What Are Printer Scanner Copier Features?

Many office corners have a gray machine with a lid that opens on top and a tray extending from the side. This thing is called a multifunction printer. HP, Canon, Brother, Epson, and Xerox all sell them. Buy one and it does the job of four.

Inkjet and laser are two different things. Inkjet machines have a row of tiny holes inside, and ink sprays out from the holes onto the paper. Laser machines have a drum inside with static electricity, toner is dry powder that gets attracted by the static electricity, then heat fuses it onto the paper. Toner doesn't dry out—leave it for six months and start it up, it still prints fine. Ink dries out, and the printhead clogs.

Print speed depends on what tier you buy. Home inkjet machines do 5 to 20 pages per minute. Office laser machines commonly do 20 to 30 pages per minute, and expensive ones can exceed 50 pages. Brother's MFC-L2750DW prints double-sided faster than some machines print single-sided.

Money matters need long-term calculations. Laser machines are expensive, but toner cartridges can print several thousand pages, working out to two or three cents per page. Inkjet machines are cheap, but ink cartridges only last a few hundred pages, working out to seven or eight cents per page or even more. Epson released a tank-style printer where you pour in large bottles of ink, bringing per-page cost down to one or two cents, but the machine itself costs considerably more.

Scanners use two types of sensors. CIS is cheap, allows thin machine bodies, and the LED light turns on and scans immediately without warm-up. CCD is expensive, produces accurate colors, and can scan uneven things like book spines. For contracts and receipts, CIS is sufficient. For old photos and art books, you need CCD.

That resolution number—600 dpi scans documents clearly, 1200 dpi is about right for photos. Higher numbers are often calculated by software, not actually scanned at that resolution.

The automatic document feeder is a tray where you put a stack of paper, and the machine automatically pulls them in one by one to scan. Cheap ones hold 30-40 sheets, expensive ones hold 100-200 sheets, and the most extreme industrial-grade ones can hold over 700 sheets. There's something called duplex scanning where the paper passes through once and both sides are scanned, saving half the time.

Copying is scanning something and immediately printing it out. Copiers used to be separate machines, but now they're all combined into multifunction units. Duplex copying is also automatic—no need to flip the paper.

WiFi connectivity on printers is now standard. Press a button on your phone and print. Apple devices use AirPrint—print directly without installing drivers. Scanned items can be sent directly to email, saved to a USB drive, or uploaded to cloud storage.

Paper tray sizes vary greatly. Home units hold 200-300 sheets. Office machines can hold 600-700 sheets in the main unit, and with additional trays can reach 2,000-3,000 sheets. Small trays mean adding paper every day—annoying.

There's a specification called monthly duty cycle, which indicates the maximum pages the machine is designed to print per month. Home units are around 5,000 pages. Office units are 20,000-30,000 pages. But manufacturers recommend keeping actual usage at around 20%, otherwise the machine breaks down easily.

Touchscreens have become standard in recent years. Seven inches is about the size of a phone. Tap a few times to operate—more convenient than pressing buttons like before. Xerox screens respond quickly; HP menus have many layers.

Security features are what enterprise customers care about. Set a password, and printed documents only come out when you enter the password at the machine—they won't be taken by others. Administrators can see who printed how many pages and how much it cost.