All-In-Wonders

Can one peripheral do everything--and do it well? With the latest printer/copier/fax/scanners, the answer is finally yes.

Lisa Cekan

Feel like you've set up your office in a phone booth? Attempting to carve out a work area for your home business or small office can give you that Spam-in-a-can experience--especially when you try to accommodate all the office equipment you need. If you can't figure out how to set aside adequate space for your PC, scanner, printer, copier, and other hardware, consider an all-in-one multifunction device. With an MFD you get nearly all of the functions you need in a single compact box. Today's MFDs use space efficiently, save you money, and make your cramped quarters feel just a bit more palatial.

All-in-Ones Improve

Since their inception, all-in-one MFDs have had two shortcomings: Their performance was often significantly below that of the separate devices they replaced; and if one component on an MFD broke, you lost nearly all of your office equipment in one painful stroke. That has now changed. The models we looked at for this review print almost as quickly as stand-alone printers, and their print and scan quality is every bit as good, so buyers need to make fewer compromises.

MFD manufacturers have tackled the reliability and repair issue in a couple of creative ways. HP's LaserJet 1220, for example, adds a separate scanner/copier unit to a stand-alone printer--though this solution generates its own difficulties. Many other MFDs keep each function separate within an all-in-one form: If the copier breaks, for instance, the printer and scanner still work. Nevertheless, if you need to send the device to a service center for repair--or if a technician arrives at your workplace to correct the problem--you're left without access to much of your basic office equipment for the duration.

For this review, we appraised the ease of use, speed, and image quality of six new multifunction devices--three ink jet MFDs and three laser models. We found a lot to like about these devices, and we encountered a variety of approaches to the simple tasks of printing, scanning, copying, and faxing. Some MFDs use a flatbed scanner, while others are sheet-fed. Some work as stand-alone fax machines, while others rely on PC-based faxing--and one lacks fax capabilities entirely. (For tips on deciding whether to get an all-in-one without fax, see the sidebar, "How Much Fax Do You Need?")

As with any piece of office equipment, picking the best MFD model for you depends on your particular needs. If you want color printing, pick an ink jet model; if you copy and print a mountain of documents, you're better off with a monochrome laser model; and if you need to receive important faxes at all hours, choose an MFD that works as a stand-alone fax.

Lisa Cekan is a PC World associate editor.

Multifunction Devices: Features Comparison (chart)

Rank	Ink jet	Price	Text/graphics print speed (ppm)	Print quality (overall text and graphics combined)	Copy quality	Flatbed/ sheet-fed scanner	Stand-alone/ PC faxing         	Comments                                    
1	Canon MultiPass F50 (http://pcworld.pricegrabber.com/search_prodsummary.php?masterid=508744)	$499	6.1/0.8	Very good	Adequate	Both	Both	Text prints quickly, and there are tons of features, but copies look too garish.
2	Best Buy HP PSC 950 (http://pcworld.pricegrabber.com/search_prodsummary.php?masterid=513261)	$399	4.1/1.2	Very good	Good	Flatbed	Both	Great all-in-one for the home includes media card slots for printing photos without a PC.
3	Lexmark X63 (http://pcworld.pricegrabber.com/search_prodsummary.php?masterid=496671)	$199	4.6/0.7	Good	Good	Sheet-fed	Stand-alone	This somewhat inflexible MFD faxes only from the panel and scans only through a PC.
Rank	Laser	Price	Text/graphics print speed (ppm)	Print quality (overall text and graphics combined)	Copy quality	Flatbed/sheet-fed scanner	Stand-alone/PC faxing	Comments
1	Best Buy Brother MFC-9700 (http://pcworld.pricegrabber.com/search_prodsummary.php?masterid=470168)	$599	11.1/5.6	Very good	Very good	Both	Both	A large paper tray, fast printing, and sharp images highlight this versatile small-office machine.
2	HP LaserJet 1220 (http://pcworld.pricegrabber.com/search_prodsummary.php?masterid=415994)	$529	11.8/4.3	Very good	Good	Sheet-fed	No fax	Though it's difficult to set up and lacks a fax capability, the 1220 is fast and offers impressive print quality.
3	Oki Data OkiOffice 87 (http://www.okidata.com/mkt/html/nf/OO87Home.html)	$599	6.5/3.6	Good	Adequate	Sheet-fed	Both	Prints text slowly and scans only in monochrome, but has a feature-rich fax function.

