The $350 HP LaserJet Pro 100 bears a near-exact resemblance to the LaserJet Pro M1212nf, but this step-up model cuts out the fax machine in favor of color printing that uses Hewlett-Packard’s innovative new carousel-style cartridge bay. The printer maintains a small footprint by leaving out the autoduplexer, and the rotating toner carousel helps with size as well, but unfortunately at the expense of printing speed. Larger offices will appreciate a heavy-duty device like the Dell 1355cnw multifunction printer, but the HP LaserJet 100 earns my recommendation for home offices where users will take advantage of HP’s unique features like ePrint and Smart Install, and the LaserJet Pro’s 35-page autodocument feeder.

Design and features
The HP LaserJet Pro 100 is exceptionally compact for a multifunction laser printer, but the multiple color cartridges inside bump the weight up to 35 pounds with all the accessories attached. Its narrow 17-inch by 16-inch footprint won’t hog space on your desktop, and HP includes wide cutouts on the bottom of each side to use as handles when transporting the unit around an office. Unfortunately, HP doesn’t include the USB or Ethernet cord necessary to make a hardwired connection, probably to encourage you to establish the Wi-Fi connection you’ll need to access the ePrint services.

Once you acquire a cable, HP’s Smart Install makes it simple to establish a connection and start printing without the fuss of a driver disc. The new design embeds the communication drivers directly in the printer itself, so all you have to do is plug the power cable into a wall, connect it to your PC (via USB), and turn on the printer, and the two machines will take over and do the rest. Smart Install is also useful when it comes time to transfer the printer to another host computer, or if another user wants to use it as a network printer. Unfortunately for Mac users, Smart Install only works with Windows machines, so HP includes a standard installation disc as well.

Setting up the printer with an Ethernet cable is nearly as easy as setting up a direct connection. As with USB installation, you can use either the included CD or Smart Install. I opted for the latter. First, you must print out a configuration report using the printer’s control panel by pressing the setup button (the one with the wrench icon), using either of the arrow keys to select “Reports” from the Main menu, and then selecting “Config report.” The printer will then spit out two pages of configuration details, one of which is the printer’s IP address. Type the address into the browser of a PC on your network, and on the resulting Web page, click the HP Smart Install tab. From there, click the green Download button to install the software. After a quick download, the printer will print out a test page confirming it’s connected to your network.

The printer ships with version 1.0 of the operating software, but you’ll need to download and install a firmware update to enable ePrint. Once you have an active Ethernet connection established, follow these instructions from HP to download the update, locate your printer’s IP address, and enable Web services on the LaserJet Pro 100. It took me about half an hour to update the firmware, but once you’re set up, you can use ePrint to send jobs directly to the printer using a unique e-mail address.

The ePrint system can print e-mail message attachments in the form of images, document files, PDFs, and photos, and it will send a separate job for any text that appears in the body of the e-mail. The default preferences let anyone with the address print wirelessly, but you can also set up a list of verified senders to allow on a private network. My testing confirms ePrint works with a variety of Web clients like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Microsoft Outlook, and you can even e-mail articles directly from an RSS feed like Google Reader.

You can track the progress of print jobs sent to the assigned address through the HP ePrintCenter. The printer recognizes and begins printing a job immediately after it receives an e-mail, and I like that you can queue up several jobs and track them all just as you would using a desktop client. Still, I’d also like to find some of this functionality on the printer itself.

The process for connecting to a wireless 802.11b/g/n network is similar, except that you have to enter your SSID and password to start the process. Once the printer finds your router, a physical Wi-Fi button on the front control panel will confirm the connection and print out an information sheet to confirm it, and you’re set. All three of the connectivity options are a breeze to install, and after you get the LaserJet set up, you’ll find it’s a considerate officemate–it doesn’t waste energy, as witness its Energy Star qualification, and it’s fairly quiet during operation. Our only environmental complaint is that it has no autoduplexer, meaning it won’t automatically flip the paper to print on both sides, although you can of course always do that manually.

The LCD status display console is small, but well-equipped, with all the necessary buttons to operate the machine. A number pad sits below the two-line display, and you also get two buttons down below to start and stop a job, as well as a host of setup buttons for adjusting the darkness of your prints or starting a copy job. Unfortunately, you don’t get an autoscan button, so you’ll have to start the scanning process on your computer first and return to the machine to finish the job.

You’ll also notice a multicolored circular button with a rotating arrow around the perimeter–this controls the rotation of the toner cartridges within the machine. The LaserJet Pro 100 is one of the first color lasers from HP to incorporate a new design that saves space by seating cartridges in a rotating carousel within the tray. To change the cartridges, you close the lid and press the button to unseat the primary cartridge and rotate to the next one. The printer ships with the cartridges already installed, but the printed instructions inside the bay make it easy for anyone to replace them.

A 150-sheet paper input tray folds out of the bottom of the printer and stays in place with a separate plastic tray that connects sloppily to the bottom of the printer, and a 35-sheet autodocument feeder (ADF) takes care of hands-free scanning of documents stacked on top. Larger offices that would feel confined by the 150-sheet maximum storage capacity should check out the HP LaserJet Pro 1606dn, which can store up to 250 sheets at a time.

Unfortunately, the toner itself will set you back about 4.2 cents per page of plain black text, and each precious color print will cost you 21 cents–much higher than the average. The high cost of consumables speaks to the limits of color lasers for consumer photographers, and I recommend you check out our inkjet printer reviews if you’re shopping for a photo output device.

Performance
The LaserJet Pro 100′s new cartridge carrier makes this one of the smallest laser printers I’ve tested, but it also slows down the printing process as each color page pauses to wait for the four print drums. Of course, the drop in speed compared with the competition depends on your volume of prints and the length of each job, but CNET’s benchmark results show the LaserJet trailing three other competitive printers in all three tests.

The LaserJet Pro 100′s text and graphics quality are both acceptable using the defined shortcuts HP offers in the preferences pane. The standard default, called General Everyday Printing, outputs crisp text down to 2-point font, but environmentally conscious users will likely prefer the “eco-print” selection that pauses for you to manually flip the sheet of paper–certainly not ideal for quick jobs, but energy-saving. There are also defined options for alternative media formats like envelopes, heavy cardstock, and glossy presentations, although you’ll need to feed these into the sole paper tray, since HP included no bypass tray.

The overall print quality performs to the industry standard for color lasers: black text comes out clean and nicely darkened, while the grayscale prints are good, but suffer from the minor cross-hatching common to budget laser printers. Photos on graphics pages are adequate as well, but some of the colors in our sample monochrome scans appear overly dark and nearing the dark end of the grayscale compression. Still, the output quality is certainly on a professional level worthy of general office tasks.

Service and support
HP backs the LaserJet Pro 100 with a standard one-year warranty, which includes 24-7 toll-free phone support and live Webchat during weekdays. HP’s Web site also contains downloadable drivers, software, and manuals; e-mail tech support; FAQs; and a troubleshooting guide. You can return the product within 21 days of delivery.

Conclusion
The HP LaserJet Pro 100 boasts a smart feature set and a compact design that meets the needs of home users on a budget. You get print, scan, and copy functionality in one device, along with wired and wireless networking, an ADF, HP ePrint, and a dead-simple setup procedure. As long as you don’t mind waiting a little longer for your prints to come out, the LaserJet Pro 100 is an excellent value for the cost.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)

Inkjet printers have a dirty little secret. Some might say this secret is a plan by the printer manufacturers to help you waste printer ink. Others will say this secret is a necessity that helps keep your printer in top running condition. What’s the secret? It’s the waste ink reservoir.

In the base of the inkjet printer is a large, absorbent, sponge/foam type material with a hole in it. The hole corresponds with a hole (in your printer) at one end of the printer cartridge arm path. You’ll also find another hole, leading to another reservoir, at the opposite end of the printer cartridge arm path.You wouldn’t know either hole is there unless you take your printer a part. If you remove the sponge/foam material you will find the waste ink reservoir. You will also find a varying amount of ink in the reservoir. The amount of ink depends on how long and often you have been printing with your printer.

How did the ink get there? The only way a printer can keep its jet nozzles clean is to squirt ink through them. Since the ink moving through the nozzles is not ending up on paper, the ink has to go somewhere. That somewhere is in the waste ink reservoir. For most, the upsetting part about this is that your printer decides when to squirt the ink through the nozzles and it typically happens whenever you turn the printer on. Printer owners don’t like the idea of needless ink usage (ink that does not end up on paper).

Printer manufacturers say that nozzle cleaning is essential to your printer functioning properly and the amount of ink used in the process is minimal.

Dirty secret or necessary evil? You decide.

Want to see what the ink reservoir and sponge/foam material looks like? Check out this video from Atomic Shrimp – The Dirty Little Secret Of Inkjet Printers

The year 2012 is going to be a good one for printers. While printing technology will (most likely) not change, printer manufacturers will be adding mobile printing via Wi-Fi and cloud printing via email to all the printer models they release in 2012. This technology will allow printers to follow their users away from their desks and on to their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.

Gone are the days where we must be using a computer sitting next to a printer to print anything. Now we’ll be printing from just about anywhere we want, to any printer we want. Get ready to embrace mobile printing and cloud printing.

In 2011 Apple, Google, HP, and Lexmark all introduced mobile and cloud capabilities in their printers and services to enhance our printing capabilities. Google’s Cloud Print App lets users print via email on any printer connected to a computer that has Internet access. Apple introduced AirPrint, which lets you use Wi-Fi to send a variety of print jobs directly from an iOS device to any nearby AirPrint compatible computer. HP unveiled ePrint, a service allowing you to email a print job from anywhere to an ePrint compatible HP printer. Lexmark’s SmartSolutions apps allowed users to display a limited amount of web based information on their printer’s LCD screen.

In 2012 we will see these manufacturers expand their mobile and cloud print offerings while others begin to get in the game. Canon, Epson, and Kodak will all release printers, this year, that are mobile and cloud print enabled. Canon’s printers will offer Easy-PhotoPrint (for printing from Android and Apple phones and tablets) and PIXMA Cloud Link (for printing from Google Docs and Gmail from your mobile device) apps. Epson will will release the same type of printer apps under the name Epson Connect.

Kodak will following suit, but has chosen to focus on the size of the email message users can send to their printers. As of now, mobile and cloud printing apps only accept print jobs of a certain size. I imagine other printer manufacturers will follow Kodak and over the course of 2012 we will see less limited size constraints.

If you are in the market for a printer this year, definitely make sure you check out mobile and cloud printing apps before buying. They promise to be a very useful technology.

Canon’s new Pixma MG6220 multifunction printer carries an impressive list of features compared with other consumer-level printers that sell for $200. This capable machine achieves top-scoring marks in both speed and output quality, but also innovates with features you can’t get with the competition, like a 3-inch display that pairs well with the touch-sensitive control panel. The touch sensitivity can use some tweaking, but if you’re on the hunt for a printer truly worthy of its all-in-one moniker, the Canon Pixma MG6220 won’t disappoint.

Design
The Pixma MG6220 features a thin shape and a unique design that incorporates folding trays to keep the footprint small. The printer measures 18.5 inches wide, 14.5 inches deep, and just under 7 inches tall with both front and rear trays folded. It also weighs slightly more than average at 20.1 pounds due to the rear-mounted ADF and the six internal ink tanks, but it should still be relatively easy for anyone to transport around the home or office.

The far left side of the printer houses the only hard button for power. Touch-sensitive virtual buttons for copy, scan, and print controls light up the top-mounted interactive panel when you initially hit the hard power button, but the printer only illuminates the commands necessary for each function once you select a print mode. This feature helps eliminate confusion typical of heavily populated control panels.

