The simple A4 printer is dead - long live the multifunction!

For just a little more room on your desk, these new all-in-one printer-copier-scanners can offer you a whole lot more than simply printing documents.

Using the same basic components and often accepting the same cartridges, many multifunction printers also allow you to digitize documents as well as copy them in your choice of black and white or color. 

Digitization is a great bonus as it allows you to e-mail copies of your important documents, or keep a permanent record of your written correspondence without having to file mountains of paper - store it all on your computer and recycle the originals!

More advanced models feature built-in memory card readers, allowing you to print your photos straight from your digital camera without first copying them onto your computer. 

Equally, many work as fax machines too, scanning in outgoing documents and printing out incoming documents. 

None of this is new technology, but it's certainly great to see more and more these advanced features on a wide range of products.

Trends for 2008-9: WiFi

More than half of all computers in use in the world today is now a notebook, and the trend for living life wirelessly shows no signs of slowing down. 

Lexmark was amongst the first to suggest ditching USB cables for printing over WiFi, and was probably ahead of the game. 

Now, though, WiFi is so ubiquitous that most of the medium and high-end models we tested could print effortlessly without requiring any kind of physical connection at all.

Choosing the right all-in-one: What kind of user are you?

The most important question to ask yourself is how often you intend to use your multifunction printer: are you a frequent user, or will you most likely only have occasional needs?

• Frequent Use - several times a day
  You'll likely need a lot of cartridges, and Canon's and Epson's, featuring a simpler design, are usually amongst the cheapest.

With Lexmark and HP, a printing head is added to the container rather than remaining part of the printer itself, making their cartridges more pricey. 

With some lines, though, Lexmark provide pre-paid envelopes allowing their cartridges to be returned for recycling, which is a step in the right direction.

• Ocassional Use - up to a few times a week
  Here, it's the other way round: HP and Lexmark are a safer bet if you don't need to print very often.

Canon and Epson printers both regularly include a cleaning cycle which is invoked when the printer has not been used for a few days at a time, which invariably uses a lot of ink - sometimes up to a quarter of the volume of a cartridge can disappear over its working life cleaning the nozzles.  HP and Lexmark avoid this problem by making the printing head part of the cartridge which thus gets replaced every time you change it.

Our Tests

We tested all of these multifunctions for regular office printing on A4, with both color and black and white documents, and did the same for 4 x 6" photo prints.  You can see the all-in-ones that we've reviewed so far below, and compare and contrast their results in our Product Face-Offs for multifunction printers.