Ink Jet: Canon MultiPass F50

The bulkiest of the three ink jet MFDs we tested, Canon's MultiPass F50 is nearly 13 inches tall and 17 inches wide. It has a 100-sheet main tray and a 30-sheet automatic document feeder. At $499, it's also the most expensive ink jet MFD here.

You can scan (the MultiPass F50 handles both sheet-fed and flatbed scanning), copy, and fax from the extensive control panel (with more than 30 buttons) and from LCD menus. The control panel is confusing at first; you must dig through three or four levels of menus to reach some options, but the F50's intuitive labeling helps. The printed manual, with an index and troubleshooting section, is thorough.

Copying is quick and easy. To make a black-and-white copy, you just press the Start button; for color, you press two buttons on the control panel. Our text copies reproduced well, with solid letters, but color copies looked garishly bright.

As a stand-alone fax, the MultiPass F50 can broadcast-fax, speed-dial, and poll other faxes. You can fax documents from your PC, but this isn't as easy as faxing from the control panel.

Scanning is a one-touch operation on the F50's control panel, and scans look bright and vivid at the default setting of 600 by 1200 dpi. Canon bundles OmniPagePro 9.0 OCR software--a powerful text recognition program that checks spelling, in addition to offering extensive formatting options. The device scanned our text document extremely well.

Printing black-and-white text at a snappy 6.1 pages per minute, the MultiPass F50 is almost as fast as some laser models--and its text appeared nearly as sharp. We were equally impressed with its color graphics: smooth and bright on plain paper, and vivid on glossy paper at the maximum resolution of 2400 by 1200 dpi. At 0.8 ppm, however, color printing takes a relatively long time.

UPSHOT: The MultiPass F50 would make a good choice for any small office that needs color printing.

Ink Jet: HP PSC 950

Hewlett-Packard's $399 PSC 950 can handle flatbed scanning, color copying, and stand-alone faxing--and it offers some extras for digital camera users. Using one of the three media slots (for CompactFlash, SmartMedia, or Sony Memory Stick removable media) on the MFD's front panel, you can print photos directly from your memory card without going through a PC: Press one button and you get a proof sheet showing every photo on the card. To select the shots you want to print in a larger format, just pick up a pen and fill in the ovals that appear under each proof-sheet image. Fill in ovals for photo size (4 by 6, 5 by 7, or 8 by 10 inches) and type of paper, and then scan the proof sheet back into the PSC 950. It will automatically print the photos you selected on the paper you've chosen. The PSC 950 duplicated color and flesh tones well on our photo paper, though the images lost some detail and sharpness.

The PSC 950 does a good job of printing text. In our test documents, characters looked sharp at the device's standard resolution of 600 by 600 dpi. We clocked the HP at 4.1 ppm printing black text and at 1.2 ppm printing color graphics--both speeds are comparable to speeds for stand-alone ink jet printers.

Two dedicated buttons make copying and scanning extremely easy. The PSC 950 copies text quite well; color copies lose detail and look more washed out than the original. It scans quickly at 600 by 1200 dpi, and scanned images look bright and rich. The OCR application is less impressive, however: In processing our sample document, it missed words at the right margin.

You can send faxes directly from the flatbed panel. But since you have to load the paper one sheet at a time, this feature becomes more trouble than it's worth for faxes of more than one or two pages. The MFD also supports PC-based faxing.

The PSC 950 has two paper trays: one for letter- or legal-size paper, and the other for snapshot-size paper and envelopes. Unfortunately (and annoyingly), it can't sense which tray you're using, so if you don't pull the photo tray out when you're done using it, you'll get an error when you print a larger document.

UPSHOT: More home-oriented than other models, HP's PSC 950 handles simple office tasks and prints photos at a good price.

Ink Jet: Lexmark X63

At just $199, the Lexmark X63 is one of the least-expensive all-in-ones we've seen, and it includes stand-alone fax capabilities. On the other hand, it's less flexible than most other MFDs we looked at. For instance, you can fax directly only from the control panel, not from a document on your PC via a driver. Then again, you may not want to fax at all with the X63; the page of text we faxed out came through so light that we could barely read it.

