in depth: What to consider when purchasing a business printer

Page 1 of 2Color quality, capabilities and speed

Printing a quick recipe for Wednesday night's taco night is a bit different than printing quality documents for an upcoming pitch meeting. There are several important differences between printers meant for everyday home use and those meant for the office.

TechRadar Pro compiled these essential buying tips in order help enterprise customers make well-informed decisions.

All printers are not alike. If you are solely printing letters and other monochromatic documents, there is probably little reason to consider a color printer. However, if you are printing high-quality business pitches, advertising flyers or other documents that require a strong visual display, then a color printer can save your business time and money. Invest in a printer that features solid output quality, and above-par graphics.

In addition to a printer, is your business also looking to purchase new office input or output devices, such as copiers, scanners, or fax machines? If so, consider a multi-function device to consolidate space and expense. Multi-function devices save desk space and benefit from having a single technical-support source for handling multiple functions. Most multi-function devices cost less than $1000, which proves to be a budget saver opposed to shopping for several individual machines.

Are you printing hundreds of pages at a time? If so, speed should be a top priority when purchasing your business printer. Judge speed carefully. It is inaccurate to compare claimed speeds for inkjets with claimed speeds for lasers. Laser printers will be close to their claimed speeds for text documents, which don't need much processing time. Inkjets may claim faster speeds than more expensive lasers, but sometimes fail to live up to expectations.

Print speeds depend on how complex documents are and how many pages are to be printed. A 50 page text-only word document will probably print faster than a 100-megapixel photo printed on an A4 sheet. Printers used to rely a lot on the host computer for compute and memory resources but this has dramatically changed over the past few years. Some now integrate the same base hardware as a smartphone and can rapidly process even large image files.

Page 1 of 2Color quality, capabilities and speed

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Epson unveils world's smallest commercial A4 inkjet printer

The Epson WorkForce WF100W

Japanese printer maker Epson has launched what it claims is the smallest and lightest A4 inkjet printer in the world, the Workforce WF-100W.

The printer is aimed at mobile workers looking to print low quantity invoices, designs or other documents on the move.

The device has an integrated Li-Ion battery that can be recharged via a USB port or a bundled AC adaptor.

It is slightly thicker than an A4 reach and is about two-thirds the size; weighing 1.6Kg, it can be comfortably transported as Epson has judiciously chosen for a "brick" form factor.

It has a tiny LCD display that shows the essential characteristics of a printing job and the printer's status.

The printer uses two ink cartridges and pigment ink while the paper tray can hold about 50 pages; in a test print out, I noticed that some minor banding.

You can connect to it directly, via Wi-Fi or as a networked printer; printing can be done via an Epson app and it also boosts Google Cloud Print and Apple AirPrint compatibility.

The printer will go on sale in Europe for 299 Euros (About £240, $390, AU$410)

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HP Officejet Enterprise Color X555xh Printer

Pros Fast. Low running cost. Paper capacity suitable for heavy-duty printing. Duplexer (for two-sided printing). Ethernet.

Cons Photo quality is more comparable to typical lasers than to inkjets. Bottom Line Despite being built around inkjet technology, the HP Officejet Enterprise Color X555xh Printer's speed, paper handling, and features make it work more like a laser printer.

By M. David Stone

The HP Officejet Enterprise Color X555xh Printer ($1,199.99) is one of a select group of inkjets that are better grouped with, and measured against, laser printers. Like the Editors' Choice HP Officejet Pro X551dw Printer, the X555xh offers laser-like speed and paper handling, which lets it easily take the place of a laser in a midsize office or workgroup. It also offers extras, like the ability to print files stored on its own hard drive, that makes it of particular interest to offices that need the sort of features most often found on enterprise-level printers.

Like the X551dw and other printers that are laser-class but not actually lasers, including the Xerox ColorQube 8870DN and the Memjet C6010 Powered by Memjet, the X555xh takes advantage of a printhead that's nearly as wide as the page. HP calls its version HP PageWide Technology.

