Lab

Inkjet MFPs

Single-function inkjet printers might be a dying breed, but the quality and variety of multifunction peripherals (MFPs) has been growing by the month. This isn't surprising, as for only slightly more than the price of a single-function device you can get an MFP that scans, copies, and prints documents and photos. Most have PictBridge or memory card support for printing photos directly from digital cameras, and some can print on CDs or send faxes. While MFPs may once have been expensive and over-complicated, many now cost less than a single-function inkjet and can produce outstanding results.

This month we've tested nine of the latest MFPs from a variety of manufacturers and at a range of prices. Whether you want to equip your home office, produce colour newsletters and brochures or simply print your holiday snaps, read on to find the best MFP for your needs.

Inkjet multifunction peripherals (MFPs), also known as multifunction printers or all-in-ones, have become the most popular choice for home printing. They combine the functions of an inkjet printer with an integrated scanner, and most have a range of memory card slots. Some MFPs can even send faxes. Which MFP you choose depends largely on what you will use it for.

Text and graphics

While all nine MFPs can print documents and photos, scan and make mono and colour copies, not all are equally fit for every task. If you're buying an MFP for a home office, your priorities are likely to be print and copy speed, and you may want an integrated fax machine. High-quality photo printing is unlikely to be as important. Three of the MFPs in this month's Labs can send faxes, and a couple of others can produce quality prints at high speed and low cost.

All three fax MFPs have an automatic document feeder (ADF), which takes between 10 and 35 pages. This is vital for sending multi-page faxes, and makes the task of copying large documents easier. A duplexer is also helpful if you want to save paper or create professional-looking double-sided leaflets, although only one of the MFPs in the Labs has one as standard.

The most expensive MFP in the group is designed for creative projects that need high-end photo printing and scanning, but you can buy one with great all-round performance for under £80. Photo print cartridges are available for some of the devices, but only Epson's Stylus Photo RX685 comes with six separate colour cartridges as standard. Canon's PIXMA MP610 has both a pigment black cartridge for text and a dye-based black for photos. Printers that have only a pigment black and dye-based cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges print photos with a black made by mixing the three colours.

Whatever you print, running costs will be a key factor. Many manufacturers produce high-yield versions of their ink cartridges, which are usually much better value. We've calculated the cost of printing mono and colour pages by dividing the cost of the most economical cartridges available by the number of pages the manufacturer says they'll print. The results are in our table and benchmarks on pages 106 and 107. Cartridges can run down quickly, so it's worth picking up an extra set when you buy your printer.

Multifocal peripheral

All the MFPs in the group have scanners that can produce reasonable results from a 300dpi document scan. If you plan to do something more intensive than simple faxing, copying and document archiving, you'll need a high-resolution scanner with good optical quality. Scanner resolution is measured in dots per inch (dpi), and the higher your scan resolution, the more detail you can capture from a small area. However, this level of detail is of no use if the scanner can't focus accurately. We've tested all the scanners in the group to let you know which can produce the sharpest scans and which can't cope with more than the most basic imaging.

High-resolution scanning takes longer and requires more disk space than lower-quality imaging. All the scanners in the group produced scans fairly quickly at resolutions of less than 1,200dpi, although Lexmark's X6570 took a minute to complete our 600dpi photo scan. At 1,200dpi, the results were more varied. Brother's DCP-135C performed a 1,200dpi scan in just 19 seconds, but the quality was indistinguishable from that of scans it made at lower resolutions. None of the scanners in the group has a backlight that allows them to scan negatives and slides, so if you need to do that, you'll have to invest in a dedicated scanner.

Making the connection

The only MFP that comes with a USB cable in the box is Lexmark's X6570, which requires it to set up wireless networking. For the others, you'll need a USB A-B cable before you can connect the device to your PC, although Brother's MFC-465CN can also print over a network.

Even when they're not connected to a PC, all the MFPs in the group can make photocopies and print photos directly from a digital camera that supports the common PictBridge USB standard. Some have even more standalone functions. All the MFPs with memory card readers can print images directly from the cards they support, and both the Brother printers and HP's C5280 can scan directly to USB flash drives or supported memory cards.

To make the most of these devices, you'll need suitable software. As well as drivers, all the printers in the Labs come with simple image-editing packages, but not all of them come with optical character recognition (OCR) software, which converts scanned documents into text files that you can edit in a word processor.