Scanning with the X63 is more complicated than it should be. Most MFDs let you scan quickly and easily by pressing one or two control buttons on the front panel. With the X63, you start by pressing the Scan button on the X73's control panel; next, using your PC, you choose whether to scan to an application, a file, or an e-mail message; finally, you click Send. We found these extra hoops a pain to jump through. That said, the scanned images looked vivid and sharply detailed.

It's easy enough to copy text using the device's front panel, though copies default to printing in black-and-white. To select color, you have to scroll through a few menu items using the on-panel buttons and the LCD panel. And keep in mind that the X63 uses a sheet-fed scanner, so it won't accept thick media.

The X63 prints text fairly quickly (a brisk 4.6 ppm), but graphics pages come out at a more leisurely 0.7 ppm. At the standard setting of 600 by 600 dpi, text and color images look sharp and rich; photos are grainy, however, even when printed on glossy paper. Lexmark includes MGI's PhotoSuite 8.1 image editing software, which lets you adjust brightness and contrast and adds templates for greeting cards, calendars, and magazine covers.

UPSHOT: With four pieces of office equipment in one box at a bargain price, the Lexmark X63 is fine for light work--especially if you rarely send faxes.

Laser: Brother MFC-9700

You may discover that you have to clear some space for Brother's flatbed multifunction device. Standing 19 inches high with an 18-by-17-inch footprint, the $599 MFC-9700 looms large on a desk. If you can live with the size, though, you'll get some useful features, such as a paper tray capable of holding 250 sheets.

Printing at 600 by 600 dpi, the MFC-9700 generates fine, black text at 11.1 ppm. Gray-scale graphics were also speedy at 5.6 ppm, showing good contrast and slight graininess. We also liked the dark, detailed copy quality. As on many MFDs, copy buttons on the MFC-9700's control panel let you zoom up to 400 percent, adjust the contrast, enter the number of copies, and collate.

Other dedicated control panel buttons include 'Scan to email,' 'Scan image,' and 'Scan/OCR.' You can use the flatbed panel for oddly shaped documents, or you can choose to place documents in the sheet-fed input tray to feed automatically. Brother doesn't bundle an image editing program with the MFC-9700; the unit defaults to saving images as.bmp files and text as.txt files. Nevertheless, scanned text was clean and color images looked bright and realistic. We were also impressed with the bundled ScanSoft TextBridge OCR software, which recognized our entire sample text page without adding the stray paragraph breaks that many other programs do.

The MFC-9700 supports stand-alone and PC-based faxing, and both methods send dark, legible documents. Faxing from the panel is easy: Just type in a phone number and press the Start button. PC-based faxing is nearly as simple, but it's less intuitive to set up. After you install the drivers, you must enable the network fax in a setup dialog box; then a fax option appears within the MFC-9700's printer driver. Fortunately, Brother includes a printed manual with step-by-step instructions for setting up the PC fax and for working with such advanced features as speed-dial and broadcast faxing.

UPSHOT: The Brother MFC-9700 is powerful enough to handle most small-office tasks, and it produces great-looking images.

Laser: HP LaserJet 1220

In lieu of constructing a true all-in-one device, HP took one of its stand-alone printers, the LaserJet 1200, and added a freestanding scan/copy unit; when you hook them together you get a multifunction machine. This makes saving space easier because you can detach the scan/copy unit from the printer for storage. But the arrangement has disadvantages. First, the 1220 lacks fax capabilities; second, attaching the unit is so difficult that once you've done it you won't want to take it off again. The process sounds simple: Remove a side panel from the printer, and attach the data cable for the scan/copy unit and the printer's USB cable. But the side panel is hard to take off, and when the unit is in place, the panel is even harder to reattach. You must slide it into position and then snap it under the scan/copy unit, keeping all cords in place.

When you finally get the LaserJet 1220 set up, printing is easy and fast. Text prints quickly at 11.8 ppm and looks quite dark at the standard resolution of 1200 by 1200 dpi. Our test photo looked smooth, with just a hint of banding and some lost detail. Graphics printed reasonably quickly, at 4.3 ppm.

The control panel has only two buttons--one for copy and one for scan--and they're labeled with cryptic images. The indicator lights that report on the toner and power--and those that signal other errors--are similarly vague. The manual helps explain them, but we wish HP had made the control panel clearer.

