simply nowhere near as cheap to run.

The MAXIFY GX5550 has another potential advantage. With a single fill of black ink lasting up to 9,000 pages in Economy mode, it's likely to go longer between maintenance intervals. That could be a bonus if you have branch offices or shops without particularly tech-savvy employees. This printer is built to handle a duty cycle of up to 45,000 monthly pages, and is backed up by a three-year onsite warranty
– although you'll need to register to qualify.

Canon MAXIFY GX5550 review: Setting up

Setting up Canon's MegaTank refillable printers usually involves inserting a print head, but the GX5550 is the first example we've tested where it's already there. Instead, you simply glug ink into the appropriate tanks – the bottles are keyed so you can't mix them up. If, like us, you do this often, you might end up just as frustrated that you can't join the printer to a wireless network in the 10 minutes or so that it takes to prime the ink system. It's time you could be spending installing drivers, or configuring the device from its web interface.

Canon's pigmented inks show up nicely through the window of each ink tank, adding a splash of color to the printer's front panel. Each of the 250-sheet paper cassettes has an inspection window, too, but this is some way forward of the actual paper stack, so it's not always easy to read at a glance.

Unlike laser printers, the MAXIFY GX5550 doesn't have any particular ventilation needs, so you could wedge it into a fairly compact space. That said, you'll need clearance above to access the rear paper tray, and there's a rear panel you may need to open if you ever get a nasty paper jam. This is a fairly compact printer for its specification, and it weighs only 10 kilos – even in its box it's easy to lift and maneuver.

Canon MAXIFY GX5550 review: Printing

So far the MAXIFY GX5550 compares well to an equivalent laser printer, but it doesn't make such a strong case for itself when it comes to print speeds. Canon says it'll hit 24ppm in black, or 15.5ppm in color – both are a little behind what you might expect in a laser printer at this price. Start printing and it's clear that, depending on the job, those speeds are a little optimistic.

We hit the GX5550 with our usual suite of tests. It delivered 25 copies of a formal letter in 76 seconds, a respectable rate of 19.7ppm. However, our tests include the time taken to spool and send a print job, and this became more of an issue on multi-page documents. Our 50-page text test – usually a chance for fast printers to stretch their legs – was slower, appearing at 17.3ppm.

Color print speeds were more disappointing still – and further off the claimed speed. The GX5550 reached 7ppm when repeating a single page of lightweight color graphics, but bogged down to just 4.9ppm on our more complex, 24-page test. This, along with our 25-page draft text test, was slowed by mid-job housekeeping pauses.

The GX5550 was reasonably quick to print photos, however, delivering six postcard-sized prints in about a minute each, and an A4 page in two and a half minutes.  For an inkjet, it wasn't too bad at duplex printing, reaching 3.2 images per minute (ipm), but this is far short of what you could expect from a laser, which doesn't have to wait for ink to dry before pages go through for a second pass.

Happily, the MAXIFY GX5550 delivers when it comes to print quality. It produced crisp black text, with no tears or jagged edges visible to the naked eye. Its color prints lacked the glossy luster you get from great lasers, but Canon's pigment inks stood out well from the page, giving color graphics a solid, bold appearance. We've seen more vibrant colors from an inkjet, but these were accurate, with prints overall easily good enough for office and presentation use.

Many inkjets use less ink when duplexing to reduce the chance of smearing, but the GX5550 didn't seem to. Its duplex prints were every bit as good as single-sided pages, with just a tiny amount of the opposite side's ink visible through the cheap 80gsm paper we test on.

The GX5550 isn't built for photo printing – its driver has no borderless printing option, even on 6x4" (10x15cm) paper. It's poor on glossy paper, where colors lack impact and the pigment inks don't dry to a glossy finish. However, it was surprisingly good on matte inkjet papers, printing a neutral and detailed black and white test image, and fair color photos with just a trace of grain. Again, we felt the colors could have been more vibrant, but our tests on coated paper were as good as or better than we'd expect from a laser.

Canon MAXIFY GX5550 review: Is it worth it?

It's impossible to say if the MAXIFY GX5550 is 'better' than a laser, but it's certainly a decent printer that deserves consideration against laser and inkjet competitors. It's well specified at this price, and with a three-year warranty your investment is protected for a reasonable time. It generally produces good results, with nobody likely to notice that their letter, report, or handout is created from ink rather than toner.

But without a doubt, this printer's low running costs and long maintenance intervals are the stars of the show. It's comfortably cheaper to run than all but competing ink tank devices. It uses less electricity than a laser printer and is likely to require less maintenance overall. That, and its decent duty cycle, should make it an ideal printer for moderately high-volume applications, but here its underwhelming speeds could become a problem – particularly if you'll mostly be printing detailed color graphics.

Overall, the MAXIFY GX5550 is a great choice where low running costs and minimal maintenance are the priority. However, if you're willing to pay more for outright speed, consider a laser alternative such as Brother's HL-L9430CDN.

Canon MAXIFY GX5550 specifications

In a world where technology changes almost by the day, laser printers are something of a constant. Still reassuringly big, boxy, and unexciting, they're the bedrock of businesses who want high-volume, low-maintenance printing. Accordingly, the Brother HL-L9430CDN almost looks like it could have launched 20 years ago. Only its large color touchscreen particularly gives it away as a current device.

The HL-L9430CDN is aimed at busy workgroups, with a 40-page-per-minute (ppm) print engine and a 520-sheet paper cassette as standard. This is complemented by a 100-sheet multipurpose feed, and a paper output rated at a useful 250 pages. This printer's high specifications extend beyond paper handling; there's a gigabyte of onboard memory to help it process more complex jobs. It's also equipped with a gigabit Ethernet port, but there's no 'CDW' variant – if you want wireless networking you'll have to buy this and fit the relevant upgrade card.

Direct control comes via the aforementioned color touchscreen, an 8.8cm device running a user-friendly menu. Tucked around the side there's a USB host port for walkup printing, and Brother has secreted a second alongside the other connections at the rear. But this printer is also strong on security features, with an integrated NFC reader offering access control, plus support for standards including 802.1x and LDAP.

Usefully, the HL-L9430CDN is highly expandable. Its optional accessories list includes 250 and 500-sheet trays, plus a 4 x 520 tower feeder – you can upgrade to a combined total of up to 2,600 sheets. There are mailbox and staple finisher options, too.

The HL-9430CDN is built to stay busy. Brother recommends a 12,000-page monthly duty with a 120,000-page maximum overall, while the service life of its consumables and other supplies are measured in the thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages. Its highest capacity, super-high yield toners are rated for 15,000 black or 12,000 color pages – the printer arrives with comparatively generous 9,000 black and 5,000 color page supplies.

This is a complex device, though, and apart from toners, you'll eventually need to replace its drums and waste toner box – both around every 100,000 pages. Meanwhile, the transfer belt is rated for 150,000 pages. All told there are seven consumables you might need to keep in stock, although you could of course simplify things with Brother's managed print service offerings. Buy consumables yourself and you'll pay around 0.9p per text page, or 6.1p in color (ex VAT), even including other consumables such as drums. That's very competitive for a color laser.

Brother HL-L9430CDN review: Setting up

This is a predictably big printer, and at 29 kilos it's heavy too, so installing it should be a two-person job. While it's not especially noisy by the standards of a large laser printer, it's best suited away from people if you want to stay on their Christmas lists.

You load the Brother HL-L9430CDN's cassette and multipurpose feed from the front, so you'll only need access to the rear for the straight paper path, or if you need to jigger with any cables. Cooling air exits via a couple of big vents on the right, so you need to leave a little space on that side. Annoyingly, the front USB host port is actually on the left panel, which could lead to it being blocked if you're trying to fit the HL-L9430CDN into a tight spot.

This printer arrives with its consumables in place, but you'll need to pull the toner tray forward to remove a small amount of packaging. This is usually trivial, but our sample was reluctant to part with an orange plastic strip running down the left of the toners. We eventually had to use force to snap it off, which was particularly odd given the right side came free normally.

Other than this, the HL-L9430CDN feels reassuringly well put together. We often criticize the clattery paper trays on Brother's home office inkjet range, but the 520-sheet drawer here operates smoothly and feels robust. It and the multipurpose feed have clear markings for paper orientation, which is welcome.

Brother HL-L9430CDN review: Performance

Leave this printer overnight and you might want to start your first print job after putting the kettle on. It took an incredible 86 seconds to wake up, warm up, and start printing – one of the longest times we've measured. The rest of the time it's far more reasonable, delivering a first page out in as little as 14 seconds, or 25 seconds after we left it idle for an hour.

Once started, the HL-L9430CDN thunders on as you'd expect. It hit 30.6ppm over our 25-page text test and stretched its legs to 34.9ppm on a 50-page document. Given our tests include print spool times, that's about equivalent to Brother's 40ppm stated speed.

Virtually all printers are slower when printing color graphics, and the HL-L9430CDN was no exception. Still, we timed 20 pages of simple graphics at an impressive 27.3ppm, dropping to 21.8ppm on our more challenging complex test – that's still a very competitive result. At top quality, it produced two 10x8" photos on A4 pages in 23 seconds, or three A4 pages containing six postcard-sized images in just 21 seconds.

Brother quotes a speed of 28 images per minute (ipm) for duplex printing, but we didn't get close. Again, our tests here include the spool time, with the printer managing a still excellent 19.4ipm on black text. It slowed to 14.0ppm when duplexing our more complicated graphics test, but that's still among the better results we've timed.

As you'd expect from a laser, the HL-L9430CDN produced excellent black text – bold, crisp, and with a subtle sheen. It also performed well on graphical prints, delivering images without banding in solid fills, or any particularly obvious dithering patterns in color progressions. Color prints had a rich and even sheen, lifting them above the quality of many lasers and most office-focused inkjets. Even the photos were unusually impressive.

Our main criticism was that prints didn't have particularly accurate colors and that their discrepancy with the originals seemed a little variable. Some graphics were more vivid and bright than ideal, whereas photos tended towards undersaturation and slightly murky colors. Still, the only real letdowns were black and white photos, which all tended to be too dark and lacked shade detail.

Brother HL-L9430CDN review: Is it worth it? 

It's hard to find any particularly significant weaknesses in this printer. It's reasonably priced, well specified, very upgradeable, and promises very reasonable print costs – particularly if you'll mostly be sticking to black. It's secure out of the box, with enterprise-level features to lock down access and prevent tampering. It's also fast, getting close to Brother's claimed speeds on our tests without sacrificing print quality.

