Small Office All in One Laser Printer Reviews
The enquiry
- Why you should trust us
- Who should get this
- How we picked
- How nosotros tested
- Our pick: HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e
- Flaws merely not dealbreakers
- A budget option: Brother MFC-J805DW
- Upgrade choice: HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw
- What well-nigh ink-tank printers?
- The competition
Why you lot should trust us
Wirecutter has been testing all-in-one printers since 2012, and I've personally been covering the beat for the amend function of four years. Collectively, nosotros've spent a ridiculous number of hours researching models, squinting at test documents, eyeing stopwatches, and fiddling with menus. In addition to our own testing, we've polled readers and gathered feedback from comment sections. In short, we've done a lot of legwork to acquire nigh what people want in a printer.
Who should get this
To figure out if an all-in-1 is correct for yous, ask yourself a few questions:
- Exercise you need to impress oftentimes but not all day, every day? Something like 100 to 500 pages per calendar month? If so, the inkjet AIOs below should be perfect. But if yous print all the time, curl downwardly to our upgrade pick or consider upgrading to an enterprise-grade machine. If y'all don't print much, choose a monochrome laser printer and a adept scanning app. (Or, if you're not stuck at home in lockdown, forget the printer completely and just use the ane at work, the library, or your local FedEx store.)
- How frequently do you browse? If yous both impress and scan more than a few times a month or routinely need to scan both sides of a page, having an AIO is probably worth it. But if you don't scan much, you can look for a inexpensive print-only machine and a adept scanning app.
- Do you often print in color or want to print the occasional glossy photo? If so, one of the picks below will work best. But if you lot don't, a blackness-and-white laser AIO might save you lot some money.
As the questions above suggest, color inkjet AIOs aren't the best choice for anybody. If you admittedly need your own printer but don't frequently browse, copy, or fax and don't need to print in color, monochrome laser printers are almost always a better choice for irregular usage. Inkjets have been known to dry and clog if they sit idle for also long between uses, and to go them going once again y'all need to run cleaning cycles that waste ink and drive upward your operating costs. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation printers can sit unused for weeks or even months on end with no downside. (If you do demand to scan and copy and don't mind paying a petty more for laser reliability, we also have recommendations for monochrome light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation and colour laser AIOs.)
If photo and scan quality are critically important to you, an AIO probably won't cut information technology. We accept recommendations for photo printers and document scanners if you lot need better operation for those specific tasks.
A few years ago, nosotros declared that all printers suck. That's withal true—even the best ones available today aren't a joy to utilize. But with a few advances, printer makers have inspired some guarded promise for the hereafter. They've developed cost-saving ink-subscription services that take the pain out of keeping printers topped up (and keep a steady stream of income flowing into manufacturers' pockets). They've too introduced more models with large ink reservoirs that don't need to exist refilled as oftentimes. Wireless connections can nonetheless be flaky, just they're getting better: HP and Canon have finally adopted 5 GHz Wi-Fi, and HP is ad "self-healing" wireless connections, pregnant the printers observe connection issues and attempt to resolve them automatically or provide guided troubleshooting rather than just tossing upward an indecipherable error bulletin. And mobile printing apps are improving all the time, reflecting smartphones' increasing dominance over PCs.
Despite ongoing quality concerns, AIOs remain pop because they're a one-end shop for abode document product needs. A midrange inkjet AIO makes a lot of sense for anyone who prints or copies on a daily ground, scans documents from fourth dimension to time, and maybe even needs to fax on occasion. Colour laser AIOs have come down in price since we started roofing them, but in general they remain far more expensive than inkjets. Though AIOs are jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none, they as well represent the most economical way to accost all of the certificate production needs a home or pocket-sized business might have.
How nosotros picked
We set out to detect a printer with all the essential features for home and dwelling-role use that won't price you an arm and a leg. Hither's what we looked at to detect the all-time of the best.
- Printer type: The perfect AIO is probably an inkjet, as laser printers are still too expensive for near people. Still, nosotros did test color laser all-in-ones so that we could recommend a machine for more demanding small-business owners and home users who only don't want to bargain with the frustrations that can come up with inkjet ownership.
- Automatic certificate feeder: A great AIO should feature an automated document feeder (ADF), because information technology can automate large scanning and copying jobs to save y'all time.
