By Christine Frietchen on January 12, 2010 in
If you are shopping for a multifunction printer -- one that scans, copies, prints and faxes -- you used to have to choose between a business model (which was better at document printing) and a photo model (which was better at photos, but so-so on business documents). With the latest batch of multifunction printers, you no longer have to make a big compromise.
Case in point: The HP Photosmart Premium Fax C309 (*Est. $200) tries to cram just about every function consumers might want into one inkjet MFP. The Photosmart Premium Fax scans, prints, faxes and copies; it can print directly from USB flash drives, Bluetooth, PictBridge-compatible cameras and memory cards, and it displays photo previews on an adjustable 2.4-inch LCD. There's a duplexer (for automatically printing on both sides of the page) for both input and output, and an input tray for printing onto special CDs and DVDs. What's more, reviewers say both text and photo output is great for the price. It's also setup for wireless networking -- and reviews report that getting it to work on your Wi-Fi network is actually easy. The downside? This printer takes up a pretty good chunk of space on your desk.
If you don't need to send and receive hard-copy faxes, you can find cheaper all-in-one printer-scanner-copier machines for around $100, but not all budget MFPs are created equal. One example is the Brother MFC-3360C (*Est. $100), which CNET's Justin Yu bemoans as ugly and agonizingly slow. It "comes in last place compared with others in the same price range, but the MFC-3360C wins biggest loser by a landslide with one measly page of text per minute, most of which was spent preparing itself to receive the document from the computer." The 3360C also gets a lot of negative reviews on Amazon.com -- about half of those contributing reviews give it just one star out of five. Complaints center around the flimsy paper tray and inaccurate "empty cartridge" alerts.
Among budget models that don't fax, we found better reviews for the Canon Pixma MP490, which actually sells for a bit less (about $80). Read about these and more top-rated MFPs in our latest multifunction printer update.