Suppose you're buying for a small business more interested in print costs than outright performance. In that case, it's worth investigating whether a refillable inkjet printer like Canon's MAXIFY GX5550 would be a suitable alternative. But if you know you need a workgroup laser, and your priorities are high-speed, consistent printing, Brother's HL-L9430CDN is an excellent choice.

Brother HL-L9430CDN specifications

Canon's imageFORMULA DR-M1060ii is a desktop document scanner, designed to connect to a PC via USB. Despite compact packaging – it's the size of a small inkjet printer – it's capable of scanning paper sizes up to A3, and can handle a variety of media weights including business and plastic cards up to 1.4mm thick.

The DR-M1060ii is an update of the venerable DR-M1060 but, other than a switch to black plastic, the physical differences are quite subtle. The scanners' layout and dimensions are much the same, but the DR-M1060ii has an 80-sheet input (up from 60), and an increased recommended daily duty of 13,000 pages. Confusingly, Canon also makes an A4 model called the imageFORMULA DR-M160ii - it's not A3 capable.

There's a bigger change when it comes to the software bundled with this generation of the device. The DR-M1060ii came with Canon's own CaptureOnTouch scan management software, along with Kofax VRS and Nuance eCopy PDF Pro Office. With the DR-M1060ii you just get CaptureOnTouch Pro, which covers scan management and processing such as optical character recognition (OCR).

While it's not the fastest scanner around, the DR-M1060ii's 60-page per minute (ppm) top speed on A4 paper is unlikely to be much of a bottleneck. As you'd probably expect for a document scanner, it tops out at 600 dots per inch (dpi) resolution, and its dual contact image sensors mean it can capture both sides without any mechanical shuffling of paper. With only an 80-sheet input tray this isn't ideal as a batch scanner, but batch processing is supported, with a configurable range of separators including barcodes and blank sheets.

Canon imageFORMULA DR-M1060ii: Setting up

The imageFORMULA DR-M1060ii is compact by the standards of A3 devices. It's fairly easy to find room for it on a desktop, although you'll need more space to accommodate its paper trays. At the front, you'll find the main input and output trays in a U-path configuration. Pull open the wide flap at the rear and scanned pages will pass straight through – ideal for thicker or fragile media.

The DR-M1060ii is unusually unfussy when it comes to media. Lift the feed mode lever on its front right panel and you'll disengage its separation rollers, which allows you to feed stapled or even bound pages. There's a light to warn you that the mode is changed, but forgetting to lower the lever again could confuse you if the scanner is shared among casual users.

While this scanner is fully capable of handling A3, its compact packaging means there are some compromises. The input tray in particular is barely big enough to cope with A3 sheets, which threaten to slide off unless they're partially resting on the desktop. If you are scanning A3, you'll need to place the DR-M1060ii right at the back of a standard desk, which could create an issue if you also need to use its straight paper path. Unless the scanner is on a deep desk with no wall or partition behind it, you may need to move it about to use its full capabilities.

A happy consequence of the DR-M1060ii being A3-capable is that it can process A4 sheets in either landscape or portrait format. In the latter, the shorter page height allows for faster feeding and the quoted 60ppm (120 images per minute (ipm)) top speed.

The DR-M1060ii software package is a 600MB download from Canon, comprising a driver, user manual, and CaptureOnTouch Pro. Annoyingly, you'll get version four of the latter when you follow the link given in the scanner documentation – it's best to navigate to the scanner's product page on the Canon site, where you'll find version five.

CaptureOnTouch isn't the most welcoming package we've used, greeting new users with a lone 'Save to folder' shortcut, but it's easy enough to edit this or add new tasks. Up to 10 of these can be assigned a job number, accessible from the scanner's control panel, meaning users can select and trigger favorite workflows from the scanner itself.

Get stuck in and CaptureOnTouch Pro is simpler to use than many other scan workflow managers. For each workflow, you can define or select an existing 'document', which defines basic scan options such as resolution, color, and deskew. Next, you select or define a new output, which dictates whether you'll print or email the result, save it to a folder, FTP server, or SharePoint, or send it to another application. Here you can also configure file names and formats, along with options such as PDF/A and OCR.

Like many other scan managers we've used, you do need to go digging to access advanced options – they're behind the 'Change default settings' option on the ISIS/TWAIN/WIA tab of the Driver Setting tool. Here you can tweak settings such as edge and character emphasis, alongside image compression and the double-feed options. You can also change the sensitivity for the automatic blank page suppression feature – as we'll explain, you might need to.

Canon imageFORMULA DR-M1060ii: Scanning

This isn't the fastest A3 scanner on the market, but for a desktop device, it's no slouch at all. We began by testing it on a 24-page simplex color A3 document. At 200dpi it was finished in just 46 seconds, a rate of 31.3ppm. With OCR enabled, processing and saving the completed document took a further 10 seconds on a relatively slow PC. Scanning a duplex (double-sided) version of the same document took just 23 seconds, giving a result of 31.3ppm and 62.6ipm. The processing time when saving was identical.

Although rated at a modest 80 pages, the input tray was happy to accept 89 pages of A4. Loaded in a landscape orientation, the DR-M1060ii despatched the whole stack in just 67 seconds. Reaching almost 80ppm and 160ipm when set to 200dpi, it hugely outperformed its rated 60ppm/120ipm maximum.

The DR-M1060ii can't hit these heady speeds when scanning at 600dpi, but it's still fairly swift. It captured a stack of 27 photos in 63 seconds, a rate of 25.7ppm. It had no issues with thick, stiff photo paper. It also coped magnificently with our torture test – a 10-page, 16-side jumble of yellowing, tissue-thin magazine pages and poor-quality mono prints. Throughout our tests we experienced no mis-feeds, jams, or even any crooked pages, suggesting the DR-M1060ii is likely to prove highly reliable.

Should you experience a jam, a lever on the front panel lets you open this scanner's mechanism by about 90 degrees. This gaping aperture gives you plenty of room to remove any snagged paper. It also makes it easy to access the sizeable rollers, the DR-M1060ii's only consumables.

This scanner produced excellent image quality across our tests, but it took a little tweaking to get it there. We noticed a significant bleed-through from the reverse side of some of our duplex prints. We turned on the Prevent Bleed Through option but found that at its default setting it was overzealous, eroding thin text. Turning this right down cured the bleed-through while getting a decent copy of the side being scanned.

By default, scans from the DR-M1060ii were slightly too dark. This wasn't typically a problem on the office documents that would form the bulk of the scanner's workload, but it was clear on photos and our Kodak Q60 test target. Here we couldn't distinguish the darkest third of the test shades until we raised the driver's brightness settings slightly.

These two tweaks transformed scan quality, with the DR-M1060ii delivering excellent images across all of our tests. However, we still weren't entirely satisfied with the results overall. With 'Skip blank page' configured in the Document settings, the scanner would still include the occasional reverse side of a single-sided page. Turning the sensitivity down to about 10/100 cured the problem.

Similarly, CaptureOnTouch Pro can rotate page images based on text orientation. Our experience across all scanners is that this isn't always reliable on pages with little written content, but in our earlier tests – using CaptureOnTouch Pro v4 – it occasionally misfired on pages with plenty of clear text. It also appeared inconsistent, with different pages mis-rotated when we repeated the same job. We couldn't find any settings to tweak the sensitivity, but upgrading to CaptureOnTouch Pro v5 fixed the issue.

On the rare occasions when CaptureOnTouch Pro v5 didn't rotate pages correctly, we could of course fix their orientation in its scan preview. It's the work of a few seconds to delete any blank sides or turn pages through multiples of 90 degrees before clicking Finish and sending the job to its destination. It's an important step, though – optical character recognition only works on correctly rotated pages.

Canon imageFORMULA DR-M1060ii: Is it worth it? 

This is a highly capable scanner, which in some ways may be overspecified for the job. It seems unlikely anyone will approach its specified 13,000 daily duty – equivalent to 27 pages a minute sustained over a working day. That said, the DR-M1060ii combines robust design with paper-handling finesse, picking and feeding our fragile test pages entirely without incident. This kind of reliability could prove essential to maintaining productivity and avoiding damage to valuable originals.

Its limited paper trays aside, the DR-M1060ii is convincing when it comes to A3 media. It's happy to accept a wide mix of paper weights and sizes, even if you mix them up in the same job. And once we'd made a couple of adjustments, its scan quality was uniformly excellent – even on photos.

It's a shame we needed to tweak a few settings in CaptureOnTouch Pro – and odd that Canon hasn't updated the scanner's software page with the latest version. Those issues aside, however, it's a good software package for the scanner's intended use. Once updated, tweaked, and set up with appropriate shortcuts, it's simple and effective, helping its users make the most of this compact and capable scanner.

Canon imageFORMULA DR-M1060ii specifications

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

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

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

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

HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdwe review: Setting up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3102fdwe specifications 

We always list the dimensions of the devices we review, but that doesn't always tell the full story – Almost without exception, printers and multifunction peripherals (MFPs) need space for their cooling vents or paper trays. And even when they don't, you'll need some clearance just to simply get to their controls, trays, and cassettes. That can be a problem if you need to get a printer into a tight space – such as you might find on a reception desk or in retail environments.

Enter Canon's MAXIFY GX6550, offering an interesting solution. It's a compact and strange-looking inkjet MFP. Aside from its refillable tanks, the main feature of note is an automatic document feeder (ADF) that points to the front, rather than a more typical landscape orientation. So equipped, you can wiggle the GX6550 back into remarkably tight spaces, and still make quick work of prints, and single and multi-page copies.

Oddball arrangement aside, the GX6550 is a fairly typical refillable inkjet MFP. It's equipped with both wired and wireless networking, along with a fairly well-concealed USB host port on the front panel. It's strong on paper handling, with an enclosed 250-sheet paper cassette along with a 100-sheet tray at the rear. Both the printer and ADF offer duplexing, so you can make double-sided prints, scans, and copies. The only real omission is a fax modem, which could be more significant than usual given this MFP's other reception-friendly features.

This MFP's tiltable control panel combines a color touchscreen with a smattering of dedicated buttons. You can use it to print from or scan to an inserted USB stick, and to control other direct functions such as photocopies. It's clear and reasonably responsive, but the menu can be a little fiddly compared to the best.

Canon MAXIFY GX6550 review: Setting up

Canon's refillable ink system is branded MegaTank, and is broadly similar to competing technology from Epson and HP. One feature of the system is that you need to install the heads into a new printer – they're much like empty cartridges. With this done it's a case of inverting ink bottles over the relevant tanks, and waiting while their contents gurgle out. This is foolproof, with keying to prevent an expensive misfuelling mistake. Resist the temptation to squeeze a bottle and you won't spill a drop.