The MG6220 will always display the “home” and “back” navigation buttons regardless of which application you access (print, copy, scan), but you can also scroll through the menus and adjust the number of print copies using the active touch wheel. Finally, an ample 3-inch color LCD screen lifts up from the middle and tilts 90 degrees forward and back to allow visibility no matter where the printer sits in relation to the user.

The new “as-needed” buttons are useful and easy to use, but I hope the next version will let you adjust sensitivity settings. The fixed setting is so sensitive that a quick swipe can easily trigger an accidental press, and even hovering your finger over the sensor can activate it.

Dual 150-sheet paper trays fold out of the top and bottom of the MG6220 and adjust forward and backward to accept a range of paper sizes from 4-inch-by-6-inch snapshots all the way up to legal-size sheets. The 300-sheet overall paper capacity means you can put different-sized media in both compartments, but the trays themselves both feel easily breakable; I can’t vouch for their durability over time and continued use.

The MG6220 can also print labels for your blank CD and DVDs using the extra feed tray included in the box. Canon calls it the Printable Disc tray, and it even has notches that fit full-size CDs as well as mini-media, but the special slot located just above the paper output tray can only accept one disc at a time. Regardless, the process is easy to use thanks to Canon’s free label-printing software (included) that lets you design and print your own stickers.

Setting up the printer is simple no matter how you choose to connect it to a computer, and the installation disc offers onscreen instructions that guide you through three connectivity options using either 802.11 b/g/n wireless, an Ethernet cable, or a simple USB cord. You can choose Easy Install to grab everything, or pick Custom Install for a-la-carte features, including Easy-PhotoPrint EX for managing your digital photos, MP Navigator EX to guide you through the scanning process, and more. Keep in mind you’ll need 691 megabytes of free hard drive space on your computer if you go with the comprehensive Easy Install.

Once Easy Installation is complete, Windows users will notice several new buttons displayed above the taskbar on the lower right side of the screen. These shortcuts are designed to give you quick access to five of the most commonly used printer functions: Scan a document, Layout print, Photo Print, Show Main Screen, and Hide.

The MG6220 also includes Canon’s HD Movie Print that pulls still photos out of videos shot with compatible Canon HD video cameras. I tested the printer with a Canon Powershot S95 top-flight handheld camera and was impressed with the Canon Solution Menu EX software’s step-by-step walkthrough instructions.

The software allows you to edit video images and prepare a moving clip for grabbing still shots from the video. It’s as simple as selecting a video snippet and either capturing a group of 10 frames or hitting the “capture” button to select single images. Once that’s finished, you can edit the image to reduce noise and sharpen images and although the SD95 is only capable of 720p video resolution, the software supports true 1080p digital SLR cameras like the Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

The lid of the MG6220 lifts to reveal the five-ink cartridge bay for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink tanks, and there’s another high-capacity pigment black cartridge inside that only draws ink when you toggle the “monochrome” mode within the driver preferences. This convenient feature actually saves you money in the long term by extending the longevity of the smaller black cartridge, since it only gets depleted in color print mode.

Printing functions aside, the MG6220′s copy function has all the features you’d expect from a diligent multifunction printer. You can enlarge the original copy up to 400 percent or simply fit the entire document to a page. Other special features include two-sided copying, borderless copying, exact duplication, cropped copy, and 2-on-1 and 4-on-1 photo collages.

Scanning is also typical, with save options that include sending the file straight to your PC, as an e-mail attachment, scanned as a PDF, or simply opening it to an application. You can save all documents as TIFF, JPEG, BMP, or PDF files, and the scanner now supports film and negatives as well. The negative and slide holders are accessible underneath the document protector underneath the lid. The scanner supports document sizes up to 8.5 inches by 11 inches, but the fixed hinge makes it difficult to stretch the scanner cover over thicker documents and books.

Performance
The disparity between the MG6220′s impressive text and presentation speed output versus the time it took to print photos and pages of color graphics is surprising. It’s no match for the Epson WorkForce 610 and drops down to second place in the text-page test with a respectable 8.24 pages per minute (PPM) but loses momentum and falls to the bottom of the pack at a sluggish 1.02 pages of color graphics and 0.87 full color photo snapshots per minute. Despite polarizing speed test results, you’re unlikely to notice the subtle differences as a consumer unless you’re printing consistently high numbers of pages of text or photos. To that point, the MG6220 isn’t the best performer for busy offices, although I wouldn’t hesitate to use its high-quality graphics prints in a boardroom presentation.

Contrary to the speed tests, the Pixma MG6220 performed well in CNET’s quality examination. It printed solid, dense text with fully formed characters down to five-point font size, and the color graphics emerged solid and evenly distributed. I did notice small portions of the graphic print outs had more neutral tones than the original image, specifically in areas with gradual color gradients. To confirm, I repeated the test three times and the imperfections were consistent, if subtle, throughout. In most cases, snapshot photos came out with vivid coloration and with even tones.

Service and support
Canon supports the Pixma MG6220 with a standard one-year limited warranty program that includes InstantExchange and a year of toll-free phone support. In addition, the product page for the printer features frequently asked questions, registration, recycling information, driver downloads, and more.

Conclusion
The Canon Pixma MG6220′s slower-than-average print speeds are offset by its competent extra features, including HD Movie Print, AirPrint compatibility, and dual paper trays that let you store up to 300 sheets at a time. In the future, I’d like to see Canon allow you to adjust the sensitivity of the control panel, but overall I’m satisfied to recommend this printer that finally achieves a balance between the modern luxury of touch sensitivity and the need for quick access to the control panel.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)

The HP Photosmart Premium C410a is of average size for a midgrade MFP, measuring 11.1 inches high, 18.4 inches wide, and 17.8 inches deep. It features one 125-sheet paper tray with a 20-sheet photo paper tray above it. In comparison, the Epson WorkForce 840′s 500-sheet paper tray offers four times the capacity for busy offices that cycle through more prints.