The advantage of the wide printhead is that it can print the page in one sweep from top to bottom, without the printhead shuttling back and forth. That lets it print a lot faster than a traditional inkjet. For the X555xh, this translates to a 44-page-per-minute (ppm) rating. In theory, that's the speed you should see when printing a text document with the printer's default setting and ignoring the time for printing the first page. It wasn't quite that fast in my tests, but I clocked it with a text file at a more than respectable 31ppm.

The Basics
At least as important as its raw speed is the fact that the X555xh offers an appropriate level of paper handling for that speed, with two 500-sheet drawers, a 50-sheet multipurpose tray, and a duplexer (for two-sided printing), all standard.

Among the X555xh's noteworthy conveniences are the ability to print PDF files from a USB memory key and a 4.3-inch color touch-screen control panel that makes it easy to change settings and give commands.

If you want to connect by Wi-Fi, HP offers an external module for the printer with standard Wi-Fi only ($199.99). In addition, you can get optional internal ($49.99) and external ($69.99) modules that add Wireless Direct—HP's version of Wi-Fi Direct—so you can connect directly to the printer from a smartphone, laptop, or tablet to print even if you don't have an access point on your network. Both modules also add NFC Touch-to-Print, which lets you print though a connection you can establish simply by touching the device to the printer. At this writing, however, only a limited number of mobile devices support Touch-to-Print.

Among the features that earn the printer the "enterprise" designation is the ability to add both administrator and user passwords. The administrator can log in at the printer's front panel or from a browser to change any number of options, including security settings, whether to allow printing from a USB key or printing through the cloud, and whether and where to automatically send alerts such as low-ink warnings via email or text message.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
The X555xh is big and heavy for an inkjet, measuring 21 by 15.7 by 24 inches (HWD) and weighing 63 pounds. Moving the printer into place, and stacking it on top of the second paper drawer, is best considered a two-person job. Setup is otherwise standard. For my tests I connected the printer to a wired network and installed the drivers on a Windows Vista system.

I timed the X555xh on our business application suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at 8.8ppm, essentially tied with the HP X551dw's 9.2ppm. (Differences of up to about 0.5ppm aren't significant at this speed.) That makes it slower than the Memjet C6010, which I clocked at 14.8ppm, but it's still faster than most laser printers we've tested at PC Labs.

Output quality is also a plus. Text quality was a step below par for a laser in my tests, but easily good enough for almost any business use. Graphics were par for a laser, making them more than good enough for any internal business use, up to and including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Depending on how critical an eye you have, you may consider the output good enough for marketing materials like one-page handouts.

Because the X555xh is meant to compete against lasers, I ran our official timing tests with our photo suite using plain paper rather than photo paper. The output was a little worse than you would expect from an inkjet, with colors a little dark in terms of a hue-saturation-brightness model. On the other hand, it was comparable to the bottom of the range that includes most color laser printers.

I also ran the photo suite using photo paper. As you would expect, the output looked better than on plain paper. However, colors were still a little dark. The overall quality was roughly a match for the worst you would expect from drugstore prints.

One final plus for the X555xh is a low claimed cost per page, at 1.1 cents for a monochrome page and 5.5 cents for a color page. That's not particularly low for this expensive a printer, but it is low enough to help keep running costs down.

If you're looking primarily for fast printing, the Memjet C6010 is worth a look, because it was much faster than the X555xh, at 14.8ppm, on our tests. However it only has a 250-sheet paper capacity, which may keep you busy refilling the tray if you print a lot of pages. As a practical matter, you'll probably be better off with either the X555xh, with its 1,050-page capacity, or the HP X551dw, which offers 550 sheets standard and an optional 550-sheet drawer ($199) to bring the capacity up to 1,050 sheets.

If you don't need the HP Officejet Enterprise Color X555xh's hard drive or its administrative features, be sure to consider the HP X551dw. It offers the same speed and nearly the same output quality as the X555xh, which makes it a better value for most small and mid-size offices and keeps it in place as Editors' Choice. If, however, you can make good use of a hard drive and assorted features for security and administrator control, the X555xh will likely be the better printer for your needs.

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HP Officejet Enterprise Color X555xh Printer

Pros Fast. Low running cost. Paper capacity suitable for heavy-duty printing. Duplexer (for two-sided printing). Ethernet.

Cons Photo quality is more comparable to typical lasers than to inkjets. Bottom Line Despite being built around inkjet technology, the HP Officejet Enterprise Color X555xh Printer's speed, paper handling, and features make it work more like a laser printer.

By M. David Stone

The HP Officejet Enterprise Color X555xh Printer ($1,199.99) is one of a select group of inkjets that are better grouped with, and measured against, laser printers. Like the Editors' Choice HP Officejet Pro X551dw Printer, the X555xh offers laser-like speed and paper handling, which lets it easily take the place of a laser in a midsize office or workgroup. It also offers extras, like the ability to print files stored on its own hard drive, that makes it of particular interest to offices that need the sort of features most often found on enterprise-level printers.

Like the X551dw and other printers that are laser-class but not actually lasers, including the Xerox ColorQube 8870DN and the Memjet C6010 Powered by Memjet, the X555xh takes advantage of a printhead that's nearly as wide as the page. HP calls its version HP PageWide Technology.

The advantage of the wide printhead is that it can print the page in one sweep from top to bottom, without the printhead shuttling back and forth. That lets it print a lot faster than a traditional inkjet. For the X555xh, this translates to a 44-page-per-minute (ppm) rating. In theory, that's the speed you should see when printing a text document with the printer's default setting and ignoring the time for printing the first page. It wasn't quite that fast in my tests, but I clocked it with a text file at a more than respectable 31ppm.

The Basics
At least as important as its raw speed is the fact that the X555xh offers an appropriate level of paper handling for that speed, with two 500-sheet drawers, a 50-sheet multipurpose tray, and a duplexer (for two-sided printing), all standard.

Among the X555xh's noteworthy conveniences are the ability to print PDF files from a USB memory key and a 4.3-inch color touch-screen control panel that makes it easy to change settings and give commands.

If you want to connect by Wi-Fi, HP offers an external module for the printer with standard Wi-Fi only ($199.99). In addition, you can get optional internal ($49.99) and external ($69.99) modules that add Wireless Direct—HP's version of Wi-Fi Direct—so you can connect directly to the printer from a smartphone, laptop, or tablet to print even if you don't have an access point on your network. Both modules also add NFC Touch-to-Print, which lets you print though a connection you can establish simply by touching the device to the printer. At this writing, however, only a limited number of mobile devices support Touch-to-Print.

Among the features that earn the printer the "enterprise" designation is the ability to add both administrator and user passwords. The administrator can log in at the printer's front panel or from a browser to change any number of options, including security settings, whether to allow printing from a USB key or printing through the cloud, and whether and where to automatically send alerts such as low-ink warnings via email or text message.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
The X555xh is big and heavy for an inkjet, measuring 21 by 15.7 by 24 inches (HWD) and weighing 63 pounds. Moving the printer into place, and stacking it on top of the second paper drawer, is best considered a two-person job. Setup is otherwise standard. For my tests I connected the printer to a wired network and installed the drivers on a Windows Vista system.

I timed the X555xh on our business application suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at 8.8ppm, essentially tied with the HP X551dw's 9.2ppm. (Differences of up to about 0.5ppm aren't significant at this speed.) That makes it slower than the Memjet C6010, which I clocked at 14.8ppm, but it's still faster than most laser printers we've tested at PC Labs.

Output quality is also a plus. Text quality was a step below par for a laser in my tests, but easily good enough for almost any business use. Graphics were par for a laser, making them more than good enough for any internal business use, up to and including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Depending on how critical an eye you have, you may consider the output good enough for marketing materials like one-page handouts.

Because the X555xh is meant to compete against lasers, I ran our official timing tests with our photo suite using plain paper rather than photo paper. The output was a little worse than you would expect from an inkjet, with colors a little dark in terms of a hue-saturation-brightness model. On the other hand, it was comparable to the bottom of the range that includes most color laser printers.

I also ran the photo suite using photo paper. As you would expect, the output looked better than on plain paper. However, colors were still a little dark. The overall quality was roughly a match for the worst you would expect from drugstore prints.

One final plus for the X555xh is a low claimed cost per page, at 1.1 cents for a monochrome page and 5.5 cents for a color page. That's not particularly low for this expensive a printer, but it is low enough to help keep running costs down.

If you're looking primarily for fast printing, the Memjet C6010 is worth a look, because it was much faster than the X555xh, at 14.8ppm, on our tests. However it only has a 250-sheet paper capacity, which may keep you busy refilling the tray if you print a lot of pages. As a practical matter, you'll probably be better off with either the X555xh, with its 1,050-page capacity, or the HP X551dw, which offers 550 sheets standard and an optional 550-sheet drawer ($199) to bring the capacity up to 1,050 sheets.

If you don't need the HP Officejet Enterprise Color X555xh's hard drive or its administrative features, be sure to consider the HP X551dw. It offers the same speed and nearly the same output quality as the X555xh, which makes it a better value for most small and mid-size offices and keeps it in place as Editors' Choice. If, however, you can make good use of a hard drive and assorted features for security and administrator control, the X555xh will likely be the better printer for your needs.

View the original article here

Epson LabelWorks LW-600P Portable Label Printer

Pros Portable. Prints from iOS and Android devices, as well as Windows and Mac computers. Prints barcodes and QR codes. More than 50 label types available.

Cons Lacks a keyboard. Composing labels on small iPhone screen is awkward. Limited font choices in Android. Inconsistent Bluetooth pairing with Android devices. Occasional app crashes. Bottom Line The Epson LabelWorks LW-600P Portable Label Printer lets you print thin plastic labels, barcodes, and QR codes composed either on an iOS or Android device or on a computer.

By Tony Hoffman

The Epson LabelWorks LW-600P Portable Label Printer ($99.99) lets you design and print labels from an iOS or Android mobile device, as well as from a USB-connected PC or Mac. This printer can print standard labels, barcodes, and QR codes on more than 50 types of peel-off plastic tape that Epson offers.

The LW-600P superficially resembles a tiny tower PC. It measures 5.7 by 1.7 by 5.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.3 pounds. It can be powered either by the included AC adapter or 6 AA batteries. It lacks a keypad, so you can't compose and print labels from the printer itself. Windows in the front and side let you see the kind of label and how much tape is left. Printed labels, which are automatically cut, emerge from a slot under the front window. The display, which is set at an upward-facing angle above the front window, contains just three icons: Exclamation Point (warning), Battery (need to be charged or replaced), and Bluetooth (when solid, it's connected; when blinking, it's not).

Connectivity
The LW-600P connects wirelessly via Bluetooth, and needs to be paired with one phone or tablet at a time (or else connected via USB to a Windows or Mac computer). But though it can't be shared among multiple users in the same way that a Wi-Fi printer can, it has the advantage of being able to connect directly with a mobile device when not on a network—at least in theory. I had no trouble pairing an iPhone 4S or an iPad Air with the printer, although occasionally the printer and iOS device would unpair for no obvious reason. It was hit-or-miss as to whether I could get my Android tablet (Google Nexus 7) paired, even when the tablet's Bluetooth settings showed the printer as available, and no other device was paired with it.

As it has no keyboard of its own, the label-making software is an essential part of creating labels with the LW-600P. Epson iLabel is a free program available in the iTunes app store for iOS devices and from Google Play for Android phones and tablets. You can also download Epson Label Editor software for use on a PC, or Epson Label Editor Lite for printing with a Mac, from links Epson provides in the printer's user manual.

Composing Labels With the iLabel App
Installing Epson iLabel went smoothly on both my iPhone and iPad. It wasn't quite as smooth with the Nexus 7. The program wasn't visible in the Google Play store at first, and I had to upgrade the tablet to the latest Android version (4.4.2 KitKat) to download it.

