1. Product Survey: Multifunction Printers

All-in-one, or multifunction printers, combine inkjet printing with a built-in scanner to offer color copying as well as other features. With a starting price around $50, they're a tempting offer for many lifestyles and are no longer relegated to their traditional status as home-office workhorses.

They take up a little more room on your desk, but these new all-in-one printer-copier-scanners can offer you a whole lot more than simply printing documents.

Using the same basic components and often accepting the same cartridges as single-function printers, many multifunction printers also allow you to digitize documents and copy them in your choice of black and white or color. 

Digitization, or scanning, allows you to e-mail copies of your important documents, or keep a permanent record of your written correspondence without having to file mountains of paper - store it all on your computer and recycle the originals.

More advanced models feature built-in memory card readers, allowing you to print your photos straight from your digital camera without first copying them onto your computer. Many work as fax machines too, scanning in outgoing documents and printing out incoming documents. 

Trends for 2009: WiFi

More than half of all computers in use in the world today are notebooks, and the trend for living life wirelessly won't slow. Lexmark was among the first companies to suggest ditching USB cables for printing over WiFi. Now, though, WiFi is so ubiquitous that most of the medium and high-end models we tested could print effortlessly without requiring any kind of physical connection at all.

Choosing the right all-in-one: What kind of user are you?

The most important question to ask yourself is how often you intend to use your multifunction printer: are you a frequent user, or will you most likely only have occasional needs?

• Frequent Use - several times a day
  You'll likely need a lot of cartridges, and Canon and Epson models, featuring simpler designs, are usually amongst the cheapest.

• Ocassional Use - up to a few times a week
  Here, it's the other way round: HP and Lexmark are a safer bet if you don't need to print very often.

Tips

• With Lexmark and HP, a printing head is added to the container rather than remaining part of the printer itself, making their cartridges more pricey. 

• With some lines, though, Lexmark provides pre-paid envelopes allowing their cartridges to be returned for recycling, which is a step in the right direction.

• Canon and Epson printers both regularly include a cleaning cycle which is invoked when the printer has not been used for a few days at a time. This invariably uses a lot of ink - sometimes up to a quarter of the volume of a cartridge can disappear over its working life cleaning the nozzles.  HP and Lexmark avoid this problem by making the printing head part of the cartridge itself, which gets replaced every time you change it.

Our Tests

We tested all of these multifunction printers for regular office printing on A4 paper, with both color and black and white documents, and did the same for 4 x 6-inch photo prints. You can see the all-in-ones that we've reviewed so far below.