The Photosmart Premium C410a’s main paper tray can hold up to legal-size paper, and the small photo tray can hold up to 5×7 paper. A busy, high-volume office will constantly need to refill the 125-sheet paper tray, but it’s highly convenient for home users to have a dedicated photo tray that saves the hassle of manually loading photo paper when alternating between document and snapshot photo prints.

On top of the printer, you’ll find a 50-sheet auto-document feeder (ADF) that lets you slide in a stack of sheets for hands-free scanning, copying, or printing. The Photosmart Premium C410a also features automatic duplexing that can print on both sides of a single sheet of paper, and a button on the printer’s control panel lets you easily toggle between single- and double-sided printing.

The Photosmart Premium C410a bucks the touch-screen trend, serving up a control panel littered with physical buttons. The control panel runs nearly the entire width of the printer with ample room for an organized button layout. A small, 2.4-inch status LCD sits on the left side of the control panel. The panel sits fixed at an angle, but the color LCD can tilt forward for better viewing when you’re seated. To the left of the LCD on the front face of the printer are three media card slots (MemoryStick, SD, and CompactFlash) and a PictBridge USB port for direct printing from a compatible digital camera.

You’ll also notice a button labeled “Print Photos” in addition to the usual buttons to initiate scans, copies, and faxes. When you attach a USB device or insert a media card, the printer will scan the drive or card for photos that you can view on the LCD and scroll through using the arrow buttons. You can also select the photos you’d like to print, perform a few basic edits if you so desire (though the small screen makes it very difficult to see how your edits affect the image), and hit the Print Photo button to output your project. Finally, the convenient automatic paper sensor will automatically draw media directly from the photo paper tray.

Installing the printer is no more complicated than installing the software and drivers from the bundled CD, and then connecting the printer to your PC or Mac using a USB cable. You’ll need to supply your own for a direct connection as HP leaves it out of the box. The C410a also features Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking, and we connected it wirelessly on the printer by stepping through the setup screens, clicking on our preferred Wi-Fi network from a list, and entering our password.

You need no additional apps to print from an iPhone once you have the printer synched up to a wireless network. It also works with the iPad and iPod Touch, although we didn’t test with these devices. HP calls this functionality AirPrint, and it’s incredibly slick. Without the need to visit Apple’s App Store, we were able to print directly from our iPhone. We printed out a photo from our iPhone photo library by simply choosing the printer, and hitting Print. You can’t adjust any print properties, however, which resulted in some clipping on a square Hipstamatic photo using both letter-size paper and 4×6 photo paper.

In addition to AirPrint, the printer also features HP’s ePrint technology, whereby you can e-mail the printer an attachment to print out. To set it up, hit the ePrint button on the Photosmart Premium C410a’s control panel and it will print out a welcome sheet with a code that you then must enter on HP’s ePrint Web site. The code then becomes the e-mail address like so: code@hpeprint.com. ePrint is a convenient feature, but it comes with a few restrictions. For one, the printer must be on and also connected to your network (you select whether anyone can e-mail print jobs to your printer or only those to whom you grant access). For another, it can’t print Web pages, although you can simply copy the Web text into the body of an e-mail to get a similar page.

The printer also features HP’s print apps, which let you print pages from outlets such as Financial Times, Yahoo, Reuters, USA Today. Others from DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, and Disney let you print coloring pages, paper airplane templates, and other crafts. You can also install additional free apps, but you must do so from HP’s ePrint Center Web site after creating an account. It would be infinitely easier to simply download them directly to the printer. Also, the apps are much more useful on a printer with a larger LCD display.

The flatbed scanner/copier measures 8.5 by 11.7 inches, meaning it can scan or copy letter-size documents but not legal sheets. It features a 4,800 dpi resolution, and scanned and copied documents looked crisp and sharp. You can send scans to a PC, a memory card, or a USB drive. There is also an option for scanning photos to whatever paper you have in the photo tray. The front-right corner is used to align material to be copied or scanned, which is easier than other printers that make you align your pages or photos in the back-left corner. Unlike the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901, however, the Photosmart Premium C410a’s hinges do not detach, which is inconvenient when scanning or copying pages from thick textbooks.

The Photosmart Premium C410a employs a five ink-tank system (yellow, cyan, magenta, and two black cartridges). High-yield black cartridges (564XL) cost $17.99 for a rated 750 pages, and high-yield color ink cartridges (564XL) cost $22.99 for a rated 550 pages. Working with these figures, monochrome pages cost 2.4 cents a page, and color pages cost 4.1 cents a page. These numbers are roughly average for an inkjet, though the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 uses high-yield black ink cartridges that cost only $4.99 and deliver monochrome prints at less than a penny per page. The Pinnacle Pro901 also boasts a low 3.2-cents-per-color-page figure.

Performance
In lab testing, the HP Photosmart C410a proved itself an above-average performer across all four of our speed tests among multifunction printers (MFP) in its price range. On our speed tests, it produced just over eight pages of monochrome text, four pages of color graphics, and just over six PowerPoint slides per minute. Those speeds trailed the performance of the Epson WorkForce 840, our Editors’ Choice for this category, but outpaced similarly priced MFPs such as the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901. It also clearly outclassed an entry-level, two-tank MFP, the HP Photosmart D110a, which shows the performance you gain as you scale up HP Photosmart line.

The Photosmart C410a also produced 1.35 4×6 photos per minute; we think anything over 1 4×6 photo per minute is respectable, and even the highly rated WorkForce 840 failed to hit that mark.

The Photosmart C410a’s speed does not come at the expense of quality. It produced crisp, dark black text, which was clearly superior to the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901′s text quality. Color graphics and photos exhibited accurate colors, though we found that copies of photos, come out slightly blurry. That said, we recommend simply reprinting a photo from its digital source if you need another copy.

Service and support
HP backs the Photosmart C410a with its exclusive enhanced support services: a dedicated toll-free number, troubleshooting over online chat with an HP expert, and a one-year warranty that guarantees repairs with “Next-Day Business Turn Around” and offering brand-new replacement units for the first 30 days after purchase.

