Which multifunction printer for a small home office?

I was taking a professional approach, looking for reliability and proper customer support. But printers are pretty sturdy, dependable creatures and you've certainly opened my eyes to the opportunities presented in the secondhand market.

A secondhand HP 2320 model - way more than I really need - is available on eBay at a starting bid price of £250 and as you suggest, I could scour around for cheap toner cartridges.

I'm very tempted to shop some more and see what I could find - picking up a "pre-owned" MFP would appeal to my environmental side.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

Well, I've been teasing you all for long enough, it's time to come clean about my final shortlist.

I really appreciated the prompt from Paul Johnston to focus on my functional needs and input/output volumes. Just to clarify, I'm a web editor rather than a practitioner so my demands are slightly lower that most AccountingWEB.co.uk readers on both counts.

That said, as a former typesetter I am something of a print quality snob and have always favoured lasers over ink. I frequently want to print off documents just before I run for a train, so output speed is also an important quality for me. Most paper documents are for my own consumption, so colour is a "nice to have" feature rather than "need to have" - so for cost and speed reasons, it's a mono laser for me. Simon's Hurst's positive experiences after switching from Canon to Lexmark have been a strong influence, but I'm also impressed with the speed and dependability of the Samsung laser printer a friend has lent me. I'd still like to get a closer look at the interface & paperless software that comes with the devices, but my current preferences are:
1. Lexmark 264dn
2. Samsung SCX 4284FN
=3. Kyocera FS1118 (no duplex) & Sharp AL 2040 (costly to run, but PaperPort an added bonus).

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

*PS - Steve, the specs on the MCF-490CW from the Brother website confirm scan to PDF facility. You've just got to spend a bit of time tracking down where to find the detailed data from the different suppliers.

My apologies, Steve, for the Brother PDF oversight. You are indeed correct that the Brother WILL scan to PDF. To be as consistent as possible, I drew my comparisons from printerbase.com and the documentation I consulted failed to include PDFs in the supported file formats.

The Brother machines posed a bit of a challenge for this selection. They were mentioned over and over as the best choice for low cost machines, but often the recommendations were for older models that have been discontinued. The 490CW was nice and compact, but with the fax and built-in wireless facility, it's a little pricier than some of the other models, which can go as low as £65 (without PDF output).

But this is where the cost of consumables start to bite. To work out the cost per page calculation, I used the following equation based on the David Park-Simon Hurst (Park-Hurst?) technique:
Printer cost + 1 set replacement inks + warranty/page output (original + replacement inks)

So the 490CW worked out as follows:
£108 (from printerbase) + £12.78 (K) + £6.55 (C) + £6.63 (M) + £5.92/850 = 16.5p...

That's the full output load, so assuming something like 700 pages would emerge from the machine would give a higher per page cost of around 18.9p. So - I've obviously cocked up the calcuation (it was one of the first ones I carried out and I didn't document the numbers at the time: one for future reference!).

Suitably chastened, I have adjusted the entry for the MFC-490CW as a result of your intervention. While it may be a bit embarassing on a personal level, this peer review process does help a lot to improve the final result. Thanks for bringing both points to my attention.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

I'll be back with my personal preferences shortly.

My apologies to RP for omitting the Canon MF4690PL from the main mono laser list, but actually put it into the "also worth checking" section for budget colour lasers (now fixed in article). My main reference site (www.printerbase.co.uk) didn't have this one listed, so I assumed it had reached the end of its time on the shelf - one of the most confusing aspects of trying to sift printer suggestions down to a practical list.

On checking with Canon, I see the machine is still commercially available. I'ill do a long-term cost comparison with the other models. If it does well, I'll edit this post to append it as a recommended machine. It's almost impossible to assemble a definitive list, so every up-to-date comment put forward helps to round out the overall picture - so thanks again for your input.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk