PC Pro Excellence Awards 2012: laser printers

Posted on 12 Sep 2012 at 11:02

Winner: Oki

Highly Commended: Samsung, Brother

This year, we’ve divided the printers’ award into dedicated laser and inkjet categories. The burgeoning popularity of laser printers, both in small businesses and increasingly in homes, has given us enough feedback to split the award in two, and it’s laser stalwart Oki that claims the crown.

Its 97% score for print quality is the result that helped to lift Oki above the Highly Commended award-winners, Samsung and Brother. An industry-leading score of 91% for reliability secured the top slot.

Samsung offers the best value for money of any laser printer manufacturer, according to your votes, scoring 86% in that category.

There was little to separate Samsung from Brother, the winner of last year’s combined printer award, which was highly rated for reliability.

The laser printer category was one of the tightest contests in this year’s award, with only 6% separating the winner from bottom-of-

the-table Lexmark, which still scored a very creditable overall rating of 85% – a score high enough to take the award outright in several other hardware categories.

Results

How the awards are decided

The PC Pro Excellence Awards are the culmination of months of feedback from our magazine and website readers. With 20 categories and at least five questions in each one, we compile a detailed picture of the UK’s tech buying habits.

We ask our readers to rate each product or service on a number of factors, such as performance, reliability or value for money. We convert these answers to numeric values to obtain percentage scores for each category, and derive an overall score. Only companies with a significant number of votes are included.