This printer comes with a full set of ink bottles, the contents of which are rated for 6,000 black, or 14,000 color pages. A deal of that is used in the initial ink system priming, which takes around 10 minutes, but you'll still get thousands of pages from just the ink that comes in the box. This alone should be enough to offset the GX6550's higher purchase price: it's about three times what we'd expect to pay for a cartridge-based equivalent.

At the time of our review, this MFP hadn't yet been included in Canon's long-running three-year warranty upgrade. The standard 12-month cover is something to consider if you expect to print in low-ish volumes: if the printer dies before you can use its included ink, you may not yet have recovered your initial outlay through lower running costs.

Over the long term, and in higher volume use, the savings could be considerable. A full new set of bottles comes in at less than £60 (ex VAT). That equates to an ongoing cost per page of just over half a penny for full-color prints, or about 0.16p in black only. Canon doesn't give an estimate of how long the replaceable maintenance cartridge will last, but it's only £14 for a new one.

It's easy enough to install the GX6550's driver package from the Canon website. It's immediately familiar to anyone who's used a Canon inkjet in the last 10 years or so and includes probably the best TWAIN interface around – a great mix of usability and decent features. That said, it's a shame this MFP doesn't come with a more office-orientated software package. Despite its high-speed, dual-sensor ADF, there's no batch scanning application, and no optical character recognition software.

One final point to mention here is that the GX6550's useful second paper tray is at the rear. If you are planning to place it in a cubby, you won't be able to access it.

Canon MAXIFY GX6550 review: Printing, scanning and copying

The MAXIFY GX6550 is fairly rapid by the standards of a compact inkjet MFP. It could deliver a first page of text in just 13 seconds, going on to hit 20.5 pages per minute (ppm) over a 25-page test. That includes the time taken to process the job, so the actual print speed was creditably close to Canon's claimed 24ppm. It's rated at 15.5ppm in color, but our taxing 24-page graphics test appeared at only 4.7ppm – that's still not a bad result for this class of device.

This printer doesn't offer a draft mode, but you can choose Economy, which Canon says will use 50% less ink. In theory, that could see a new set of bottles last for 9,000 black or 21,000 color pages. At 19.2ppm, the Economy was slightly slower than the normal mode in our tests. Like other inkjets, the GX6550 isn't a rapid duplexer, as there's an additional pause to allow ink from the first side to dry. It delivered 10 pages onto five sheets in a little over three minutes, a rate of 3.1 images (sides) per minute.

In monochrome, this MFP is a fairly quick copier, producing a single A4 page in 15 seconds, and needing just 68 seconds to copy 10 pages using the ADF. A single-color page took 16 seconds, but a 10-page copy needed two and a half minutes.

With a duplex scanner and printer, the GX6550 can make double-sided copies of double-sided originals. The dual-sensor scanner captures both sides of an original in a single pass, but the printer can't keep up: it needed five minutes to finish a 20-side, 10-page color copy.

Spend any time using the scanner and you'll discover that its forward-facing orientation is a compromise. Lift the lid and there's a small platen with a portrait orientation and a 5x7" (13x18cm) maximum area. You can't scan A4 pages on the glass, and there's a 600 dots per inch (dpi) maximum when using the ADF. The platen's big enough that you can scan or copy a passport or other ID card, but of course, you'll need to lift the ADF to do it, which won't be possible with the MFP in a particularly tight spot.

One further – and surprising – issue is rather more basic. The ADF input tray folds away completely, and before it can be used it needs to be extracted and clicked properly into place. This isn't immediately obvious as there's a very weak detent. Rely on this and it can fail, dropping the input tray so that it obstructs the ADF output, which can cause scanned pages to get crumpled. Canon has fitted a sticker drawing attention to the correct way to engage the tray, but even this doesn't make the proper position obvious.

The GX6550 can't preview an A4 page, so we couldn't complete our timed test, but the scanner previewed a 6x4" (15x10cm) photo from the platen in seven seconds. It needed 18 seconds to scan an A4 sheet at 150 or 300dpi, and 29 seconds to scan a 6x4" photo at a detailed 600dpi. 

This printer's pigment-based inks should be ideal for plain paper prints. They're less so for glossy photo printing, where the bigger ink particles are too big to play nicely with coated papers. It's happy to try photos, and does a decent job on matte photo papers and high-quality, thicker stock, although it won't print borderless photos on any paper size. At the highest print quality, an A4 print took two and a half minutes, while six postcard-sized prints were completed in just over five minutes.

This is primarily an office MFP, and as we'd expect, its pigment black ink delivered dark and crisp text. This was about as good as we've seen from an inkjet, but the GX6550's graphics prints were altogether less convincing. While color images stood up strongly from the page, they lacked saturation when compared to the best inkjet or laser output, leaving them a little dull and uninspiring. It was a similar story with photocopies, where color prints were drab but usable.

Despite its strange configuration, there's little wrong with the GX6550's scanner. It did a particularly good job of capturing photographs, with a wide dynamic range that preserved detail across the full range of shades in our Q60 reference target. It's odd, then, that it did a little less well with documents, where it tended to underexpose the darkest shades. We also noticed a little distortion in A4 images from the ADF, where parts of the same image shifted slightly between scans of the same page. Overall, however, it's still likely to be good enough for the vast majority of office uses.

Canon MAXIFY GX6550 review: Is it worth it? 

While $500 is a lot of money for a compact office inkjet, the GX6550's high asking price isn't a major concern. Provided you'll print enough to use up all or most of its bundled ink, you'll pay less overall than you would for a similar, but cartridge-based device. That leaves you free to relax and enjoy the other clear benefits of an ink tank printer – low maintenance, and long service intervals.

This MFP's design is certainly compact, and it could be ideal in confined spaces, but it's not quite as clever as it thinks it is. The scanner's portrait orientation limits what you can do on the platen, while if you take advantage of its ability to slot under a low shelf, you won't be able to use the second paper input. We wonder why Canon didn't pair a landscape scanner with a front-loading, landscape ADF and – as it did with the MAXIFY GX7050 – fit a second front-facing paper tray.

This slightly compromised packaging and underwhelming color printing means that the Canon MAXIFY GX6550 isn't ideal for general-purpose use in a home or small office. However, it could still be uniquely beneficial – a niche MFP, for literal niches. 

Canon MAXIFY GX6550 specifications

The world of work has changed dramatically over the last decade, with an ever-increasing focus on digital-first delivery, which has brought with it new benefits and challenges. 

In 2023, many businesses now enjoy a hybrid work setup, with employees working from home some days while spending others in the office carrying out tasks that can’t be done remotely. Others operate on a fully remote model, having abandoned the traditional office.

No matter what their setup is, all companies are under greater pressure than ever to set out clear sustainability goals, reflected in investment decisions, energy efficiency, and reduced waste when it comes to day-to-day operations, as well as software and hardware.

Technology brand HP has been at the forefront of research around hybrid working, which has recorded the pain points employees and employers have felt as they adapt to this new way of working. While personnel practices and software can be modified and updated as needed, it is clear that investment into hardware must to be carefully considered before a purchasing decision is made to ensure it meets all of the business’ needs in a hybrid environment.

Printers are an example of core hardware that have been adapted over time to not just meet the energy efficiency needs of companies but continue to play just as important a role as in the ‘traditional’ office.

In a recent interview with Mopria Mike Scrutton, director of print technology and strategy at Adobe, stated that printed documents continue to play an important role in information sharing, even as digital and virtual environments are embraced.

“Compared to the [screen and whiteboard] trends seen at CES, paper complements them rather than replacing them, and vice versa,” he said. 

“In the same way you can look something up on a smartphone or tablet and then return to a bigger screen to continue your task, so a printed sheet can be used to refer to information, an idea, or be transported outside the room. Or indeed be used to bring information into a space.”

If you run a large business, it’s likely that physical documents still play a large part in some aspects of your weekly business processes. This could be in the form of sensitive contracts or briefings for important clients.

Businesses that fail to invest in printers may find themselves relying on costly third-party printing services when they face a sudden need for printed content. Additionally, many businesses have an existing printer setup that may be in need of replacement.

This could be an ideal opportunity to take stock of how vital printing is to a company’s individual needs. For example, a business that has moved largely to the cloud since it last purchased printers could benefit from buying fewer, smaller units when it next invests in new hardware.

Whatever the business, printers need to be reliable, interoperable, and compatible with scaling ambition to fit into today’s fast-paced work environment.

Guilt-free, green documents

No matter the size of a company, sustainability is an important factor to place at the very center of its business strategy.

Customers feel better buying from a business they know has clear sustainability objectives, and proper planning around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy helps employees feel proud of where they work.

ESG targets can only be met if businesses take a holistic approach to internal change, and reassessing all hardware, including printers, is included in this.

Having the right printers to hand can be cheaper and more sustainable than not having any at all - it’s all a matter of strategy.

If a business under-invests in printer hardware, it may be saddled with poor-quality products that are wasteful with materials and have a disproportionately negative impact on the environment.

Conversely business professionals are understandably reluctant to over-invest in printer hardware that’s impractical for their needs. Buying the right-sized printer, from a trusted manufacturer with clear sustainability goals is a must.

Printer manufacturers recognize these concerns and have heavily invested in developing products that provide effective printer hardware and software that is more environmentally ethical than ever before.

HP’s TerraJet cartridges, for example, run at 27% lower energy cost than preceding products, and come with 78% less plastic in their packaging and manufacturing. This new toner comes as standard with HP’s latest Colour LaserJet Enterprise 5000/6000 printer series.

Enterprises that make use of HP's managed print services can also use its two-tone cartridges, which require less metal at the point of manufacturing.

While the business world has not eclipsed its need for printers, it does demand more from its hardware than ever before with regards to efficiency and ethics. 

Enterprises that make the right choice when it comes to printers can set themselves up for the future and save at the same time. 

Hybrid work and printing can go hand-in-hand

In a similar fashion, embracing printing does not have to come at the expense of those working in a remote or hybrid environment.

With the right hardware approach, companies can ensure workers get to enjoy the benefits of modern work patterns at the same time as having access to printers when they need them most.

The HP Global Hybrid Work Study revealed that 60% of British workers feel hybrid work has improved their productivity, and as many as 89% indicated that hybrid work provides a foundation for a better work-life balance.

Whatever the setup, every business needs to ensure that employees are able to deliver excellent printed content as and when it is required.

“Flexible work arrangements are here to stay with companies of all sizes using it as a way to attract and retain top talent. However, distributed workforce productivity is top of mind for businesses,” says Xavier Garcia, global head and general manager of office print hardware at HP.