- Duplex printing, scanning, and copying: Two-sided (duplex) printing is a must-have, and if an AIO tin can print both sides in a single pass, all the better. Printers that offering single-pass duplex print, scan, and copy are the holy grail.
- Low operating toll: Ink or toner for black-and-white prints shouldn't toll more than a few cents per folio, and colour prints shouldn't be more than iii or four times as much. If manufacturers offering a subscription ink plan, we take that into account also.
- Splendid impress and scan quality: Although we think most modern printers produce adept-quality results, some generate slightly sharper text, more accurate colors, or better-looking photos. All else existence equal, we'll have the printer with the best impress quality. And the same goes for scanners, where we consider both overall scan quality and how direct the ADFs manage to continue bulk scanning jobs.
- Support for mobile impress standards: Any printer being offered today should support smartphone and tablet press protocols like Google Cloud Print, Apple AirPrint, and Mopria.
- Convenient, usable apps: The best printers offering full-featured apps that brand information technology like shooting fish in a barrel to print from and scan to only nigh whatever kind of device, including smartphones and tablets.
- High printing and scanning speed: While printer makers like to trumpet their models' blazing-fast print speeds, we think speed is 1 of the least important traits for dwelling house employ. That's not to say that speed isn't important—information technology's just not every bit crucial equally the stuff we've listed above.
- Good looks: This may sound featherbrained on the surface, just we prefer overnice-looking printers. Obviously, function matters way more than than form for office machines, but unless you're squirreling your printer away under your desk, you're going to be looking at information technology every day for years to come up. It might as well be pleasant to view.
How we tested
To make sure we deemed for all kinds of people and needs, we tested these printers under every bit many conditions as possible. Nosotros set up them up using Windows and Mac computers, as well every bit Android and iOS phones. We positioned them every bit far as possible from the router to examination the strength and reliability of their Wi-Fi connection and did most of our testing wirelessly considering that's how about people print these days.
Since setup is often the nigh frustrating role of printer buying, nosotros were especially critical of installer packages, impress-and-browse software, connectivity issues, and the mobile app quality. We ran through just about every option in the on-device menus to root out any showstopping firmware flaws and pain points that might emerge through extended use.
Nosotros were more critical of these bug because the truth is that near printers part just fine—it's getting the chore to kickoff that'southward the hard part. But some machines practise impress (and scan) better than others. We tackled a variety of text- and graphics-heavy documents to assess print quality and speed. With the inkjets, we also printed several colorful, glossy shots to examination photo quality. Finally, we scanned the documents we printed to examination each machine's ability to capture the fine details of each kind of print.
Paper handling is of import, also, so we ran large print jobs to cheque for jams and slowdowns caused by overtaxed onboard retention. We scanned those large documents via the automatic certificate feeder (ADF) to make sure each car grabbed a single sheet each time and didn't crumple or skew the results while pulling sheets through.
As we lived with and used the printers, nosotros kept our eyes on other stuff that we didn't formally exam, such every bit build quality, noise, and warm-up times. We checked each machine for firmware updates (they all needed them out of the box) and made sure we could apply them over Wi-Fi. Nosotros listened for annoying noises that would wake u.s.a. up in the night. The goal hither was to decide whether nosotros would want these machines to be permanent houseguests.
Finally, we tested ink and toner subscription services, where available, to see how reliable the shipping was and how easy the subscription was to manage and cancel. And when testing ink-tank-style printers, we took note of how easy it was to fill up the ink reservoirs (when necessary) and did calculations to see how their long-term cost of ownership stacked upwardly against the cost of machines that came with less ink in the box.
Our option: HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e
Our pick
HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e
The best all-in-i printer
Easy-to-utilize software, affordable ink, a long warranty, and plenty of thoughtful touches make this all-in-ane less annoying than the competition. Results look sharp, too.
Ownership Options
*At the time of publishing, the cost was $230 .
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e isn't HP'south most powerful inkjet all-in-1, simply it is the all-time one for almost people. Information technology's remarkably piece of cake to set up and apply, striking the sweet spot of speed, print quality, and reliability in a fashion that other printers can't match. Its running costs are a reasonable 2.2¢ per folio for printing in black or 8.ix¢ for colour, with the option to join HP'due south Instant Ink program for prepare-and-forget refills and cheaper colour printing. (A six-month trial of Instant Ink is included in the box, so you lot can come across if it works for you.) This printer'due south sleek design helps it stand out from stodgy-looking competitors, which is about enough to make united states forgive its tiny touchscreen and flimsy output tray. And we capeesh the two-year warranty, which is double what most manufacturers offering for printers in this grade.