In addition, HP offers an added Accidental Damage Protection and a Pick-Up-and-Return program that sends an authorized courier to pick up your failed equipment and deliver it directly to an HP-designated repair facility.

You can find more warranty information by visiting the HP Support Web site that also features online classes, FAQs, driver downloads, and troubleshooting tips, as well as a new shopping buddy that puts you in a chat room with an HP sales rep so you can ask questions before you buy.

Conclusion
For a home office that needs copy, scan, and fax functions, the HP Photosmart Premium C410a offers crisp speeds and output. Its low-capacity paper tray limits its appeal for high-volume offices, but HP’s ePrint and AirPrint features make it a worthwhile option for home users.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)

Giving a printer? Thinking about buying one for yourself? Deals are abound, but before you head out to make that purchase take a few minutes to read our Holiday Printer Buying Guide. Inkjet or laser? Multi or single function? How much to spend? We’ve got the scoop on the best printers available this holiday season.

Brother, Canon, Epson and HP. They’ve all made our list. If you are out shopping make sure you check out the following.

Epson Workforce 635 Wireless All-in-One

The Epson Workforce 635 is built for office environments, but will work great for anyone. You may not want to spend the money (starting at $140.00) unless you do a lot of printing though. For those looking to save paper, and the environment, it automatically prints on both sides of a piece of paper. Printing photos? This may not be the printer for you. It’s photo print quality is average and its photo print speed is slow. The 635 is a visually appealing printer (shiny black) with a large, and easy to use, control panel. Replacement ink cartridges are reasonably priced. If you are looking for an office type printer (lots of text printing) this may be just what you need.

HP OfficeJet Mobile

Need to print documents, presentations, and handouts while on the road? The OfficeJet Mobile Printer is for you. Business professionals will love  it’s sleek design and print quality. HP has increased the printing speed over previous models and added Bluetooth wireless printing capabilities.  The printer also features a rechargeable battery. The drawback? It’s expensive (starting at $219.00). If you spend a lot of your work time on the road and need the ability print, this is the mobile printer you need.

Canon ImageClass MF3010

Easy to set up. Easy to use. Reasonably priced (starting at $109.95). The Canon ImageClass MF3010 is great for students, office professionals, and you budget minded folks. Here’s the bummer . . . No wireless networking or auto document feeder! If you can get past those two missing features get yourself this printer. You’ll be very happy with the print speed.

HP Photosmart Premium C410a

This printer is great for the home office crowd. Print, copy, scan, and fax all from the same printer. You are going to get quick print speeds and quality print outs. Those who don’t need to put a whole ream of paper in the paper tray every time they replace paper won’t mind the capacity of the paper tray (it holds a max of 125 sheets). The C410a will features wireless printing and offers access to HP’s Web printing technologies. A fair amount of features for its price (starting at $119.90).

Epson WorkForce 840 All-in-One

Another Epson printer! This multifunction inkjet printer quickly produces great prints (text and graphics). It also offers auto duplexing, wired/wireless networking, and support for mobile printing. If photo speed and quality are what you are looking for, you may want to skip this printer. This printer costs quite a bit more than the average All-in-One inkjet printer (starting at $314.99), but may just be worth it depending on your needs.

HP LaserJet Pro M1217nfw

This is HP’s most inexpensive multifunction laser printer (starting at $199.99). Small budget minded offices are going to get the most bang for their buck with this printer. You’ll be printing, copying, scanning, and faxing in just a matter of minutes (set up is very simple). The M1217nfw offers a driver-less set up and both wired and wireless connections. It’s a work horse printer for small offices that do a lot of monochrome printing. Unfortunately, no auto duplex printing here.

Brother HL-2270DW

The only Brother printer on our list! Basic printing functions at a budget price (starting at $89.99). Brother’s reliable and easy to use printer is just right for home users or students. This monochrome laser printer features wireless networking and quick print speeds. Get is for good looking black and white print outs, not for graphics (not good!).

Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901

Lexmark printers don’t typically make these types of lists, so they’ve done something good with the Pro901. The good I am referring to is Lexmark’s decision to make a lower performing printer in favor of a printer that is cost effective. They are jumping on the “printer ink is to expensive” bandwagon, and hoping to sell a lot of printers because of it. With the lowest black ink cost per page available Lexmark is hoping consumers will look past black prints that are not of the same quality as other printers, slow copy speeds, and poorly designed SmartSolutions app in favor of a low printing cost. The printer itself might be slightly overpriced (starting at $147.00) for the features you get.

A little something for those holiday do-it-yourselfers – Print your own holiday cards! If you are having trouble finding just the right way to convey your holiday wishes this year, why not print your own holiday cards. You can find many card templates online. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and print. If you ae good with graphics you can design your own card. Here are three things you’ll need to make sure your cards look good.

Tip # 1 – Pick the right paper
The secret to printing a great looking holiday card is to make sure you get the right paper. Make sure you get greeting card paper stock. Ideally you’ll get something that is 14 point gloss cover stock (if printing a photo on your card). If you have a speciality paper store in your area, ask them what they think is best. You can often get envlopes with the card stock. Buying card stock and envelopes together will save you some money.

Tip #2 – Check your printer settings
Before printing your holiday cards, make sure you update your printer settings. For the best looking card you will want to set your printer to print with maximum dpi (highest quality print quality setting). Once you’ve updated your printer settings, print a test card to make sure everything looks good. If you are happy with the test print, start printing the cards you want to send.

Tip #3 – Make sure you have enough printer ink
Make sure you have some spare printer ink cartridges. Using a high print quality setting will require more ink. Depending on the number of cards you are printing you may need to use a few cartridges.

Released in time for the back-to-school season, Epson squeezes a printer, scanner, and copy machine into a small device it’s calling the “small-in-one.” The Stylus NX430 occupies roughly the same amount of desk space as your average Blu-ray player, and it performed twice as fast as the four other competitive models, with high-scoring quality results to boot. We recommend investing in Epson’s extra-large-capacity ink refill tanks if you print a large volume of full-color documents and photos, but if price and space hold top priority on your printer shopping list, the $99 Epson Stylus NX430 is worth your dollar.

Design and features
The Stylus NX430′s space-saving design is the printer’s main focus, measuring a little more than 15 inches wide, 20 inches deep, and 11 inches tall. Relative to other printers, its size falls somewhere between a single function inkjet and a color laser printer, but at 9 pounds it’s only half the weight of the average color laser printer and ideal for offices that frequently move workstations.

The center control panel sits within a console that rotates up to a suitable viewing angle. Though I’m not usually a fan of virtual-only button layouts, I like that the only buttons that light up on the NX430 are the four-way directional pad and the power on and off controls–the rest of the functions illuminate depending on the particular function you’re accessing.

I did notice that the screen on this machine feels distinctly less responsive than the capacitive touch dials on the higher-end WorkForce 845 All-in-One. By contrast, NX430′s plastic surrounding the screen has a tendency to flex as you press down on it, lending a mushy feeling to menu navigation. The screen itself never gave me trouble in terms of virtual button actuation, however.

I can’t fault a $99 device for not including an auto-document feeder or multiple paper input trays, so all paper handling is fed through the single tray on the back and exits through the “mouth” below the controls. You’ll also notice a memory card reader up front that lets you walk up and print from an expansion card without actually touching a computer. You can preview your photos on the ample 2.5-inch LCD touch panel, and even make simple adjustments to crop dimensions, resize, or perform one-button touch-ups.

Epson gives you the option to connect the printer to your computer using direct USB or Wi-Fi. I assume most of you will prefer the latter, since Epson doesn’t include a USB cable in the box. Smart setup on the touch panel is a two-part process: turn on the machine and click Network Setting, then designate your wireless network and enter its password, and that’s it. The entire setup from start to finish, with a connection established on our lab network, took us less than 2 minutes. The installation process also includes a step that asks if you want the system to automatically hunt and install firmware updates, and we recommend you click “yes” when prompted; the appeal of Web-connected printers like the NX430 means you don’t have to wait for Epson to ship you software updates, so take advantage of it.

Connecting through Wi-Fi also means you can take advantage of Epson’s host of free mobile printing apps that let you print directly from mobile devices. First, the Epson iPrint application for iOS and Android devices enables you to print Web pages, photos, documents, and anything else on a smartphone directly to the WorkForce NX430, though I noticed the printer cropped photos when I flipped orientation from portrait to landscape and vice versa, so I wouldn’t recommend using the app to print important images like business presentations this way; it’s more appropriate for quick outputs of snapshot photos and to-do lists.

Performance
In our speed tests, the Stylus NX430 performed at an average rate printing photos, but it sprints ahead of the competition with presentation output speed, color graphics speed, and especially text speed. To widen the margin further, the NX515 printed a staggering 14.11 pages per minute of plain text on plain white paper.

Meanwhile, the next fastest printers are the Lexmark Interpret S405 and the Canon Pixma MX410 that both registered only 7.65 and 6.08 pages per minute (PPM), respectively.

In fact, the Epson churned out more pages per minute (text, graphics, and presentations) than most inkjet printers I’ve tested to date. Look no further than the Epson Stylus NX430 printer if you need hard copies of your documents in your hand as quickly as possible.

The printer also doesn’t disappoint in terms of print quality. With so many driver options to choose from, Epson makes it easy to cater to your prints in the most efficient way possible. I tried to cycle through most of the options, including using Epson’s Vivid colorspace as opposed to Adobe’s RGB, but I found that Epson’s preset setting produced the most pleasing and accurate images. By far, the most accurate samples came from black and colored text and graphics containing thick, black lines.

Considering the cost of the printer and the consumables, the Epson’s print samples are some of the most evenly saturated, fully formed shapes I’ve seen in a while. I’m satisfied with the weight of thin and thick lines, and the readability is clear even down to the smallest fonts on normal white document paper. I’m equally happy with the photo quality that continues to live up to the Epson name. All the printouts display smooth quality and are free of graininess or blotchy facial tones.

Service and support
Epson backs the Stylus NX430 with a limited one-year warranty that includes toll-free customer support weekdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT. Further support is available online through a model-specific troubleshooting guide, FAQs, e-mail support, driver updates, and document downloads.

Conclusion
The Epson WorkForce NX430 lives up to its “small-in-one” moniker with the size and features to match. Students and small offices cramped for space will have to sacrifice an auto-document feeder and double-sided prints to get the NX430 under $100, but its Wi-Fi connectivity, quick print speeds, and the most recent addition of iPrint apps for smartphones make this multifunction a worthwhile grab.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)

The good: The Dell 1130n’s low-profile design, basic setup procedure, and decent output results make it a strong contender to be your next light-duty office printer.

The bad: The 1130n’s graphical output quality needs improvement, and it doesn’t include Wi-Fi connectivity.

The bottom line: Although it performed adequately in our print speed tests, this basic monochrome laser printer is outgunned by competitive devices with wireless networking for the same price.

The Dell 1130n delivers the basic features we’d expect from a budget monochrome laser printer; it includes wired networking through the Ethernet port on the back, an ample 250-sheet paper tray, and a separate one-sheet manual feed tray for irregular media. We wouldn’t think twice about recommending getting the 1130n if you see it on sale, but its simple design and modest functionality don’t justify its $180 retail value. If you’re on the hunt for a new laser printer, we’d instead point to the Samsung ML-2525W, an aesthetically similar device with the added benefit of Wi-Fi access.