Printing as a first line of defense

The widespread digital transformation of the corporate world has come with downsides, including increased vulnerability hacking, malware, and ransomware attacks.

As the number of connected devices has increased, so has the attack surface. It’s more important than ever, therefore, that networks and devices on them are as secure as possible.

If an organization’s printer is compromised, attackers can intercept sensitive data from documents that passed through it and leverage this for extortion or sell it directly on the black market.

From factory floor to office floor, IT managers need assurances of a secure supply chain. Even printer cartridges can be tampered with by threat actors, prompting companies such as HP to introduce extra security layers for added peace of mind. 

In addition to security concerns, reliability, and downtime loom large over devices in the modern workplace. Keeping up with any industry in near real time means being able to produce mission-critical documents at a moment’s notice and with no privacy concerns.

As critical pieces of office hardware printers need to be ready at a moment’s notice, and quick to fix when they run into an issue.

Problems that persist for an hour or more could be the difference between a missed deal, or a vital contract signing being pushed back by at least a day.

With the right approach to hardware, business leaders can avoid production pitfalls at the same time avoid falling behind on security. Knowing your own needs, and how best to fulfill them through trusted brands, is key.

The same applies to challenges in sustainability, productivity, and work patterns. When businesses recognize hardware investment as key to achieving long-term goals rather than a remedy to immediate issues, they can achieve success without having to make sacrifices.

Businesses with big document digitizing plans will love Xerox's D70n, as this desktop scanner offers a blistering top scan speed of 90ppm. An equally huge 15,000-page daily duty cycle means it can handle high demands, while the capacious 100-sheet automatic document feeder is ready for bulk batch scans.

The D70n is primarily designed to provide network scanning services over its gigabit port, but you can use the USB 3 port for local connection to a host PC. All scan management is handled by the Visioneer OneTouch app, which links up with the scanner's color LCD display and buttons to present a range of custom menus. 

Xerox D70n Scanner review: Setup

Installation is deftly handled by a single downloadable utility that loads the Windows drivers along with a Network Scanner Manager and the OneTouch app. It also provides options to add ABBYY's FineReader OCR and PDF 15 scan tools plus Visioneer's Organiser AI for smart document management, Capture SE for batch scans, and DriverPlus for scan customization.

From the Network Scanner Manager app, you choose a scanner from the list and connect to it, after which you can use OneTouch, TWAIN, or WIA. OneTouch links a menu of nine function settings to a range of actions. You can scroll through these using the scanner's buttons or start a scan directly from the connected PC.

Actions include scans to host applications, local and network folders, printers, email, fax, FTP, and SharePoint servers, while output formats include BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PDF, and searchable PDFs. The OneTouch Acuity feature provides anti-skew, auto-crop, de-speckling, page rotation, and blank page skipping, while its redaction feature obscures custom areas of a scan with colored blocks.

With the software loaded on our Windows 10 and 11 desktops, we connected them to the scanner and had no access conflicts as the LCD display provided a list of users to choose from. The display also shows the settings being applied by the selected function, such as output type and resolution.

The Organiser AI app keeps your documents organized by scanning the host PC, classifying detected file types, and providing full search facilities. It doesn't interact with the scanner but you can convert existing documents to other formats and send them to email, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox by dragging them onto the icons on the interface.

Visioneer's free VAST cloud service provides remote scanning access and, after registering the D70n, we used the Network Scanner Manager to log in to our account and connect to it. Mobile users can get it on the act, but the Xerox Remote Capture app is only currently available for Android devices.

The top speed is supported for mono and greyscale scans and, after a brief five-second pause while OneTouch acquired the scanner, it ripped through our test sheaf of 50 bank statements in 34 seconds at both 200dpi and 300dpi resolutions for an average of 88ppm. Color scans are slightly slower but speeds of 73ppm for both resolutions are nothing to sniff at.

The scanner's integral image processor made its presence felt when we upped the resolution to 600dpi as our greyscale and color scans returned the same speeds. For general document archiving and creating sPDF files, though, 200dpi is all you need, and paper handling is impeccable as the D70n didn't jam once when scanning our test documents, receipts, and waybills.

The D70n delivers a mighty scan speed together with a wealth of scan management tools and apps. Businesses that want a high-volume networked desktop scanner at an affordable price should put the Xerox at the top of their list.

Xerox D70n Scanner specifications

Canon's imageFormula RS40 is aimed at home workers that want to digitize their old photo collection as well as business documents. It takes everything from Canon's standard R40 desktop model and adds extra image-processing functions that enhance photos as they're scanned.

The RS40 is a USB-only device with no network capabilities and claimed speeds of 40ppm for mono scans at 300dpi and 30ppm for color scans. It works for us as a business document scanner as it sports a 60-page automatic document feeder and claims a 4,000-page daily duty cycle.

Canon imageFormula RS40 reviews: Setup

Installation is a swift affair. We ran the single setup utility on a Windows 11 desktop to load Canon's CaptureOnTouch 4 Standard software and TWAIN drivers. Unlike the R40, you don't get the ReadIris Pro 16 OCR software, which supports direct scanning to cloud storage accounts.

CaptureOnTouch simplifies scan operations. Its text document profiles contain settings for color or mono scans as well as the resolution, and tools for blank page skipping, image rotation, and page straightening. Below these, you create scan destinations, which can be local or network folders, printers, SharePoint and FTP servers, and local email apps, plus options to send scans to local Dropbox, OneDrive, SugarSync, and Google Drive file sync folders.

You have six output file types from which to choose, and OCR is automatically applied when the PDF option is selected. The software is great for quick scan operations: shortcuts link document profiles with destinations and you can assign up to nine to the scanner's single-digit LED display for walk-up scans.

Selecting Photo as the document type reveals five extra image enhancement tools, with the auto photo fix option analyzing the picture and automatically choosing the most appropriate corrections. It also provides red-eye correction, face sharpening and smoothing, paper texture correction, and rectifying fading. 

Canon imageFormula RS40 reviews: Performance

As expected, the RS40 delivered the same document scanning speeds we saw when we reviewed the R40. It returned the quoted mono speeds at 200dpi and 300dpi, color scans at 300dpi dropped to 21.2ppm, while output and OCR quality at 200dpi were fine for document archiving purposes.

To test the CaptureOnTouch software's photo-enhancing capabilities we dug out our trove of dusty old 35mm prints. With a 600dpi resolution, JPEG output, and all enhancing features enabled, a stack of 25 6 x 4in snaps took 194 seconds to scan for an average of 7.7 photos per minute. 

Destination profiles provide some useful indexing features for organizing your photos. You can set a specific folder for a batch and have each photo scan appended with a custom name, the current date and time, and a counter of between one and six digits.

The software makes a fairly good fist of photo improvement. We ran scans of each print with and without the enhancement features enabled. For landscapes, it visibly brightened them, removed color casts, and improved the overall color balance and contrast.

The smoothing tool made clear improvements to people's faces, but we found the red-eye remover failed to make any noticeable difference. Black and white photos looked brighter and more detailed, but the software doesn't offer sharpening and de-speckling tools, so if the images are out of focus and damaged, that's the way they'll stay.

The RS40 is an interesting desktop scanner, but you do pay a premium for the photo enhancement tools as it costs £180 more than the R40. In this age of digital cameras, it will also have limited value, but if you have a big collection of old photos that need digitizing and want business document scanning as well, the imageFormula RS40 is a worthy candidate.

Canon imageFormula RS40 specifications 

If your business has a need for speedy scanning, Epson's WorkForce DS-870 is a worthy contender, with this compact desktop model claiming a fast performance of 65ppm. It can do this for greyscale and color scans at 300dpi, while the 7,000-page daily duty cycle and 100-page ADF are geared up for high-volume scanning. 

It only has a USB 3 connection so you'll need a Windows PC to host it. Networking isn't entirely off the agenda, though: you can connect Epson's optional network interface unit to the USB port, although this will set you back over £200.

The scanner can handle paper weights from 27gsm to 413gsm so embossed cards won't be a problem, and its long paper mode can scan documents over six meters in length in a single pass. If you forgo the network unit, you can extend its capabilities further with Epson's flatbed scanner conversion kit, which enables it to handle documents that can't be put through the ADF.

Epson WorkForce DS-870 reviews: Setup

Installation on a modestly specified Windows 11 desktop took 15 minutes, with a single utility handling the entire process. This included device discovery, driver downloads, installation of Epson's Scan 2 plus Document Capture Pro utilities, and checking for firmware updates.

Epson's Scan 2 utility can be used for quick scans to local or network folder destinations and swings into action whenever you acquire scans from other apps using the TWAIN driver. It provides plenty of scan controls, allowing you to select a resolution, color, greyscale or mono scans, document and contents skew correction, simplex or duplex operations, and blank page skipping.

From its advanced settings tab, you apply text enhancements, brightness and contrast controls, punch-hole removal, and watermark addition, and can send the scan to two destinations simultaneously. You can pick from BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PDF, and searchable PDF (sPDF) output formats and, when you've finalized your choices, save them as quick-access profiles.

Document Capture Pro provides more sophisticated scan automation services, such as creating multiple jobs for different types of scans and saving them for one-click access from its main interface. Along with defining the scan settings, resolution, output format, and destination, you can apply job separation indexes using features such as custom barcode and OCR detection areas. 

It offers far more destinations than the Scan 2 tool, with support for email to an SMTP server, direct printing, FTP servers, SharePoint Online, and web servers over WebDAV, and it provides cloud connectors for Dropbox, Evernote, OneNote, Google Drive, OneDrive and SugarSync. When saving your jobs, you can also make them available for direct access in the scanner's control panel.

Epson WorkForce DS-870 reviews: Performance

Performance is impressive, with our test sheaf of 50 bank statements scanned at 68ppm at both 200dpi and 300dpi resolutions in greyscale and color. Upping the resolution to 600dpi saw speeds fall to 17ppm, and we noted the subsequent conversion phase for color scans increased from 101 seconds at 300dpi to a lengthy 277 seconds.

That shouldn't be an issue, though, as quality at 200dpi will keep your inner archivist happy while the OCR service correctly converted every word on our statements down to 6pt fonts. Paper handling is another winner, with the DS-870 deftly handling our test mix of statements, still receipts, and waybills without a single jam occurring. 

For a 65ppm desktop scanner, the WorkForce DS-870 is good value and offers top output quality and solid scan management apps. SMBs requiring network support may need to look elsewhere as Epson's add-on unit is expensive, but for those that don't, this scanner has what it takes to handle heavy archival workloads.

Epson WorkForce DS-870 specifications

Sitting on the rung below Brother's flagship ADS-4900W scanner, the ADS-4700W offers a more affordable alternative to SMBs on tight budgets. It may cost over £200 less than its bigger brother but still delivers an impressive package with a top scan speed of 40ppm, a hefty 6,000-page daily duty cycle, and a slightly smaller 80-page ADF.

It's well connected, too, offering USB 3, wired, or wireless access, though for the latter it supports only 2.4GHz networks (not 802.11a/n 5GHz like the ADS-4900W). There are no compromises with the user interface, though: the same slick 10.9cm color LCD touchscreen offers a wealth of user-friendly scan features.

Brother ADS-4700W review: Setup

Installation takes around 30 minutes per PC, with Brother's downloadable utility getting you started by loading the drivers, iPrint&Scan app, and firmware update tool. It also adds Brother's Utilities app, which you use to download and install Nuance's PaperPort 14 SE digital file cabinet and Kofax's Power PDF 3 OCR and document conversion tool.

The ADS-4700W can be remotely managed via its web browser console and you can monitor it and all other networked Brother devices with the free BRAdmin 4 SNMP-based software. Mobile users also get in on the scanning act; the free Mobile Connect iOS and Android apps remotely connect to the scanner, pull in scans and offer to save them locally or email them as JPEGs and PDFs.

Brother provides the best cloud support as the ADS-4700W can send documents directly to SharePoint Online, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, OneNote, Evernote, and Box accounts. They're simple to set up from Brother's Web Connect portal, where we registered our Dropbox account, and entered the unique 11-digit code at the scanner's touchscreen, and PIN-protected local access.

Brother ADS-4700W review: Performance and features 

Walk-up scan features are outstanding. Documents can be sent directly to any networked PC that has Brother's software installed just by selecting them from the touchscreen. The scanner's web console can be used to create up to 25 profiles for scans to FTP and SharePoint sites, email servers, and network shares, with each destination appearing on the touchscreen. The touchscreen allows you to create up to 56 scan shortcuts grouped under six custom tabs. Enable the setting lock feature in the web console and shortcut access can then be restricted by requiring a username and PIN. 

Our tests showed the ADS-4700W was slightly faster than the quoted speeds, with duplex greyscale and color scans of 50 bank statements at 200 and 300dpi delivering between 44 and 46ppm. We chose sPDF for our output format and had to wait two minutes after each scan had finished for the iPrint&Scan OCR service to convert them.

Moving to 600dpi saw speeds drop to 11.6ppm, but you won't need this for general document archiving as scans at 200dpi produce good-quality, accurate sPDFs. Paper handling is impeccable, too, with the scanner handling our stacks of statements, flimsy courier tear-offs, and receipts without any jams.

The ADS-4700W is a fine choice for small businesses, with an impressive range of scanning features at an affordable price. Performance is good, output quality can't be faulted and the versatile LCD touchscreen menus provide great walk-up scan services.

Brother ADS-4700W specifications 

On the face of it, HP's Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw has everything you need for a small office or workgroup. It's a color laser multifunction peripheral (MFP) offering print, scans, copies, and fax, and a set of other well-thought-through office features. With just four consumables, it offers easy maintenance, while its maximum 50,000-page duty cycle means it should cope with the odd bout of heavy-duty use.

You can buy two versions of this printer. This one supports HP's Instant Ink toner subscription service, but if you prefer you can buy HP or third-party consumables through your usual supplier. The subtly different 4302fdwe has identical specifications, but it's mandatory that you sign it up to HP+, and it won't work without an internet connection. The 4302fdwe also only works with HP toners - although you don't have to get them through Instant Ink.

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw review: Setting up

The MFP 4302fdw is a neat device, almost as smart and compact as color laser MFPs get. While it's made from the usual off-white plastic, this is livened up with blue panels at the front of its two paper trays. These comprise an enclosed 250-sheet cassette in the base, together with a 50-sheet multipurpose tray that folds forwards. On top, there's a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) which, like the printer, supports automatic duplex (double-sided) operation. This MFP can make unattended duplex prints, scans, copies, and faxes.

Direct control for the MFP 4302fdw comes via its smart-looking color touchscreen, which is mounted between its 150-sheet paper output tray and the scanner bed. This is crisp, responds accurately to input, and runs a typically excellent menu system that combines reasonable ease of use with in-depth user and administrative features. There's a real breadth of ability here, for example in the scan menu, which supports direct scans to email, network folders, USB, SharePoint, or a computer. You can also print directly from an inserted USB stick.

Physically, this isn't a difficult device to set up. It's not too big or heavy for a fit person to lift onto a desk, and it doesn't require a huge amount of clearance except to fill and operate the paper trays at the front. Its black, cyan, magenta, and yellow consumables are also accessed from the front, rather than a side panel, and there are no cooling vents to the sides. Even if space is tight, you should still be able to squeeze in the MFP 4302fdw.

This MFP arrives with its consumables already in place and ready to go. Each cartridge combines toner with an imaging drum. This might seem wasteful given that drums often last far longer than toner, but it does have the advantage of simplifying maintenance. You only need to keep four consumables on hand, rather than four toners and four spare drums. HP sells two capacities: the standard HP 220A items are rated for only 2,000 black pages or 1,800 in color. Stick with the HP 220X supplies and you'll get a more reasonable 7,500 black and 5,500 color pages from each set.

Buy toners on the open market and you'll pay around 10.1p (ex VAT) per full-color page, which is high for a device that's a few rungs up from the entry-level. On the face of it, then, it's a no-brainer to sign up for Instant Ink and print for between 3.3p and 1.3p (ex VAT) per page. However, in practice, it may not be as simple. Like other print subscriptions, Instant Ink works best if you print at, or very close to the page-per-month level you select. Print less and you'll pay more per page. Print more, and you'll pay a substantially higher price for any extra pages over your quota.

If you mostly print black-only pages there's a further consideration: buy your own high-capacity toners and the MFP 4302fdw will print a black page for 1.7p (ex VAT). Only the highest, 1,500-page-per-month subscription can beat that, and only then if you print almost the full allocation of pages each month.

To sum up, Instant Ink can dramatically lower this printer's running costs if you'll often print color pages, and particularly if you'll print lots of graphics-rich content. However, it may not prove cheaper if you'll mostly print black text. Additionally, getting a fleet of printers onto the right subscription for their usage level could well become its own headache.

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw review: Printing, scanning and copying

HP quotes a 'blazing fast' 30ppm (pages per minute) for this printer in both black and color. Our tests usually fall a little short of manufacturer figures, not least because they include the time taken to prepare and spool each job, but the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw performed fairly strongly across the board. It could deliver the first page of either black text or basic color graphics in just 17 seconds from standby, or 21 seconds from sleep mode.

Timed on our 25-page black text document, the MFP 4302fdw hit exactly 25ppm. Printers are usually quicker when churning out our 50-page document, but this one was only marginally more rapid, at 25.4ppm. Our graphics-rich, 24-page color document is very taxing, and the 4302fdw took about 40 seconds to even begin printing, resulting in a fair result of 14.4ppm. Strip out the extended spool time, however, and it ran at the same speed whether printing black or color.

This theme of similarly swift black and color performance extended to photocopies. The MFP 4302fdw could dash off single A4 copies in eight seconds, whether in black or color. Loaded with a 10-page, single-sided original, it rattled off 10-page copies in just 30 seconds.

Duplex printing may save paper, but it's always a little slower. The MFP 4302fdw printed 10 sides of color graphics onto five A4 sheets in 77 seconds – a decent rate of 7.8 images per minute (ipm). We loaded a 10-page, 20-sided duplex document into the ADF and completed a two-sided color copy in an impressive 63 seconds. Here this MFP was helped in no small part by its excellent dual-sensor ADF, which captures each page in a single pass, rather than needing to manually flip it.

HP seems to have removed the 150 dots per inch (dpi) resolution from its scan interface again, so we couldn't complete our low-resolution A4 document test. This was a quick enough scanner otherwise, completing a 300dpi A4 document scan in 15 seconds when sending the job to a PC over a wireless connection. It completed a 600dpi scan of a 6x4" (10x15cm) postcard photo in 17 seconds. At the maximum 1,200dpi, however, the job failed on our test PC, abruptly closing the TWAIN interface and dumping us back to the imaging program we were using.

While many scanners and MFPs leave you scrabbling to retrieve your originals, the MFP 4302fdw has a lipless area to the front of its platen. It's effortless to slide documents forward and remove them – we wish all scanners were like this.

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw review: Results

Our tests show that this MFP is comfortably fast enough to support a reasonably busy small office or workgroup, but unfortunately, it didn't produce the best quality results. Black text was excellent, of course, but color graphics and photographs often exhibited a slight blue tint, quite noticeable in areas of dark shading. Conversely, skin tones tended to look too flushed and reddish. Graphics and photos generally were a touch on the dark side, with parts of our test black and white photograph entirely lost in the shadows.

Our review sample was printed with quite significant color misregistration, most noticeable between cyan and magenta toner. This caused narrow strips of color or shade inaccuracy, particularly at vertical color boundaries, and left some details of our presentation slides looking a little wonky. We tried running Colour Calibration from the device's Troubleshooting menu, but it didn't solve the problem, however, we'd be wary of concluding that all examples of this MFP would have a similar issue.

Things were a bit better when it came to scan quality. Office documents were fine, with sharp focus, and relatively faithful colors. Higher-resolution photo scans were a little less impressive, with the MFP 4302fdw seemingly struggling to preserve the dynamic range of originals. In Auto Exposure mode it captured dark and mid-shades well and with accurate colors, but tended to wash out the very brightest shades. However, this was an improvement over the slightly dingy scans with Auto Exposure switched off.

HP's scanners usually seem to apply sharpening to high-resolution scans whether you want it or not, leaving digital artifacts that are visible if you zoom in to 100%. Here this effect was particularly pronounced and very visible in photos, but it left office documents unmolested – fortunate, considering the target user.

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw review: Is it worth buying?

HP has nailed the packaging and design of small business printers. The Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw is a reasonable size and looks almost stylish, yet it packs in all the features a small office is likely to need. It's fast, particularly when printing and copying, and with just four consumables each lasting upwards of 5,000 pages, it should be reasonably simple to maintain.

This is a flexible MFP, offering four primary functions, and enhancing each with duplex scan and print capabilities. It has all the features network admins are bound to love, including HP's Web Jetadmin printer management system. It's also upgradeable, with a 550-sheet paper tray available as an option. Despite all this, however, it's let down by underwhelming graphical prints, and a scanner that only really cares for office documents.

If you buy toners yourself, the MFP 4302fdw's high-ish cost per page all but rules it out of contention. If you don't mind subscribing, however, it could offer very reasonable ongoing costs. Exactly how reasonable depends on whether you can find an Instant Ink toner subscription to closely match your actual use. If you can, and outright print and scan quality aren't your priorities, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw is a fair choice.

FAQs

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4302fdw Specifications 

If you're a keen photographer, or you run a business that prints plenty of photos and graphics, you probably don't need us to tell you it can be ruinously expensive. Epson's EcoTank ET-18100 is out to change that – high purchase price notwithstanding.

The ET-18100 is a six-ink printer, specifically aimed at photo and other art use on specialist papers up to A3+. It's fitted with Epson's EcoTank refillable ink system, which cuts down on maintenance and plastic waste, while potentially slashing running costs. There's not much else to it – no scanner or display – but if you've already got everyday office prints covered, the ET-18100 could be a great addition.

Epson EcoTank ET-18100 review: Setting up

There's a good chance you'll have experienced a refillable ink-tank printer by now – Epson launched its first EcoTank models almost a decade ago – but if not, it's worth us quickly demystifying them. Instead of small plastic cartridges that last perhaps a couple of hundred pages, EcoTank models use larger fixed tanks, filled from ink bottles, and connected to the print heads by fine capillary tubes.

The ET-18100 arrives with a full set of bottles rated for about 7,200 plain paper prints, but you'll lose some of that in the initial priming – a one-off process that won't affect future ink top-ups. A full set of ink is rated for an impressive 2,100 10x15cm (6x4") photos, although Epson says you'll 'only' get around 1,500 from the in-box supplies. When you run out, replacement ink costs less than £9 (£10 inc VAT) per colour, giving an ongoing cost of roughly 2.4p per postcard-sized photo print.

Epson doesn't quote page yields for bigger photos, but an A4 sheet has four times the area of a 10x15cm print, while an A3+ sheet is about 10.6 times bigger. As a very rough guide, that would equate to 10p per A4 photo, and 25p for A3+.

Epson's had time to refine its EcoTank system, and it's essentially foolproof. To fill up, you simply invert the relevant bottle over its tank, place it on the nozzle, and wait for the contents to glug out. Each tank has a unique key, so you can't ruin a new printer with an expensive mis-fuelling incident. The only thing to remember is not to squeeze, which could cause a leak. You're meant to keep a filled ink tank printer upright, but we accidentally stored ours on its edge for two weeks – fortunately the previous tester had remembered to flip the ink isolator, and it didn't leak.

This is a surprisingly compact device by the standards of A3+ printers, but it still requires quite a bit of desk space once you open up its large paper input and output trays. Epson no longer provides driver CDs, but it's easy to download PC or mobile software and follow the prompts to connect this printer to your wireless network – there's no Ethernet port. It is, however, worth flagging up that there's also an EcoTank ET-1810. At the time of our review, its drivers came above those for the ET-18100 in Google's search results.

Epson EcoTank ET-18100 review: Printing

The EcoTank ET-18100 isn't really optimised for plain paper printing, but it'll oblige when you need it. It's not especially quick, delivering a first A4 page of text in 20 seconds, and going on to reach just 7.9 pages per minute (ppm) over 25 sheets. Switched to draft mode, it managed a more creditable 13.9ppm.

As you might expect, it compared slightly more positively when it came to colour graphics. It completed our taxing 24-page document at a rate of 5.3ppm – not bad for an inkjet with a creative, rather than office bias. This printer doesn't have a duplexer, so it can't automatically print to both sides of plain paper.

The ET-18100 is likely to spend most of its time printing photos and high-resolution graphics on specialty media, and here it's in its element. It's quite brisk, depositing borderless 10x15cm photos every minute and 20 seconds, and completing a borderless A4 shot in just under three and a half minutes. Even a borderless A3+ portrait shot was done in six and a half minutes.

We didn't encounter any gotchas during our time with the ET-18100, but from previous experience we know that the EcoTank system doesn't have tank level monitors. That means the PC status monitor will pester users to manually look out for low ink, with dire warnings about letting the system run dry. In practice, these warnings usually start a long time before the tanks need filling, but you can top up and reset the ink level warning to silence them.

Epson EcoTank ET-18100 review: Performance

This printer uses dye-based inks, optimized for excellent results on coated papers. The flipside is that they deliver underwhelming prints on plain paper. Text wasn't as black as you'd get from an office-orientated inkjet, let alone a laser, and colour graphics lacked impact on the page. Even solid, bright colour fills looked a little washed out and gutless.

Switch to photo papers and you'll have no such disappointments. The ET-18100 combines a standard black, cyan, magenta and yellow ink setup with additional light cyan and magenta inks. This six-ink system allows it greater control over shading in lighter regions where, rather than using a few darker ink droplets, it can use many lighter ones. In theory this results in smoother shade progressions, better definition, and less chance you'll spot any grain.

It worked well across our test results, in which it was barely possible to make out grain even with the help of an eyeglass. Landscape prints in particular were impressive, with bold cobalt skies and richly textured rocks and vegetation, and an impressive amount of detail preserved even among heavily shaded, distant objects. Group photos were generally good, too, with a nicely balanced exposure preserving the detail of faces, fabrics and backgrounds.

The ET-18100 was less impressive on other prints, particularly close-up portraits, where it tended towards slight overexposure at the cost of some fine detail. Skin tones looked too pale in several images, while the detail was lost from clouds and sun-bleached wood in one shot, taken under bright sunlight. Overall, however, this is a very capable photo printer, if not quite up to the standards we've seen before now from some high-end Epson printers.

Epson EcoTank ET-18100 review: Verdict

Like other ink tank printers, the Epson EcoTank ET-18100 comes with a steep asking price when compared to its standard, cartridge-based equivalents. In this case, you might expect to pick up something broadly comparable for around a half to two-thirds of the price, however, you'd then be faced with significantly higher running costs. Provided you'll use the ET-18100 fairly regularly, you're likely to pay less overall.

To make a very rough comparison, Canon's superb, eight-ink PIXMA Pro-200 costs around two thirds as much to buy, but it might cost around seven times as much to keep in ink. You'd need to buy two full sets of cartridges for it to produce the 1,500 postcard-sized photos you get from the Epson's supplied bottles, which would equate to about the same overall cost of ownership. Thereafter, the Epson could save you as much as 20p per postcard, or more than £1 on each borderless A3+ print, although we should stress these are rough calculations, based on stated yields rather than our own testing.

It's hard to quantify the exact potential savings from this printer, but a little easier to rate its photo quality. It's very good, but not as uniformly excellent as we've seen from some other Epson photo printers. With two extra inks, the aforementioned PIXMA Pro-200 has it beaten, too.

We're not convinced that the ET-18100 does quite enough to appeal to pro photographers, or that it's quite up to the task where outright photo quality is everything. However, if you'll often need to print exacting graphics on coated inkjet papers or large, impressive photos, this printer combines solid performance with impressively reduced running costs. It's easy to recommend. 

Epson EcoTank ET-18100 specifications 

If the HP Smart Tank 5105 is anything to go by, the Smart Tank range seem to be hitting the right notes. This is despite HP being a comparative latecomer to refillable inkjets with both Epson and Canon getting in first with their EcoTank and Megatank ranges, respectively.  

This Smart Tank in particular is quite a basic multifunction peripheral (MFP). There's no fax modem, so it's limited to prints, scans and copies, and there are no niceties such as a swish colour touchscreen. What you do get is a basic 100-sheet paper input, an even more basic 30-sheet output tray, and Wi-Fi connectivity. There's a simple mono LCD display, with buttons to trigger mono and colour copies, or a print-out of the MFP's status.

HP Smart Tank 5105 review: Setting up

The Smart Tank 5105 is clearly aimed at home and home office use, and as such it's predictably easy to set up. That said, things are a bit more involved than with HP's typical cartridge-based printers. Installation involves fitting a pair of print heads - which are essentially empty cartridges – then using the supplied ink bottles to fill the four tanks ranged across the MFP's front panel.

While the EcoTank and Megatank systems both use physical keying to prevent you mis-fuelling with, say, cyan instead of magenta ink, HP's system doesn't. For this reason it's vital to pay attention and get the right colour in each tank. We encountered another hiccup when the print head carrier didn't stop in quite the right place – it needed a gentle nudge before we could fit the black head.

HP really doesn't want you to use its full suite of PC drivers, instead steering users towards the HP Smart app. There's little wrong with this, particularly when it comes to finding and configuring a new printer for a wireless network, but it's a shame you have to jump through hoops to install a conventional set of PC software. If that's what you need, the key is to search online for HP Easy Start, and decline a switch to HP Smart when the setup program prompts you.

Like most other HP printers you'll get the chance to sign up for HP+, but it's not mandatory. This printer also comes without the usual hard sell for an Instant Ink cartridge subscription. In large part this is because you won't be buying ink all that often. The 5105 arrives with enough to print around 6,000 pages and, unlike rival models, there's no initial priming process to use any of it up. Subsequent refills should last for the same number of pages, giving this printer ultra-low ongoing running costs of 0.17p per black page, or 0.6p (excluding VAT) for a full-colour page.

The Smart Tank system may lose points for its lack of colour keying, but it gains them back again as the only refillable system with ink level monitors. Anyone who's used an EcoTank printer will know the system can be paranoid about how much ink actually remains onboard, frequently cajoling the user to make visual checks.

HP Smart Tank 5105 review: Printing, scanning and copying

Interesting ink system aside, this is a fairly prosaic, near-entry level MFP. As such, we weren't expecting great things when it came to our timed tests, and we weren't disappointed. The Smart Tank 5105 delivered a first page of black text in 16 seconds, and went on to complete a 25-page document at a rate of 10.9 pages per minute (ppm). In draft mode, this edged up to 11.6ppm, quite satisfactory for this class of device.

Things were a lot less sprightly in colour, with a first page trundling out in 40 seconds. This MFP took almost 15 minutes to complete our complex colour graphics test – a rate of just 1.7ppm. With the Max DPI setting enabled, photos were positively glacial, with six borderless 10x15cm (6x4") prints inching imperceptibly out over 28 minutes. Photocopies followed a similar pattern, with a single mono page completing in a reasonable 20 seconds, but colour copies needing a tedious 53 seconds.

We're not huge fans of HP's TWAIN scan interface, but it has improved in recent years to allow a choice of 150 dots per inch (dpi), necessary for one of our timed tests. The interface works slightly differently to competing software, with a prescan – taking 11 seconds – all that's necessary to capture at low resolutions.