The OfficeJet Pro 9015e has the easiest setup process of any printer nosotros've tested, a trait it shares with its OfficeJet stablemates. To go it upwards and running, visit 123.hp.com, enter the product name, and hit the download button to learn HP's EasyStart installer. The installer walks you through getting the AIO continued, registered, and working with your figurer, usually in around 10 minutes or less. The process is smooth and modernistic plenty that it makes other brands' comparably clunky installers feel incomparably last-generation. From your smartphone, yous can download the HP Smart app (Android and iOS) and add the printer in just a couple of steps. Information technology'southward totally painless.
The 9015e comes with enough ink in the box for roughly 850 black-and-white pages or 420 colour pages. Depending on your usage, that could last you a while. But when information technology comes fourth dimension to re-up, running costs are user-friendly: A full gear up of HP 962 Twoscore ink cartridges costs you most $150 and lasts for approximately two,000 monochrome pages or 1,600 colour. Deport in listen that these estimates are based on the stated page yields for each cartridge type; your existent-world results are probable to differ due to the ink that gets wasted during cleaning cycles. Alternatively, y'all could opt for third-party ink, which is substantially cheaper just may not produce perfect results, particularly on glossy photos.
Of class, HP also offers its Instant Ink subscription service, which lets you choose between several tiers based on how much you wait to print each month, from l to 700 pages. With Instant Ink the cost per page is reasonable—six.half dozen¢ at worst and 3.6¢ at best—just the cracking affair about the plan is that press colour pages costs the aforementioned as printing in black. When your ink runs low, the service automatically ships new cartridges. Unused pages roll over, up to three times your plan amount, and if you burn through your allotted pages (and your rollover) in a given month, extra "sets" of x to 15 pages price $1 each. You lot can besides change your subscription tier whenever yous similar, if your needs modify. Currently, the 9015e comes with a 6-month free trial of Instant Ink, and you can get more gratuitous months by referring friends.
Using the OfficeJet Pro 9015e is a generally stress-free feel. An on-screen keyboard makes it trivially easy to connect to Wi-Fi, and throughout our testing the connection remained stable even though the printer was positioned a floor above and about xl linear feet away from the router. Like other recent HP printers, the 9015e works on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, and HP says it includes "self-healing" wireless: The company says the printer automatically detects connectivity bug and attempts to reconnect to your wireless network, resets its wireless connection if it'southward unable to reconnect, and finally provides guided, contextual troubleshooting if the self-healing is unsuccessful. In our testing, the self-healing was never necessary, but it'southward dainty to know the feature is at that place.
Though you can employ the arrangement dialog to print in both macOS and Windows, the HP Smart software suite is surprisingly useful. It lets you lot check ink levels, social club replacement ink, arrange settings remotely, and admission the printer'south Embedded Web Server—a command panel designed for power users. It's a significant improvement over the command-center apps that other printer manufacturers (specially Brother and Canon) employ, where a central app launches a disruptive fleet of specialized sub-apps. In HP's all-in-i approach, few functions are more than than a click or two away.
The OfficeJet Pro'south 9015e's print prowess is on betoken. In our tests, text came out dark, and it was abrupt and readable down to nearly four points with most fonts. Graphics were crisp and vibrant on default settings. The printer has an optional Best quality setting, simply in our testing its results weren't noticeably better than those of the default Normal for everyday print jobs; use it for glossy photos, but skip information technology when press book reports. Speaking of photos, our borderless 8½-by-11-inch glossies looked fantastic. Colors skewed slightly bluer and prints showed more contrast than in the source photos, but they looked great on the refrigerator. Unless you're a serious hobbyist or a professional photographer, there's probably no need to invest in a separate photo printer. (Merely if you are ane of those people, we accept recommendations for you, besides.)