Design and features
The 1130n measures only 14.2 inches wide, 15.3 inches deep, and 7.8 inches tall, and its slim dimensions make it easy to camouflage in a busy work space. As with many laser printers, Dell uses a conservative black for the same reason, with a curved paper path that places the output tray on top of the small, rectangular unit. Conversely, the input tray pulls out of the lower half of the front and can hold up to 250 sheets of standard 8.5×11-inch paper. Dell also tells us the printer can handle approximately 12,000 pages per month (also called the duty cycle), which should be more than enough for up to a medium-size business. You can also load thicker media like cardstock and envelopes into the single-sheet manual feed slot that sits just above the main paper drawer.

We hesitate to call the top portion of the printer the “control panel,” since you only get two buttons (power and cancel print job) and two error notification lights to work with. Considering the simplicity of a monolaser, you aren’t likely to need more. On the other hand, the fixed 90-degree angle of the button layout means that depending on how high you have the printer on your desk, you may need to stand up to see them. Overall the controls are intuitive to navigate, and with no wireless networking installed in the 1130n, the printer is simple for even the most amateur technophobe to operate.

The setup is also painless thanks to the driver installation disc that comes with the printer. According to Dell, the 1130n is compatible with a variety of Windows versions including 32- and 64-bit Vista and 7, 2000, XP, and Server, as well as Linux and Mac OS 10.3 through 10.6. The onscreen instructions guide you through the 2-minute unboxing, physical setup, and software installation process using a USB cable, which you’ll need to purchase separately since it doesn’t come with one.

Folding down the front panel drawer uncovers two separate paper bays: one to hold 150 sheets of plain white paper, and a plastic lip on top that corrals outgoing sheets. The tray also features slides on either side that adjust to fit standard legal paper as well as alternative media sources like coated paper, envelopes, and labels. Unlike other business-oriented laser printers, however, there’s no manual bypass feeder of the kind some find useful for loading transparencies or labels.

The monochrome toner cartridge is easy to pull out after you disengage the plastic front panel, and Dell includes a standard-capacity toner cartridge with the unit. You can pick up a refill for $63 on the Dell Web site that will supposedly print up to 1,500 sheets. That comes out to about 4.2 cents per page, which is just higher than the average cost for a plain sheet of black ink on both laser and inkjet printers. Alternatively, if you find yourself printing more than average, we recommend investing in the $88 extra-large-capacity toner with a 2,500-page yield that comes out to 3.5 cents per page.

Dell keeps the retail cost of the 1130n low by leaving out two features: autoduplexing (double-sided printing) and the ability to print over a Wi-Fi network. Employees in an office can still link multiple stations to the 1130n using the Ethernet networking port on the back, but we’re troubled by the choice to omit Wi-Fi at this price, when the Samsung ML-2525W and the Brother HL-2270DW both include wireless connectivity for $150.

Performance
The 1130n trails the competition slightly in our monochrome text throughput test, but you likely won’t notice a speed difference unless you’re consistently printing over 20 pages at a time. While Dell can’t match the Lexmark E460dw in three out of the four tests.

The Dell 1130n performed well, but not exceptionally, in the output quality assessment portion of our tests. As expected, it produced a beautiful page of black text with solid lines and clean edges with uniform character spacing and fully formed figures down to an unreadable font, but the printer failed to deliver similar results with a page of graphics. While we still don’t doubt its ability to create handouts and presentation documents for the boardroom, we did notice malformed gradations and inconsistency in the finer lines. The same goes for snapshot photos, although we’ll assume you aren’t buying a monolaser printer to enrich your career as a photographer.

Service and support
The standard warranty for the Dell 1130n lasts one year, but you can upgrade it to up to four additional years. Dell provides free, toll-free phone support 24-7, but recommends trying the live online chat option first. For less urgent inquiries, you can also contact Dell’s e-mail support team or check out its user forums. Dell’s Web site has product-specific support in the form of online user guides, driver and software downloads, and a troubleshooting tool.

Conclusion
The Dell 1130n monochrome laser printer serves up acceptable quality for home offices and small business, with consistent performance, simple setup, and Ethernet networking, but if you’re looking for a bargain or care about a Wi-Fi connection option, we recommend the Samsung ML-2525W instead.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)

The good: Canon’s new imaging suite with HD Movie Print, automatic photo filters, Pixma Cloud Link printing, and an integrated disc labeler all make the Canon Pixma MG5320 more useful for amateur photographers.

The bad: The printer lacks an Ethernet port for wired networking, and with no high-yield cartridges available, consumables can get pricey.

The bottom line: We recommend the Canon Pixma MG5320 and its photo-friendly features for amateur photographers shopping for a do-most-of-it imaging device, but the step-up Pixma MG6120 is a better fit for multiuser offices.

The Canon Pixma MG5320 printer encourages families, work groups, and individuals to print creative photos with the help of new software features like HD Movie Print, fun photo filters, and Pixma Cloud Link. Still, we have a few complaints. The printer doesn’t have an Ethernet port so you have to connect to Wi-Fi for network printing, and with no high-yield ink cartridge option, the cost of replacing all five standard-size inks can get out of hand. Despite those caveats, the MG5320 earns our recommendation for competent performance in our speed and quality tests, and the extras you get for $150 offset its connectivity shortcomings.

Design
The Pixma MG5320 has a thinner silhouette than we’re used to seeing from Canon, incorporating a unique design with folding trays to reduce its overall footprint. The printer measures 17.8 inches wide, 14.5 inches deep, and just under 7 inches tall with the paper trays folded up. At 18.3 pounds it weighs less than its beefier linemate, the Pixma MG6120, due to the rear-mounted, 150-sheet autodocument feeder (ADF) and the five internal ink tanks. With those specs, it should be relatively easy to transport around the home or office.

The MG5320 also costs $50 less than the MG6120 because it doesn’t feature a touch-screen panel. We actually prefer the additional hard buttons on the control panel, as they make it easier to rapidly locate the necessary buttons to access a job. The top of the printer is home to the one-touch copy, scan, and print buttons, but you also get a tactile home button and a circular dial that clicks as you scroll through menus on the 3-inch LCD screen. You can adjust the brightness level of the display by navigating to the settings menu, and the screen can be tilted forward and backward to achieve your desired viewing angle.