At 300dpi and above, the software rescans the original after the preview step just like most other TWAIN interfaces. It took 20 seconds to scan an A4 page at 300dpi, and 49 seconds to capture a 10x15cm print at a medium-high 600dpi – both inline with what we'd expect, or perhaps just slightly slower. Only at the maximum 1,200dpi was this an especially slow scanner, needing more than two and a half minutes to capture a 10x15cm photo.

HP Smart Tank 5105 review: Performance

Despite some slow performances, most users are likely to find the results worth waiting for. This MFP produces great prints on plain paper, with bold black text that looks almost laser-sharp to the naked eye. It's a good color graphics printer, too, painting bold colors without particularly obvious banding or graining.

Despite their slow gestation, photo prints weren't as impressive, suffering from slightly washed out colours in places. Our black and white test print had a subtle greenish hue – it wasn't the worst, but you wouldn't choose this printer if photo quality was of primary importance.

Similarly, this isn't the best scanner we've tested. It did a good enough job of capturing office documents, although their colours were a little desaturated when compared to the originals. Photos seemed gently underexposed and, in common with almost all HP scanners we've tested, showed evidence of digital sharpening when viewed at 100% zoom – there's no option to switch this off. Photocopies very much reflected the scanner's performance, suffering slightly from its sombre take on colours.

HP Smart Tank 5105 review: Verdict

Set aside its purchase price for a moment, because the Smart Tank 5105 is essentially a near-entry level device. Bear this in mind, and on the whole it produces decent results in a reasonable timeframe. Its strongest point is excellent plain paper quality, and its worst is very slow colour printing. Despite being basic, it's fairly easy to use and it worked reliably in all our tests.

Consider price, and the 5105 needs a little more explaining. It costs three or four times as much as we'd expect to pay for a cartridge-based equivalent, but it does arrive with 6,000 pages' worth of ink – potentially saving you around £400 before you'd even need to buy more bottles. Of course, you'll only realise those savings if you print that kind of volume, which can take a couple of years on a moderately used home device: reassuringly, HP's offering a three-year, 30,000-page warranty upgrade on registration, which ought to more than cover it.

This isn't the best MFP we've tested, and it's not quite the cheapest to run, but as an overall package HP has got the Smart Tank 5105 spot on. If you don't need fast performance and advanced features, but you're looking for a cheap, low maintenance MFP for a home or micro office, it's an excellent choice.

HP Smart Tank 5105 specifications 

The Brother DCP-J1800DW does something we've never seen before. For the most part, it's a straightforward three-function inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP), capable of color A4 prints, scans and copies. But although you'd never guess from its typically Brother appearance, it packs a guillotine capable of hacking an innocent sheet of A4 paper into two A5 pages. More on that later.

Paper cutting aside, this is quite a well-specified MFP, suited to a home or micro office. There's no fax modem, but it supports wired and wireless networking, has automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, and is topped off with a 20-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) – although this is only single-sided. All of its functions are controlled via a 6.8cm color touchscreen employing Brother's straightforward menu system – it's one of the best to use.

This certainly isn't suitable as the main printer in a busy small office. Its recommended 1,000-page monthly volume is too low, but perhaps more immediately its 150-sheet paper tray would quickly prove limiting. There's no second input, so you have to juggle paper around to print on headed paper or specialty media.

Brother DCP-J1800DW review: Setting up

Brother's printers are usually easy to set up, and the DCP-J1800DW is no exception. Although it's heavier than the Japanese manufacturer's other similar MFPs, it's still light and compact enough to sit on almost any desk or table.

Brother gives you the choice of installing a full PC driver package that includes a TWAIN scan driver, or using the iPrint&Scan app, which is also available for Android and iOS. Both are simple to install and use, although the PC scan driver looks dated and has comparatively limited functionality.

This printer arrives with a set of standard-capacity cartridges. They're normally rated for 200 pages each, but some ink is lost to the one-time priming process. If you're planning to use Wi-Fi, you'll experience the common frustration of having to wait for priming to finish before you can join the MFP to a wireless network. You can't get the installation underway on PCs or other devices until this 5-10 minute process is over. Once primed, the DCP-J1800DW spits out a quick nozzle check sheet and prompts you to align its print heads. It's a simple process where you print and scan a single sheet.

You can buy 'XL' replacement cartridges for this printer which, as is almost always the case, result in lower running costs than the standard ones. They're rated for only 500 pages, though, so you're likely to find yourself shuffling cartridges every couple of weeks if you subject this MFP to even moderate use. Perhaps more significantly, they're not at all keenly priced, leaving the DCP-J1800DW with disappointing running costs of 3p per black or 9.8p for a full-color page (excluding VAT).

Brother stands alone as the only major inkjet manufacturer without a refillable model in its home office lineup. While it offers ink subscriptions through the Ecopro, the DCP-J1800DW isn't supported, meaning this is an expensive MFP to run.

Brother DCP-J1800DW review: Printing, scanning, and copying

Bearing in mind that this printer is aimed at reasonably light use in very small offices, it's actually fairly swift. It delivered the first page of black text in 12 seconds, needing 16 seconds to produce a first page of lightweight color graphics. It went on to deliver 25 pages of text in 100 seconds: exactly 15 pages per minute (ppm). At draft quality, this test ran at 15.5ppm.

By affordable inkjet standards, this is quite a quick color printer. It completed our 24-page test, comprising some taxing magazine pages and presentation slides, at a rate of 6.0ppm. It was also impressive when duplexing, hitting 3.6ipm – again, that's good for this class. As an inkjet, it's happy to print on coated photo paper, delivering six borderless 10x15cm (6x4") prints in 12 and a quarter minutes.

Timed with a single A4 page loaded on the platen, black copies took 13 seconds, and color 16 seconds. Using the ADF, the DCP-J1800DW completed a 10-page black copy in 80 seconds, needing 104 seconds in color. Again, all strong results in this class. It's worth noting again that the ADF is single-sided, though, so you can't set up an automated two-sided copy.

We test scan times using the manufacturer's TWAIN interface on a PC. The DCP-J1800DW completed a preview in nine seconds, and needed just 10 seconds to capture an A4 document at a low 150 dots per inch (dpi) resolution. Upping this to a middling 300dpi required 15 seconds. At 600dpi it took 24 seconds to scan a 10x15cm photo, topping out at 81 seconds at the maximum 1,200dpi.

At these speeds, you'd rarely find yourself waiting long for the DCP-J1800DW in a small office. However, its results aren't the best you'll get from this class of inkjet. On plain paper, Brother's inks lack the authority of some rivals, leading particularly to color graphics with a little less impact than you'd get from the class leaders. The flip-side of what appear to be dye-based inks is that they play nicely with coated photo paper, so this MFP can turn out decent glossy prints if you need them.

Photocopies from the DCP-J1800DW were quite well exposed, with little loss of detail and better color accuracy than most, so it was a little surprising that scans seemed to have a low dynamic range. They were too dark by default, leading to the loss of shade detail. Unusually this was the case even in office documents, leading to poor reproduction of some graphics. Photo scan quality is perhaps less important in this class of device, but our scanned images seemed to have a slight red bias.

Brother DCP-J1800DW review: Bring forth the guillotine

For many, it'll be hard to imagine a strong use case for this printer's unique paper-cutting ability, but it's beautifully implemented. Enable the 'Print & Cut' feature and it'll turn every A4 sheet of paper into two crisply cut A5 sheets. Exactly how it does this is up to you. Choose 'Fit to cut page' and you'll get a shrunken version of your original, printed on A5 rather than A4. Alternatively, 'No resize' just slices your A4 document in two – it's ideal for page layouts already designed for the chop. The feature supports plain paper and special media, so you can create two smaller photos using a single sheet of coated A4 paper.

Perhaps most impressively, the system works with the printer's duplexer, allowing you to create duplexed A5 pamphlets, potentially saving both paper and ink. The guillotine is secreted so deeply within the paper path that we couldn't actually spot it, so it seems Brother has designed it with poked fingers in mind.

Over a range of prints and media, the paper cut feature consistently produced evenly divided, smoothly cut prints. We literally couldn't tell the difference between the existing paper edges and those produced by the cutter. It's worth noting also that cutting adds only a moderate delay to printing, and is actually quicker if you count only the number (rather than size) of sheets printed. On 24 A5 sheets, our graphical test needed two minutes, 51 seconds. This compared to four minutes when it was printed on 24 A4 pages.

The system's other major advantage is that A4 paper is generally cheaper than A5 even before you cut it in half. If you do have a requirement to print A5 flyers or other content, or you can accept smaller prints to minimize ink and paper use, using the print cut feature will save you money.

Brother DCP-J1800DW review: Verdict

The DCP-J1800DW does something unique, and it does it brilliantly – delivering beautifully cut mini prints with the minimum of delay or fuss. If you regularly print A5, the system offers a hassle-free alternative to keeping an extra paper size in stock.

But while its headline feature is excellent, this MFP is disappointing in other ways. Its strong feature set and swift performance is undermined somewhat by poor scan quality, and its plain paper printing is a little way short of the best. More significantly, it's expensive to run – and with 500-page cartridge intervals and no ink subscription it could be a pain to manage supplies.

If you need this MFP's guillotine feature, you're likely to love it. It's truly innovative, even if it seems like something of a niche use case. But if you're looking for one multifunction to do it all in a micro office, this one won't make the cut.

Brother DCP-J1800DW specifications

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.

If you thought laser printers had the monopoly on size and weight, think again. Brother's MFC-J6955DW is big and heavy - so much so that you might need two people to lift it safely. There's good reason for all that bulk. Not only can this inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP) print, scan, fax and copy, it can do it all on paper sizes up to A3.

In its base, you'll find two fully enclosed 250-sheet paper trays, each capable of handling regular media including A4 or A3. At the back, a 100-sheet multipurpose tray can take anything from A3 down to 10x15cm photo paper.

Brother hasn't overlooked the scanner, which is also fully A3 capable. It's enhanced with a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). Best of all, both the printer and ADF support automatic duplex printing, allowing double-sided prints, copies, scans and faxes on A4 or A3 paper. Happily, the ADF has dual image sensors, allowing for a higher throughput and greater reliability than if it were mechanically flipping pages over.

Tying everything together, there's on-device control through an 8.8cm colour touchscreen, and a front-facing USB port. This MFP has 10/100 wired Ethernet connectivity, but it also supports wireless networks in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz ranges.