The 9015e is plenty fast for just well-nigh anyone who plans to apply it in a habitation or home-office setting. HP rates it at upwardly to 22 pages per minute with black-and-white documents or 18 ppm for colour. In our testing, information technology got pretty close: With a text-only Word document, we saw xix.6 ppm single-sided. Switching to PDF documents, nosotros saw the typical drop-off in speed, to 15 ppm in monochrome and eleven.five ppm in color. (These figures include the lag time betwixt our hitting the print button on our computer and the printer feeding the outset sail.) Printing 2-sided documents slowed things to 12.viii ppm with Give-and-take files and ten ppm with PDFs, which is all the same just fine.
Scanning was similarly brisk at nine.5 ppm, single sided, from the 35-sheet automatic document feeder. Duplex scanning dipped to 4.v ppm, though, mostly considering the ADF had to pull each sheet through twice to scan both sides. If you have more demanding needs, consider a machine that tin handle single-pass duplex scanning, such as our light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation upgrade pick.
In our testing, the 9015e's paper handling was nearly flawless. It dealt with both full and well-nigh empty trays, didn't cramp at scanning crumpled newspaper, and never grabbed two pages when it was supposed to take hold of ane. Our scans from the ADF fifty-fifty came out almost completely straight, a surprising rarity amongst printers we've tested. (It is possible that scans volition become less direct over time, and you have to babysit the guides to brand sure they're tight against the paper.) Similar other electric current HP models, the 9015e features slide-off scanner glass; all this means is that there'due south no raised lip around the front end edge of the platen glass, and then you tin more hands remove single-page scans. It's a piddling tweak but a thoughtful one.
We prefer the clean, sharp, and modernistic look of the OfficeJet Pro 9015e to the bulbous blueprint of the previous generation of OfficeJet machines. That'due south maxim something, since the 8700 Series printers were already a pace or two ahead of the competition in the looks department. Aesthetics are less than a tertiary concern when it comes to office equipment, but if your printer is going to alive in your home office for at least a couple of years, why not option one that'due south easier on the eyes? The 9015e is also much less bulky and weighs twoscore% less than our previous pick, the OfficeJet Pro 8720, which folks in cramped offices will appreciate.
The 9015e is 1 of the first HP printers to come with the choice of HP+. This opt-in printing ecosystem includes a new connected deject that detects and fixes connectivity issues, smart security functionality to head off malware attacks, native in-Bone printing, the option to release sensitive documents only once you're at the printer, and a "Wood First" feature that claims to offset the ecology price of every folio you lot print. We haven't yet tested these features, but nosotros plan to practice so in the coming months.
In terms of hardware, the OfficeJet Pro 9015e is identical to the now-discontinued OfficeJet Pro 9015, our former top option. If you don't intendance near the to a higher place-listed HP+ software and deject features, if you lot can live with a i-year warranty, and if you don't mind getting a shorter trial of Instant Ink (or don't want to utilise it at all), go along an center out for deals on remaining 9015 stock. Yous might exist able to detect a nice bargain.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The OfficeJet Pro 9015e'southward biggest shortcoming is probably its single 250-sheet paper tray. Although that's a standard size for a dwelling printer, it may exist less than what some home and home-business concern users desire. Since there'due south only one tray, yous need to manually swap out your plain letter paper whenever you need to impress on something else—whether information technology'southward legal, labels, glossy photo stock, or résumé paper. If you print on at to the lowest degree two types of paper on a daily basis, yous'd exist improve off looking at a dual-tray printer like the OfficeJet Pro 9025e.
We're less than enamored with HP's dinky slide-and-fold output tray, which extends out of the front of the printer. One of the best things about the OfficeJet Pro 8720, our previous pick, was that it had a self-contained output tray backside its huge touchscreen display; the upshot was that your documents were less likely to fall out and stop up strewn near your office floor. Non so with the new model.
Speaking of displays, the 9015e's is on the small side at only ii.7 inches. It works fine, but the limited existent estate does go far hard to hit the smallest on-screen buttons, such as the gear icon that takes you to the Settings card. Be prepared for a few frustrating mis-taps.
The USB port on the left side of the motorcar is prissy to accept in a printer at this cost, but potential buyers should be aware that you lot can print but JPEGs and PDFs through information technology—Give-and-take files are a no-go. You tin of grade salvage scans to a USB drive as JPEGs and PDFs, as well.
The OfficeJet Pro 9015e is capable of producing perfectly decent snapshot prints, with excellent sharpness and vibrant color. Only thing is, those colors aren't perfectly accurate. In our test prints, glossy photos from the 9015e skewed slightly blue and magenta and displayed overaggressive contrast. This isn't the sort of shortcoming that's probable to carp you lot if yous're making prints only to put on the fridge, just if you're an avid lensman, you'll probably prefer to purchase a dedicated photograph printer.
