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HWM+HardwareZone.com Tech Awards 2012: Editor's Choice - Part 2

By Team HardwareZone - 2 Mar 2012

Best AIO Color Inkjet Printer

Best AIO Color Inkjet Printer

It wasn’t so long ago that a typical office had separate machines for printing, copying, scanning, and faxing. Today, a single multifunctional device is all you need to handle all these tasks. And many of such all-in-one printers now come with built-in wireless support to rid you of yet another pesky cable, as well as memory card slots, so that you can print your photos easily. From our labs, we’ve shortlisted five such capable top-tier AIO color inkjet printers suitable for the home or a small office; read on to find out which is the one we deem the best.

Nominees:

  • Brother MFC-J825DW
  • Canon Pixma MX886
  • Epson ME Office 960FWD
  • HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus
  • Lexmark Genesis S815

And the Winner Is...

The HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus is the best AIO inkjet printer we've tested in 2011. 

The most expensive AIO in the group, the Officejet Pro 8600 Plus also has the most features, including a 250-sheet paper input capacity, a 50-sheet ADF, and a 25,000-page monthly duty cycle. It also sports 128MB of RAM, a 360MHz processor, and a 4.3-inch touchscreen. Besides the usual fare of USB, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi connectivity options, it also supports HP ePrint. This basically allows you to print from anywhere with an Internet connection by sending an email to your printer's very own email address. Performance-wise, it blows the rest out of the water in terms of print speeds. For black-and-white printing, it’s 30% fastest than the Epson ME Office 960FWD (20 vs. 15ppm), and almost 2x as fast as the Canon Pixma MX886 (20 vs. 10ppm). Even for color printing, it prints almost 2x as fast as everyone else. Due to the fast print engine, it copies the fastest too. Print-quality-wise, while the Pixma MX886 is the better photo printer of the two, for documents, both give laser-like text quality and nicely saturated colored graphics. All in all, the Officejet Pro 8600 Plus nicks this category as it hardly puts a wrong foot down.

 

Scoring Breakdown
 Criteria/Model Brother MFC-J825DW Canon Pixma MX886 Epson ME Office 960FWD HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus Lexmark Genesis S815
Physique 8.5 8.5 8.5 8.5 8.5
Features 8.0 8.5 8.0 9.0 8.0
Print Speed
8.5 8.5 8.5 9.5 8.5
Print Quality 7.5 8.5 8.0 8.0 8.0
Value 8.5 8.0 8.0 8.5 8.0
Overall 8.0 8.5 8.0 9.0 8.5
Price S$318 S$499 S$478 S$599 S$499

For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed at the References section at the end.

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