Brother MFC-J6955DW review: Setting up

Aside from the fact you might need two people to lift it, this is an easy MFP to get up and running. It does demand a reasonable amount of desk space, though, particularly if you'll be printing on A3. Extend one of the paper trays for A3 media, open up the rear multipurpose feed, and the MFC-J6955DW is more than 70cm deep.

Brother supplies a set of full-capacity ink cartridges in the box. In theory, they're good for 3,000 black pages or 1,500 in colour. However, this printer's one-time priming process will eat into that. Brother says you'll be left with at least 2,250 black and 975 colour pages - we've seen worse from inbox supplies.

You can buy high-capacity replacements rated for 6,000 black pages and 5,000 colour pages. Using these, running costs work out at 0.8p per black page or 3.7p for a full-colour page of text and graphics. While that's quite a bit more than inkjets with refillable tanks such as the Canon MAXIFY GX7050, it's still very competitive, beating many laser equivalents hands-down.

Brother's PC driver bundle covers printing and scanning and includes PaperPort scan management software that, among other things, can use optical character recognition (OCR) to output searchable PDFs. Potentially that's a great boon for smaller offices looking to tackle a paperwork or archival backlog - particularly once you consider this machine's fast, duplexing ADF. As you'd expect, Brother has a print and scan app for Android and iOS devices.

Brother MFC-J6955DW review: Printing, scanning and copying

In use, this MFP is something of a mixed bag, but there's plenty to impress. It has one of the faster scanners we've tested, capable of previewing an A4 document in just five seconds and capturing it at 150 dots-per-inch (dpi) in only seven seconds. A more detailed 300dpi scan completed in eight seconds.

As you might expect, A3 scans were a little slower but still impressive: we timed a preview at 6 seconds, a 150dpi scan at nine seconds, and even a 300dpi scan was over in 12 seconds. The MFC-J6955DW despatched our 10x15cm photo scan at 600dpi in only 11 seconds. This job needed 26 seconds at the maximum 1,200dpi, but this is still faster than average.

Single-page photocopies were quick, with A4 copies completed in eight seconds in black, or 11 seconds for colour. This MFP could dash off a black A3 copy in 15 seconds, needing only an extra second for colour. We timed a 10-page mono A4 copy at 39 seconds, rising to 64 seconds in colour. Making a 10-page, 20-side A4 copy of a double-sided original took a reasonable two minutes and 39 seconds.

It's on our more straightforward print tests that things started to go off a little, though. This isn't the fastest inkjet out of the blocks, needing 15 or 16 seconds to deliver a first black or colour page. It rattled off 25 copies of a single-page formal letter at a decent 23 pages per minute (ppm), but our 50-page document - usually a chance for fast printers to really stretch their legs - traipsed out at only 12.6ppm.

This slower performance didn't fit with what we'd expect. After a bit of network troubleshooting to no avail, we switched to a new host PC, which seemed to cure the problem. Now the 50-page job rattled through at 29.1ppm, almost a match for Brother's claimed 30ppm.

The MFC-J6955DW printed 10 sides onto five pages at a reasonable rate of 4.5 images per minute. It also delivered our graphics-rich colour document at 6.2ppm - fair, but much slower than an equivalent colour laser.

Brother MFC-J6955DW review: Switching to A3

Our A3 tests consist of printing the same black text and colour graphics pages five times. The MFC-J6955DW delivered a first A3 page of text in 21 seconds, needing 56 seconds to print five copies (5.4ppm). It completed the first page of colour graphics in 40 seconds, needing a minute and a half to finish the job (3.4ppm).

This MFP generally delivered satisfactory prints. Black text was bold and crisp, and colour graphics were reasonably punchy, if not quite the best we've seen from an office inkjet. We noticed a subtle banding on solid colour fills, but nothing that would be a problem in everyday office use.

While this isn't really a photo printer, it made a reasonable job of borderless 10x15" prints, completing six in a little over seven minutes. Our only real criticism is that its plain paper-orientated pigment inks didn't deliver a full gloss finish on coated photo paper. The Brother MFC-J6955DW produced acceptable copies: there was some loss of detail among dark shades in mono jobs, but colour copies were better.

Unfortunately, this MFP couldn't back up its very fast scanner with great scan quality. Scanned images were sharply focused and quite faithful to the colours in original documents. Digitised photos were good all-round, but documents were a little too dark by default, leading to the washing out of detail in dark graphics.

Our colour target test revealed the extent of the problem; at the default setting, the nine darkest of 24 shades were indistinguishable. While it's possible to tweak the exposure using the TWAIN interface's advanced settings, it shouldn't be necessary to this extent.

Brother MFC-J6955DW review: Verdict

Without a doubt, there is a lot to like about this big inkjet multifunction. The Brother MFC-J6955DW is easy to set up and has a friendly touchscreen interface that makes it easier to use than many office MFPs. It's a fast printer, scanner and copier has excellent paper handling, and is generally well specified. Unfortunately, it's let down a little by disappointingly dark scans and mono photocopies, and to a lesser extent by the subtle banding in some colour prints. We should also point out that its standard warranty is a stingy 12 months.

On balance then, this is a solid but unexceptional A3 MFP for a small office. It is a shame its default scan and copy settings don't produce better results, but we very much like its flexibility and reasonable running costs. If you aren't set on an A3-capable device, Canon's Maxify GX7050 covers a similar set of features with even lower running costs. But if you do need A3 print, scans, copies or faxes, the Brother MFC-J6955DW makes a good alternative to a colour laser.

Brother MFC-J6955DW Specifications

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.

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

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

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

How laser printers work

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

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

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

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

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

Do laser printers use ink?

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

Are laser printers faster at printing?

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

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

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

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

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

Are laser printers best?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are LED printers best?

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

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

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

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

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

Which produces higher quality prints?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is an LED printer better than a laser printer?

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

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

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

Designs don't really get more simplistic than the HP Deskjet 2710e, with its 7.6ppm 1200dpi print engine and single sheet 12-dpi A4 flatbed scanner. This is an office machine with all the bells and whistles taken off, leaving a faff-free, no frills printer.

However, the budget device is more of a home office buddy – something for little-to-medium printing requirements – despite its 'all-in-one' billing. The 2710e can get through monthly duty cycles of up to 1,000 pages, according to HP, though it's only recommended for a page volume of 50 to 100.

HP Deskjet 2710e review: Design

It's compact design is a big part of the appeal and largely the reason it's so well suited to a home office. At just 425 x 30 x 15.4cm, it is a machine small enough for a little corner or cubby hole. However, take note of the way the unit tapers; there's an extra 42 x 23cm on the end which will take up some desk space. The Deskjet 2710e is, however, one of the smallest all-in-one printers around.

Simplicity has been a hallmark of HP’s setup process over the last couple of years, and the Deskjet 2710e takes the same app-based approach as most of its recent stablemates.

The idea is that you simply turn the printer on, install the two cartridges, and then add the printer to the network from the Windows or smartphone HP Smart app. This has worked brilliantly on other HP printers we’ve tested, but with our test 2710e things fell apart.

We managed to complete the setup process after the fourth attempt – in reality, a point at which many users will have given up or assumed there was a fault with the machine. Three of our attempts were stalled by wireless disconnection at different stages of the process while using the Android version of the HP Smart app.

The same issues popped up on the Windows app on the first two attempts, despite the fact the printer was already connected to the network.

This is unfortunate given that HP highlights wireless network stability as a key feature of the printer, supporting both dual-band and automatic reset if a Wi-Fi signal is lost. While we saw some of this in action when testing the printer, it seems to be missing during the setup phase.

HP Deskjet 2710e review: Performance

You won’t be surprised to hear that the Deskjet 2710e is no speed demon. With our 24-page monochrome document, it took nearly 19 seconds for the first page to hit the output tray, with subsequent pages appearing at a rate of 9.87ppm. This improved to 15.9ppm with the print quality switched from Better to Draft, but the wait for the first page was still over 16 seconds.

Color performance is worse, with the first page taking up to 50 seconds to put in an appearance, and the page rate from there hovered around 5.7ppm. These results put the 2710e behind even its stablemate, the Deskjet 4120 – itself a fairly slow printer.

As for the print quality, it’s fine for the price but nothing more. In Better and Best quality modes you get sharp black text, but the definition isn’t as fine or as consistent as you’ll get from models further up the HP range like the Envy Inspire 7920e, while draft text is greyer with a slightly fuzzy look.

Color business graphics are punchy, but you can see slight signs of banding and dithering on gradients, while text overlaid on a blue or yellow box looks somewhat murky. The output is good enough for casual use or a quick draft for checking and proofreading purposes, but if you’re after professional-quality printing then you’re going to want to spend more.

It's a similar story for mono and colour copying. Speeds aren’t great, at around 20 seconds for a mono A4 page or 34 seconds for colour, and the reproduction is patchy in areas, with the printer delivering thicker, darker text than you’ll find in the original or struggling to match vibrant greens and reds.

The Deskjet 2710e will also print photos, though we found it touch and go working with heavier photo papers, often refusing to feed them in on the first try and waiting until we’d pulled them out and reinserted them. Photo printing speeds aren’t painfully slow, at around 80 seconds for an A5 photo or two minutes for an A4 photo print with quality set to high, but the prints themselves are more usable than impressive. 

Brighter colours reproduce quite well, but softer tones tend to look faded and you don’t get the clarity or detail you’ll find on prints from more expensive models like the Envy Inspire 7224e. The output’s good enough for a quick print of a smartphone snap, but you wouldn’t want to frame it.

As for scanning, there’s little wrong with the scans or the time taken to scan them – roughly 24 seconds for an A4 page at 300dpi. However, the lightweight lid makes it hard to scan, say, a magazine or book without keeping one hand on the lid to stop it slipping or too much light getting in.

HP Deskjet 2710e review: Is it worth it? 

For the minimal fee of £55 ($70), the 2710e is a very affordable machine, however, when it comes to printers, the upfront fee is often sullied by its long-term supply costs. The Deskjet 2710e is just $70 (£55) however HP's XL color cartridges cost £19 and £21 for black and those yield 200 pages and 240 pages respectively. That is almost 9p per black and white page and up to 20p for color.

What that suggests is that a business that is likely to print more than 50 pages per month might be better in the long run with a more expensive printer, one with cheaper running costs, such as the Epson EcoTank ET-1810.

As an alternative, you could look into an HP+ Instant Ink subscription. The Deskjet 2710e does come with a six-month subscription bundled in, however when that runs out you'll have to pay £2.99 for up to 50 pages or £4.49 per month for 100. 

HP Deskjet 2710e 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

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.

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.