Like most inkjets, in duplex mode the 9015e pauses between sides in order to permit the ink on the first side dry out before continuing to the second. All the same, the 9015e (and other models in the electric current OfficeJet Pro series) seem to take a longer pause than other printers we tested. Speed is an overhyped business for home printer use, merely staring at the "Ink drying, please wait" message gets to be a fleck of a drag, especially with large print jobs.
A budget pick: Brother MFC-J805DW
Upkeep option
The Blood brother MFC-J805DW is a true upkeep pick: Its price is outstanding, but everything else virtually it is merely skilful enough. Nonetheless, finding a cheap printer that'due south across-the-board good enough is tougher than it sounds. For people who tin't beget to spend big—and who don't have big productivity demands—the MFC-J805DW's combo of a low up-front price, cheap running costs, and bang-up impress quality more than make upwardly for its ambling pace, old-school button-driven control scheme, and limited features.
Here'south the bargain: The MFC-J805DW typically retails for effectually $120 and comes with ane,080 pages' worth of blackness ink and 720 pages' worth of color in the box. That'due south not quite up to the lofty standards of a true ink-tank-manner printer, only compare it with the 265 monochrome and 310 colour pages that come with the similarly priced HP OfficeJet Pro 8025e, and yous begin to understand how generous Brother's offering really is. A new set of ultra-high-yield cartridges for the MFC-J805DW usually costs near $240 but includes enough ink for half-dozen,000 pages printed in black and 5,000 pages in colour. That math works out to less than ane¢ per page for monochrome and iv.vii¢ per folio for colour. Aside from ink-tank-style printers, which we generally don't honey, we had trouble finding other printers that could vanquish those numbers.
The print quality is great, as well. In our tests, text was dark and abrupt, though fonts under almost 6 points tended to go a bit blocky, making them tough to read. Graphics popped, if not with quite the aforementioned vibrance equally we'd get from HP'southward ink. Though the MFC-J805DW is non capable of borderless press, it tin can produce respectable glossy photos with excellent sharpness and more realistic saturation and dissimilarity than in HP's amped-up output. We did notice a slightly warm, green cast to the colors, however, which might irk particularly precipitous-eyed photographers. For most people, the results are fine for coincidental framing or fridge display.
Blood brother's installer immediately lets you know this is an old-school printer. The installer itself looks and operates similar something from the Windows XP era, and information technology installs (if you let information technology, and specially on Windows PCs) a whole raft of "helper" applications that clutter your system tray. That said, we nonetheless had no trouble getting the MFC-J805DW online and printing. The machine'south array of big safety buttons are really easy to apply, and the non-touch color LCD is small but gets the job done. Inbound our Wi-Fi password with the phone-way keypad was slightly more than annoying than using the HP 9015e's touchscreen QWERTY keyboard, but with any luck it'south something you'll take to do simply once.
Mobile printing worked just fine, either through the Brother iPrint&Scan app for Android and iOS or the Brother Print Service Plugin (Android) and AirPrint (iOS). The mobile app allows press from Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and OneDrive, or lets you select documents and photos stored locally on your device. Although you can't use it to scan direct to those services, you tin can share scans to whatever compatible app on your phone using the Android and iOS share menus. Google Cloud Print is easy to set up but requires a trip into the printer'southward Web control panel, which—like nigh Brother software—isn't specially convenient or aesthetically pleasing.
The MFC-J805DW lags behind the OfficeJet Pro 9015e in nearly every performance metric, though we expected that given the price divergence and the huge amount of ink Blood brother includes in the box. In our print speed tests, the MFC-J805DW recorded a poky 10.2 pages per infinitesimal with an all-text Word doc, and 8.five ppm and 4.5 ppm with monochrome and color PDFs, respectively. With two-sided content, those numbers dipped, in order, to three.eight, 3.ane, and two.eight ppm. That's really quite slow. Sleeky photos took a particularly long time to print (remember minutes, not seconds), just given how infrequently most people impress glossies, the wait probably isn't a huge deal—just walk away and get a cup of coffee. The MFC-J805DW scanned at about half-dozen.v ppm with unmarried-sided documents, and like many budget printers, information technology doesn't practise duplex scanning unless you're willing to manually flip your pages.