Of particular interest among the options in the main menu in the iLabel app are Original Label, QR Code, Barcode (1D), and Label Catalog. When creating an original label in iLabel, there's a field to enter text. Pressing the "A" icon below the text field lets you select a Font, Type Style, and Size. Sizes are limited to small, medium, and large. In the iOS version of the app, you can choose between a variety of both classical and modern typefaces and styles. In Android, there are nearly as many typefaces, but the fonts are much less varied, and many of them are named for the devices (Droid, etc.) they were created for. You can center, right-align, or left-align the text within the label, add a symbol (there are a wide variety of icons and symbols related to work, measurements, warnings, and more) image, handwritten (rather, finger-written) text, a frame, and more.

A row of icons along the bottom of the app show you the status of the printer and tape. It also lets you print or email the label, and set the number of copies, the margins, and the label's length. When you've created the label and (if need be) set a length for it, you just hit the print button, and the label will print. When printing is done, the printer cuts the label off.

In barcode printing, you can choose between eight barcode types. For QR codes you just type in a URL (there are shortcuts for adding "http://", "www.", and ".com") and then you print the code or insert it into a larger label. The Label Catalog has a number of predesigned labels on subjects (such as safety) appropriate to a variety of businesses.

Mobile Label Printing Blues
Although it's useful to be able to print labels from mobile devices, it's not a panacea. All the mobile devices I tried would occasionally become unpaired, and the Android app crashed a couple of times. I found printing from the iPhone's relatively small screen to be awkward at times. It was somewhat more comfortable on the two tablets I tried it on, though I preferred label designing from a computer.

Creating Labels on a Computer
It's good that you can also print from Epson's Label Printer program on a PC or Mac. You get a much wider range of font choices and can set font size, add borders, and more. I found it easier, quicker, and more enjoyable to work from a laptop with its relatively large screen plus a mouse than from a tablet or phone and the iLabel app.

For many people, a portable label printer with a keyboard and display, such as the Editors' Choice Brother P-touch PT-2730 (which can also print from a USB-connected computer) may be at least as good an option as printing from mobile devices. Brother offers 65 different tape cartridges for it, up to 0.9 inches wide. It can print nine kinds of barcodes when one works from its keyboard, and twice as many (including QR codes) from a computer.

Speed
The LW-600P took 14 seconds to print, from a PC, a 3.5-inch label with the text PCMag: A Printer Test. It was a little faster when printing from the iPhone (10.7 seconds). This is similar to the Brother P-touch PT-2730, which took 11.8 seconds to print out a 3.5-inch label with the same text, composed on its keyboard. There are faster portable label printers, such as the Editors' Choice Brother P-touch PT-H500LI, which printed out the same text in 5.7 seconds. But though faster is better, print speed is seldom a decisive factor for this sort of printer.

Cartridges
Epson currently offers a wide variety of tape cartridges (54 types) for the LW-600, including standard, ribbon, strong adhesive, glow-in-the-dark, reflective, pearlized, iron-on, clear, and more. Maximum width is just under 1 inch (24mm).

The Epson LabelWorks LW-600P Portable Label Printer adds the convenience of printing from an iOS or Android mobile device to the ability to print labels from a computer. I found composing and printing labels on a tablet and especially on an iPhone more awkward than doing so from a computer, and I encountered some glitches in connecting to the printer via Bluetooth. Still, it's nice to have the option of mobile label printing, especially as the iLabel app supports printing barcodes, QR codes, and other specialty labels.

An alternative to the LW-600P is a handheld label printer with its own keyboard and display such as the Brother P-touch PT-2730, or the slightly pricier but faster Brother P-touch PT-H500LI. Although neither can print from mobile devices, both of these Editors' Choice models can connect to a computer, where you can compose the labels, via USB. Some might find typing on the printer's tiny keyboard more awkward than using a mobile device, or if you don't want to keep a PC on hand to print labels, the LW-600P could be an ideal choice.

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Epson Expression Premium XP-610 Small-In-One Printer

Pros Fast for its price. Above-par photo quality. Can print on optical media. Prints from and scans to memory cards and USB thumb drives. Solid wireless printing choices.

Cons Low paper capacity. No Ethernet. Bottom Line The Epson Expression Premium XP-610 is a compact and speedy inkjet MFP with good photo quality and a solid set of home-centered features.

By Tony Hoffman

The Epson Expression Premium XP-610 Small-in-One Printer ($149.99) is a compact inkjet multifunction printer (MFP) geared toward home users. It offers good speed and solid output quality with better-than-average photos, plus a largely consumer-centered feature set.

Design and Features
Measuring 5.4 by 15.4 by 13.4 inches (HWD), the XP-610 and weighs 21.5 pounds. There's a 100-sheet main tray and a 20-sheet photo paper tray, plus an auto-duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. The modest paper capacity is fine for home use, but it falls short of what you'd need for the printer to perform double duty in a home and home office.

On top of this MFP is a letter-sized flatbed for copying or scanning. The front panel houses a 2.5-inch LCD surrounded by touch controls. To the side of the paper trays are the memory-card slot (SD or MS Duo), and a port for a USB thumb drive.

The XP-610 prints, copies, and scans, and can do so without connecting to a computer, and it can print onto inkjet-printable DVDs or CDs. It can also print from or scan to a USB flash drive or memory card, and scan to a computer or a network folder.

You get USB and Wi-Fi connectivity (including Wi-Fi Direct, which allows a direct peer-to-peer connection with a compatible device without the need for a network), but there's no Ethernet port. It's compatible with AirPrint and Google Cloud Print, and with Epson Connect features such as the iPrint app for iOS and Android devices. I tested the printer over a USB connection with the driver installed on a PC running Windows Vista.

Print Speed
The Epson XP-610 handled our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at 4.9 effective pages per minute (ppm). It's considerably faster than the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma MX922 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer (2.4ppm), which, despite its name, is packed with home-friendly, as well as business-oriented, features. The XP-610 averaged 1 minute 8 seconds in printing out 4 by 6 photos, a good score and just a touch slower than the Canon MX922 (1:05).

Output Quality
Overall output quality is average for an inkjet. Text quality is suitable for most home use, with the exception of documents with which you want to make a good visual impression, like resumés.

Graphics quality is typical of inkjets. Most images showed dithering in the form of graininess and dot patterns in my test prints. Some very thin, colored lines were nearly invisible, and white type on a black background looked degraded at smaller sizes. Graphics quality is good enough for PowerPoint handouts for general use, though not for formal reports and the like.

Photos are above par. A monochrome photo showed some tinting, and several prints showed dithering (graininess), but most were at least the same quality as you'd expect from drugstore prints.

This printer employs five ink cartridges, including a photo black. Its running costs of 4.6 cents per black-and-white page and 13.3 cents per color page (based on Epson's figures for the prices and yields of its most economical ink cartridges) are typical for an inkjet at its price.

The XP-610 sits between the Epson Expression Home XP-410 and the Epson Expression Premium XP-810 in the company's Small-in-One line. The Epson XP-410 is strictly for home use, and lacks the XP-610's auto-duplexer, slot for a USB thumb drive, photo tray. The Epson XP-810 adds business-friendly features, such as fax capability, an Ethernet port, and an automatic document feeder (ADF). Neither of them could approach the XP-610's tested speed (4.9ppm) in printing from business apps, with the Epson XP-810 testing at 3.6ppm and the Epson XP-410 limping in at 2.6ppm.

Conclusion
The Epson Expression Premium XP-610 Small-in-One Printer is not as versatile as the Canon Pixma MX922 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer, our Editors' Choice for budget home inkjet MFPs. That said, the XP-610 could be used in a home-office in a pinch, but the lack of some business-friendly features such as fax, Ethernet, ADF, and adequate paper capacity make it a less than ideal choice in that regard. It is much faster than the Canon MX922, and speedier than either the Epson XP-410 or Epson XP-810. Although printing speed is seldom as critical a factor for home or for home-office use as it is for larger businesses, faster is still better. The Epson Expression Premium XP-610 Small-in-One Printer is not only speedy, but adds good photo quality and a solid feature set to the mix.

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