Best Multifunction Printers for the Home Office

There are a lot of printers in the market that do a lot of different things. Unfortunately, most of these printers are doomed to be travelling wanderers for their lives; jacks of all trades but masters of none. Aww! Multifunction printers that do more than one thing well are difficult to come by, and often come with other drawbacks such as excessive laser cartridge or printer ink usage. So today we check out some top models of multifunction printer on the market that are more than one-trick ponies, and won't cost the earth.

 Epson Stylus Photo TX710W

 The Epson Stylus TX710W is a fabulous photo printer, and produces excellent quality CD and DVD prints also, along with fairly standard quality text. The printer cartridges run to the expensive side for this multifunction printer, so if you don't print often but want good quality when you do, this is the model for you.

Canon Pixma MP560

Another great little photo printer, this is an excellent multifunction mid-range offering. It prints, copies and scans (although doesn't include fax capability), and has a very easy to setup wireless connection. The ink cartridges come in a set of five, so you don't have to worry about constant waste from a tri-color cartridge if you do a lot of photo printing.

HP Photosmart Premium All-in-One C309g

HP make some fabulous printers ... even if there aren’t too many other electronics that they do a good job of! It has an automatic duplexer, has fabulous black and white text quality, and connects via either wireless, Ethernet or Bluetooth. It's a printer, copier and scanner, and while people have mixed reviews of its reliability, they do note that it uses printer ink quickly. If you want a good multifunction offering for infrequent printing, this is a good choice.

HP Officejet Pro 8500 Wireless
Another good HP offering ... as long as you are using it with a very standard setup. The software and firmware can be a bit troublesome, but for those using the most 'ordinary' of operating systems and programs with this printer, it is a wonderful complete home office solution ... even including a fax machine.

Lexmark Interact S605

This is not priced as an entry-level multifunction printer, and it doesn’t work very fast. That said, everything it does is fabulous quality. There is no compromise between text and photo quality. No fax machine, but it prints, copies and scans as well as handling a wide range of paper sizes.

5 Ways to Green Your Printing Habits

We live in a world of very resource-intensive living. Electricity is used for the most basic of tasks, there are more and more trees cut down every year, and waste seems a natural part of life. Along with all that waste can come a fair bit of guilt, even if there are no immediate consequences, and the wasted paper, printer toner and printer ink that comes along with certain printing behaviors is actually a major source of guilt for many Canadians. Today we look at 5 ways you can green your printing habits, cut the guilt and preserve the planet for future generations. 

Buy a duplex printer, and ...

Printers with the capability for duplex are actually fairly common ... but it seems that people simply don’t use the function. The technology is not well established, and there are often problems with this feature. You need to not only buy a printer that supports duplex printing, but one that will do it quickly and conveniently enough that you actually use the feature.

Start a re-usable paper stack
Reducing your usage and re-using what you can are preferable to recycling sheets of paper that are accidentally printed. So, start a stack of paper that has a single web address on one side, nothing but a document header just one sentence and re-use it either for notes and scrap, or printing non-critical documents.

Recycle your printer cartridges

There are quite a few depot points across the country that take used printer ink cartridges. The plastic from these can’t be recycled along with ordinary plastics, so start a collection and take them down to the recycling station once you have a few.

Use Draft Mode
Don’t print everything on high quality - this will save on printer ink, which is both environmentally friendly and wallet friendly!

Take stock

Pay attention to the type of stock you use in your printer. Cotton, hemp and bamboo papers are all more sustainable that standard printer paper. You may have to experiment with print settings a little, but you'll feel much better about yourself! Order ahead online and you won’t be tempted to run out and grab the first tree-killing ream you see in the grocery store.