The MFC-J805DW has a few other contrasted shortcomings you'll need to deal with if you want to have reward of its cheap, cheap ink. First, the paper tray and ADF designs are annoying. You take to remove the whole newspaper tray (the height of which doubles as the output tray) to refill it. Similarly, paper that the ADF spits out during scanning or copying lands directly on the stack that's being fed in, and the resulting friction can crusade a mess. 2d, the car has no port for press or scanning from a USB flash bulldoze. Third, the only bachelor browse-to-electronic mail function uses third-party e-mail servers (from Brother and Amazon), making it less secure than browse-to-email apps from HP and others that apply SMTP to send email straight from your own account (whether it's Gmail or some other provider). This probably isn't a huge business concern if you're, say, scanning your art projects, merely it might be worrying for people who frequently browse personal documents like taxes and medical forms.
We appreciate that the MFC-J805DW comes with a 2-year warranty, which is double what most domicile-use printers offering. (It just makes sense, though, since most people are unlikely to burn down through the huge supply of included ink before the starting time twelvemonth is up.)
Upgrade selection: HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw
Upgrade choice
If you lot run a business organization, you probably aren't interested in dealing with the headaches that come up with inkjet all-in-one ownership—y'all just need your print and browse (and maybe even fax) jobs to get done. You may also demand features that more than casual inkjet AIO users don't: faster print and scan speeds, single-pass duplexing, a bypass tray for 1-off printing on odd-size media, improved security, and multiple user profiles. That's where a great color laser all-in-i like the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw comes in.
The M479fdw is expensive, just it notwithstanding ranks amidst the well-nigh affordable color laser printers that offer all the aforementioned productivity features as our favorite inkjet model. It'due south fast, reliable, and capable of producing cute documents, whether press in color or in blackness just. In our testing, it cranked out a single-sided Discussion document at around 24.1 pages per minute and slowed merely to 21.8 ppm with duplex docs. Unmarried-sided scan jobs flew past at xix.5 ppm, more than than 6 ppm faster than on whatsoever other printer we tested, while duplex jobs clocked at a rate of 16.7 ppm per sheet (which works out to 32.5 ppm per folio).
This printer produces sharper text at small font sizes than any inkjet we've tested, which may be of import if you lot demand to print a lot of legal documents. Its graphics are also crisper—if a touch less saturated—than what y'all'd get out of a printer like the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e. The M479fdw spools up faster than nigh inkjets, and its recommended duty bicycle of 4,000 pages per calendar month—near triple the OfficeJet Pro 9015e's ane,500 pages—should be plenty for fifty-fifty the busiest home office and could satisfy many small businesses with multiple employees.
Information technology has other features that businesses will appreciate, too, such every bit a foldout bypass paper tray for one-off print jobs on different paper sizes. Although the slide-off scanner drinking glass is big plenty for only letter paper, the automated certificate feeder can handle legal-size documents. The USB port is capable of printing JPEGs, PDFs, and Word files, and it can also save scans equally PDFs, JPEGs, or TIFF files.
The M479fdw is more secure than other printers we tested, inkjet and laser alike. Information technology features secure boot, firmware integrity, and runtime code integrity to ensure that the printer is drastically less likely to be hijacked by bad actors. (It sounds absurd, but it has happened.) The machine too allows for PIN-encrypted print jobs, so you can brand certain no ane else is intercepting your documents. And there'southward role-based access control for multiuser environments, so you lot can choose who tin admission which printer features. If your work involves sensitive material, these are legitimately helpful additions—and features that yous can't become from other manufacturers.
The M479fdw is cheap to run, merely despite popular myth, the toner isn't less expensive than ink for similarly featured AIOs. Per-page prices for the M479fdw hover effectually 2.3¢ for printing in black and 14¢ for color, higher than the costs for either the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e or the Brother MFC-J805DW. The up-front end cost to supersede all of the toner cartridges comes close to an eye-popping $880. Still, the real-world costs might not exist then different. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation printers waste only a tiny bit of toner, while inkjets can squander a lot of ink depending on how many cleaning cycles they have to run. With a laser printer, the advertised cost is the maximum y'all're likely to pay, while the stated cost per page for an inkjet is the bare minimum you have to pay. (At least HP has done you the favor hither of finally making duplex printing the default, then you save a fleck on paper costs.)
Since laser printers can't print on photo paper, sleeky prints are out of the question. If y'all want to print photos on a regular ground, y'all also need to buy a split photograph printer or simply settle for an inkjet AIO.
HP's 1-year warranty for the M479fdw is shorter than what some rivals offering—Canon in particular provides a three-year guarantee on its machines—just the coverage may actually exist improve. That's because the HP warranty provides on-site service inside one business organisation day, while other makers crave you to ship your printer to a service center, sometimes at your ain cost.
What near ink-tank printers?
In recent years, printer manufacturers take begun to offering a blazon of printer that comes with huge amounts of ink in the box—usually in bottles that you must inject into reservoirs inside the machine. These printers tend to cost more up front than non-ink-tank models while likewise delivering fewer features. Information technology's that lack of features that has kept us from investigating these models more than thoroughly in the by.
However, these machines evangelize prints at an especially low cost per page—think fractions of a cent for both blackness-and-white and color pages, compared with 2¢ to 10¢ per folio for typical inkjets. We've heard enough requests from our readers to know that there's a existent thirst for printers that provide cheap ink, so we recently decided that we ought to see what they're all about.
We chosen in three particularly promising ink-tank-fashion printers: the Brother MFC-J6545DW, Canon Pixma G7020, and Epson EcoTank ET-4760. Nosotros put these machines through the aforementioned battery of tests that nosotros ran on our other AIOs, and we also evaluated their long-term cost of operation compared with that of our existing picks.
Despite their attractive per-print costs, we can't recommend whatsoever of these machines. We found them to be short on important features and more difficult to work with than our picks. All had some combination of notable printing or scanning flaws, surprisingly slow printing and scanning, or poor user interfaces. And although they're cheaper to operate in the long run than our other inkjet picks, we think many people wouldn't use plenty of the included ink to make the higher upward-front end cost worth it.
Only if you're already dead set on an ink-tank model—and if y'all await to print a lot more than the average person—we liked the Epson EcoTank ET-4760 all-time of the models we tested. Let's talk value first: Although the ET-4760 has the highest up-front cost of the group ($500), it comes with 7,500 pages' worth of black ink and half dozen,000 pages' worth of color ink in the box. (A full set of replacement ink costs $60 and delivers the same number of pages.) Our tiptop pick, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e, comes with just 850 pages' worth of black and 420 pages' worth of color ink in the box, and its largest replacement cartridges incorporate a comparably paltry 2,000 black and 1,600 colour pages at a much higher $150 replacement toll.
The ET-4760 is pocket-size, lite, and like shooting fish in a barrel to set upwardly and get on Wi-Fi. We appreciated its leakproof ink bottles, which made filling the internal reservoirs much less of a messy thing than it was with the Canon Pixma G7020. The ET-4760 also has a great touchscreen interface (albeit with a very minor display), reasonably quick printing (up to 12.7 pages per infinitesimal in our testing), decent print quality, and functional (if dated-looking) apps. And it produced the truest and virtually attractive sleeky photos of the bunch, which is key if you plan to use its abundance of ink to fill out your frames.
Merely it has considerable drawbacks. Compared with the results from our tiptop pick, the print quality was a letdown: Blackness text was slightly washed out, visible alignment problems cropped upward even afterward we ran the printer's correction routines, and we observed obvious banding in solid-colored areas. Although the ET-4760 was faster than some other ink-tank printers, it was all the same much slower than the HP 9015e in both printing and scanning, and multi-folio scans from the ADF had an odd pinkish streak down one side of the page. Like all of the other ink-tank models we tested, information technology can't browse two-sided documents, either. The printer's build quality, while better than that of the other ink-tank models nosotros tested, was nonetheless flimsy in comparison with most other inkjets.
If yous can alive with those shortcomings, this printer will serve you well and pump out reasonably good-looking prints at an extremely low price. Its two-yr warranty (extended from i year if you register your auto) is a overnice bit of extra balls that it volition run for equally long as yous accept to get through your ink stockpile.
The competition
Inkjet all-in-ones
The HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e performs very much similar the OfficeJet Pro 9015e—only a little quicker in most tests. The simply thing that sets it autonomously is that it has two newspaper trays, which means you don't have to bandy out your stock if you want to go back and forth between, say, part documents and glossy photos. That'southward definitely nice to accept but non worth an extra $100, in our opinion.
We as well considered the HP OfficeJet Pro 8025e, a budget competitor to the Brother MFC-J805DW. We ultimately dismissed it considering it costs substantially more to run, at 3.6¢ per folio for printing with blackness ink or 12¢ for color, using the largest ink tanks. It too includes a paltry 265 pages of ink in the box, compared with the MFC-J805DW'due south two,250 pages. Finally, we saw some impress performance issues in our testing, with the 8025 leaving banding in solid-colored areas of photos.
The HP Envy Photo 7855 is in the same price range as the Brother MFC-J805DW and HP 8025e merely is more photo-oriented and less focused on productivity. It'due south smaller and lighter, as well, only its cost per page is far higher, its print and re-create speeds are slower, and its newspaper handling is less advanced.
The Canon Maxify MB5120 is well-liked past professional reviewers, has a solid customer rating on the major e-commerce sites, and—on paper, at least—has the specs to take the fight to HP'due south 9015e. In practice, all the same, the MB5120 didn't do much to win us over. Setup was a comparatively grueling matter, and browse quality was relatively poor. It can exercise single-pass duplex scanning and impress PDFs and Word files through the front USB port. But we think that for well-nigh people, the HP machine's superior usability will greatly outweigh this Catechism model's few advantages.
Ink-tank-style inkjet all-in-ones
The Canon Pixma G7020 printer lives up to its MegaTank billing. It delivers a whopping 18,000 black and 7,700 color pages in the box for a typical price of $330, and its refills are a little cheaper than the Epson ET-4760'due south at merely $55 or and so per set up. But the low upward-front cost and impressively cheap prints aren't worth dealing with the interminably dull print and scan speeds or the fiddly, button-driven user interface.
Like the MFC-J805DW we recommend, the Blood brother MFC-J6545DW is 1 of the company's INKvestment Tank printers. That ways it comes with an unusually large amount of ink for a cartridge-based inkjet—nosotros estimate ii,160 pages of blackness ink and i,440 pages of color, based on Brother's formula. Even so, that's still much less ink than what yous arrive the bottles that come with the other ink-tank models nosotros tested, and Blood brother's refills (which include 6,000 pages of black ink and five,000 pages of color) cost almost v times every bit much as Canon's and Epson'southward. Even though it's not the best value, it's still cheaper on a per-folio ground than the HP 9015e, and it'southward a good printer overall. Nosotros liked its large touchscreen display, its power to print and scan 11-by-17-inch documents, and its speedy printing and scanning. The print and scan quality were very good, too, though similar other ink-tank printers we've tested it can't scan or re-create ii-sided pages.
The Brother MFC-J995DW, another INKvestment Tank model, comes with ane,080 pages' worth of black ink and 720 pages' worth of color ink in the box, and the cost per page for refills is pretty low at ane.i¢ for monochrome and 5.half dozen¢ for color. In testing, nosotros liked the MFC-J995DW'southward output but found that its impress speed was too slow, its paper tray and ADF were too pocket-size, and its duplexing capabilities were besides limited for it to compete with similarly priced models.
Colour laser all-in-ones
Catechism's Color ImageClass MF743Cdw and the company's slightly less powerful MF644Cdw printed and scanned beautifully and apace, but we found them much more difficult to work with than the HP M479fdw due to their clunky UI, resistive touchscreen, and outdated PC and Mac software. We besides had issues getting the printers to accept a properly formatted USB thumb drive, which seems like a thing that shouldn't exist hard to get right.
The Blood brother MFC-L3770CDW is a color LED all-in-1, which means information technology'due south similar to a traditional color laser printer merely uses a strip of LEDs rather than a moving light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation beam to low-cal upwardly the drum. In theory, that makes it more reliable, since it has fewer moving parts. But when we tested it, the MFC-L3770CDW couldn't keep up with our laser AIO pick at the time, the HP M477fdw, in either usability or raw operation. Its resistive touchscreen wasn't as responsive, we had problems with the iPrint&Scan software freezing on our MacBook during multipage scan jobs, and it took nearly twice as long to print two-sided documents. Nosotros don't see whatever reason information technology would fare better against our new upgrade option, the HP M479fdw.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-all-in-one-printer/
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