The 150-sheet paper trays that fold out of the top and bottom of the MG5320 allow horizontal and vertical movement to accept a range of paper sizes from 4×6-inch snapshots all the way up to legal-size sheets. The 300-sheet overall capacity means you can store standard paper in the bottom tray and photo paper in the ADF, and a paper sensor inside automatically knows which one to grab depending on your job. The trays themselves are made of a light plastic that feels easy to break; we worry about their durability.

Setting up the printer is simple no matter how you choose to connect it to a computer, and the installation disc provides onscreen instructions guiding you through two options: 802.11 b/g/n wireless, or a simple USB cord. Most printers in this range also include an Ethernet port for wired networking in small offices, but Canon omits this key feature from the MG5320 so it can pull an extra $50 from your wallet if you opt instead for the $200 MG6120. Regardless, this won’t be an issue if you’re planning to use the printer at home or with a single computer.

USB setup is standard for printers and the instructions are easy to follow, and the same is true of Wi-Fi installation. If you have a wireless router with a Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) button, all you have to do is press the button and it’ll automatically connect the Pixma MG5320 to your network without your needing to input your username and password. Otherwise, make sure you have that information handy.

From here, you can select either Easy Install for straightforward help, or Custom Install if you want to sort through which extra features you want–these include Easy-PhotoPrint EX for managing digital photos, MP Navigator EX to guide you through the scanning process, and Pixma Cloud Link, which lets you print directly from the Canon Image Gateway portal or a Picasa account. Keep in mind that you’ll need more free storage space on your hard drive if you go with the comprehensive Easy Install.

Once installation is complete, Windows users will notice several new buttons displayed above the taskbar on the lower right side of the screen. These shortcuts are designed to give you quick access to five of the most commonly used printer functions: Scan a Document, Layout Print, Photo Print, Show Main Screen, and Hide Toolbar.

The MG5320 also includes Canon’s HD Movie Print feature, which lets you pull still snapshots out of videos shot with compatible Canon HD video cameras. We tested the printer with a top-flight Canon PowerShot S95 handheld camera and were impressed with the Canon Solution Menu EX software’s step-by-step instructions.

With the software you can also edit video images and prepare a moving clip for grabbing still shots from the video. It’s as simple as selecting a video snippet and either capturing a group of 10 frames or hitting the “capture” button to select single images. After that, you can edit an image to reduce noise and sharpen it, and although the SD95 is only capable of 720p video resolution, the software supports true 1080p digital SLR cameras like the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. When that’s finished, you can even print custom disc and jewel-case labels using the multipurpose tray installed just above the paper input tray, and you can personalize them using templates accessible through the software suite.

Finally, Canon’s new HD Movie Print tool lets you combine multiple still frames from a video into a single snapshot image–for example, you can merge all your golf stroke positions into one photo. The lid of the MG5320 lifts to reveal the five-ink cartridge bay for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink tanks, and there’s another high-capacity pigment black cartridge inside that only draws ink when you toggle the monochrome mode within the driver preferences.

This should extend the longevity of the smaller black cartridge since it only gets depleted in color print mode, and MG5320 users need all the cost savings they can get, as according to Canon the cost per page of each ink set is 5.2 cents per monochrome page and 13.4 cents for color. Those prices are significantly higher than the average cost for consumables, and the Canon Web store mysteriously does not sell high-capacity cartridges for this model.

Printing functions aside, the MG5320′s copy function has all the features you’d expect from a multifunction printer. You can enlarge the original copy up to 400 percent or fit the entire document to a page. Other options include two-sided copying, borderless copying, exact duplication, cropped copy, and two-on-one and four-on-one photo collages.

Scanning is also typical, with options to save the file straight to your PC, as an e-mail attachment, or scanned as a PDF, or to simply open it in an application. You can save all documents as TIFF, JPEG, bitmap, or PDF files, and the scanner now supports film and negatives as well. The negative and slide holders live under the document protector beneath the lid, and the scanner supports document sizes up to 8.5×11 inches. If you tend to scan at the highest resolution available, the MG6120 can reach 4,800×4,800 dots per inch (dpi).

Performance
We’re surprised at the disparity between the MG5320′s impressive text and presentation speed output and the time it took to print photos and pages of color graphics. It’s no match for the Epson WorkForce 610 and drops down to second place in the text page test with a respectable 8.11 pages per minute, then loses momentum and falls to near the bottom at a sluggish 2.06 pages of color graphics and 1.02 full-color photo snapshots per minute. Despite these polarizing speed test results, you’re unlikely to notice the differences as a consumer unless you’re printing consistently high numbers of pages of text or photos. Still, the MG5320 isn’t the best performer for busy offices, although we wouldn’t hesitate to flaunt its output quality in a boardroom presentation.

The Pixma MG5320 performed well in our quality examination, printing solid, dense text with fully formed characters down to 5-point font size. The color graphics test emerged solid and evenly distributed, but we did notice small portions with more neutral tones than the original, specifically in areas with gradual color gradients and skin tones. To confirm, we repeated the test in three iterations and the imperfections were consistent throughout, although unlikely to be noticed by most eyes. In most cases, snapshot photos came out with vivid coloration and even tones.

Service and support
Canon supports the Pixma MG5320 with a standard one-year limited warranty program that includes InstantExchange and a year of toll-free phone support. The product page for the printer features frequently asked questions, registration, recycling information, driver downloads, and other information.

Conclusion
The Canon Pixma MG5320′s slower print speeds are offset by useful photo printing tools like HD Movie Print, Pixma Cloud Link, disc printing, and dual paper trays that let you store up to 300 sheets at a time. In the future, we’d like to see Ethernet connectivity as well, but we would definitely recommend this printer to photo enthusiasts in need of a budget-friendly assistant.

(Review by Justin Yu on CNET – Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he’s not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast.)