All-in-One Devices Improve
If you’re setting up a home office, you’ll probably want a printer and fax machine and maybe a scanner and a copier. You could spend between $700 and $1,500 to buy all four, then enjoy the challenge of finding the space to set them up near your PC. Or you could spend between $400 and $700 for one multi-function device.
Multi-function devices, which typically offer printing, scanning, faxing and copying, have been on the market for several years but have recently become more popular. Dataquest estimates that about 2.2 million multi-function machines will be sold in the United States this year, up from 1.4 million in 1997.
Until recently, I had trouble recommending these machines, because the manufacturers generally made too many compromises with at least one of the functions. That’s still a danger. But as the market for these devices has grown, the offerings have matured. Today, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Brother, Sharp, Panasonic, Toshiba and other companies make multi-function devices with reasonably good performance in each category.
Still, there are some tough decisions to be made. With any device, you have to evaluate what features you need, what level of performance you require and how much you’re willing to spend.
Most purchases are made one component at a time. With a multi-function machine, you’re stuck with the entire package. It might, for example, have a great printer but a not-so-great scanner.
Another issue to consider is what happens if something goes wrong. If your stand-alone scanner or fax machine breaks, you can still print. But if any component goes down on a multi-function machine, the whole system may be unusable until the machine is fixed.
With multi-function devices, you generally can’t use more than one function at a time. If one person is using the machine to print, others will have to wait to send a fax, make a copy or scan a document.
Still, the cost and size of multi-function devices makes them a compelling choice for many home and home office users.
I looked at two new multi-function machines: the $499 Canon Multipass C5000 color system and Hewlett-Packard’s $699 monochrome LaserJet 3100 laser printer, fax machine, copier and scanner.
The Canon C5000 is an excellent multipurpose machine for the home user who needs a color printer and fax machine and wants the added benefits of a color scanner and copier. The machine was easy to set up and took up about the same amount of desk space as a stand-alone inkjet printer.
The printer component is similar to the Canon 4300 BubbleJet printer, which sells for about $240. It’s capable of near-photo-quality color output at 720 by 360 dots per square inch, and black pages that are about as good as you’ll get from any inkjet printer. At up to five pages per minute in black and two pages a minute in color, it’s fast enough for most home applications.
You might question why you need the fax part of the machine since virtually all PCs today come with a fax modem that lets you send and receive faxes through your PC. Fax modems are OK for faxing text files, but they’re not so great at receiving faxes.
For one thing, to receive a fax the PC must be running, and an incoming fax can disrupt whatever you’re doing. Second, with a PC, you must either view the fax on screen or print it. A stand-alone fax machine or multi-function machine with fax works even when the PC is turned off, and automatically prints incoming faxes.
What’s more, you can use the machine to fax bank statements, newspaper clippings or other paper documents.
The fax component of the Canon C5000 and most other multi-function machines gives you everything you’d want from a stand-alone fax machine. It’s always ready to receive a fax, and it prints on plain paper, which is better than the special, smelly paper used by inexpensive fax machines. Because the device is connected to the PC, you can also use it to send and receive faxes through your computer.
I prefer it to a standard fax modem because after the fax is sent, the PC is freed up for other tasks. The scanner--adequate for many users--is definitely not top of the line. Its 300-dots-per-inch optical resolution and 24-bit color scanning is below the specifications of even some low-cost flatbed scanners, such as Storm Technology’s $149 TotalScan 30-bit 600-dpi scanner.
The Canon can’t scan bound material. But it can be used to scan images and text and comes with optical character-recognition software that turns printed documents into computer text.
The Canon is a reasonably good black-and-white copier with the ability to reduce copies and print up to 99 copies of a single document. It also makes pretty impressive color copies. That feature alone could justify the expense--as long as you realize that color copying is slow and color ink can be expensive.
I’ve got a little bit of bad news and a lot of good news about the HP LaserJet 3100. The bad news is that it costs $699 and doesn’t print in color. The good news is that it’s fast, rugged, quiet, easy to set up and prints documents that look great.
I generally don’t use a laser printer because mid-range inkjet printers are sufficient. But no inkjet can quite duplicate the crisp, clear black text you get with this HP and other 600-dpi laser printers.
The quality of incoming faxes is also impressive, especially if the sender uses a PC or sends a clean original. The “convenience copier,” which is sheet-fed only, is fast and produces clean copies. The scanner does a good job with black and gray-scale images, and its OCR software--while far from perfect--did a reasonably good job at turning a four-page typed news release into computer text. Thanks to the sheet feeder and automatic software, the OCR process was a breeze.
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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached via e-mail at magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com