The LaserJet 1220 copies from the front panel. It reproduced the text in our sample copies slightly darker than the original, which is unusual--most of the MFDs we tested copied our text document lighter. The 1220's scanned images looked smooth and had good contrast; as with the Lexmark X63, though, you can't scan directly from the control panel. After pressing the scan button, you must complete your scan instructions via your PC. In addition, because the scanner is sheet-fed with no flatbed scanning option, scanning a variety of documents is harder.

UPSHOT: Consider the LaserJet 1220 if you're dexterous and want an inexpensive laser printer that can do a few extra tricks.

Laser: Oki Data OkiOffice 87

Most all-in-one MFDs evolve out of printers, but the $599 OkiOffice 87 started as a fax machine; Oki Data added printing, scanning, and copying functions. As a fax unit, it's superbly equipped. Its PC-based fax setup software is extremely intuitive, letting you quickly add speed-dial numbers into your computer and send them to the machine. The control panel has loads of buttons, most for controlling the fax. You can set up the fax for advanced features such as generating automatic reports, delaying transmissions, receiving polling faxes, sending broadcast faxes, and adding extra codes for billing. Unlike using the setup software, however, using the advanced features is an opaque process; you'll need the manual to make sense of the button labels.

The other functions that the OkiOffice 87 provides seem like an afterthought. Oki Data bundles Unimessage Pro XLite software for scanning and printing. An on-panel copy button lets you make a quick single copy, but you have to go deep into the menu to adjust image quality or to change the size or number of copies. Our text copies came out clean yet lighter than the originals, but gray-scale copies were dark and mottled.

As a printer, the OkiOffice 87 is slow. Text prints at 6.5 ppm, about half the page rate of the other laser devices we looked at for this review. Graphics speed (3.6 ppm) is also slow but more in line with that of other laser printers. Text looked light and clean, but gray-scale graphics showed crosshatched patterns throughout and some visible banding.

Scanning may not be worthwhile. You must rely entirely on the scanning software in your PC--there is no button on the control panel for it--and the unit scans only in black-and-white. The OCR function garbled enough words to require editing.

UPSHOT: A fax machine on steroids, the OkiOffice 87 will fit in offices that need an occasional copy but minimal printing.

Copy-Quality Contest

The all-in-ones we tested can print and scan well, with most able to produce solid text and vivid colors. But good prints don't always mean good copies. We copied the same magazine cover on all of the MFDs we tested and found a range of quality among the contenders, from sharp and detailed to dark and overcontrasted.

How Much Fax Do You Need?

Multifunction devices have never been cheaper--a few are priced at under $200--but the savings typically come at the cost of losing key features. With the near-universal trend toward communicating by e-mail, a fax capability is often the first feature to go. HP's $529 LaserJet 1220, for example, omits any fax, and a sibling device to our reviewed Lexmark X63--the $149 Lexmark X73--eliminates a fax in favor of a flatbed scanner. But before you buy an all-in-one without a fax function, consider carefully whether your home or small office can get by without one.

Even if you never send faxes, do other businesses you communicate with still rely on a fax machine? If so, you'll need some fax capability, even if it's just PC faxing. This is especially important if you need to return faxes with your signature.

Do you need to receive critical faxes at odd hours? Even if your fax volume is relatively low, consider getting a multifunction device with stand-alone fax capabilities. That way you won't have to leave your PC on 24 hours a day. Also, look for devices with advanced features, such the ability to archive faxed pages on a PC.

Do you receive or send faxes in large volume? Look for an MFD or stand-alone fax machine with features such as polling, so your fax unit can call another and have it respond by sending a return fax automatically; broadcast faxing, so you can fax to multiple people at once; and time-delay faxing, so you can arrange to send a fax at a later time, such as when phone rates are cheaper. Give it its own phone line, so the fax traffic doesn't fight for the phone line with your voice calls and Internet access.

Does an available alternative technology improve on faxing? You can send almost any document by e-mail if you're willing to run through some extra steps, but this process can be unwieldy. Consider documents that require signatures, for instance: You receive the document as an e-mail attachment, print it out, sign it, scan it back in, set it up in an application, and then e-mail it back as an attachment. That adds up to considerably more steps than printing, signing, and refaxing.