On the Hunt for the Perfect Home Office Printer

In most homes there comes a time when the family printer needs to be replaced. Perhaps the kids are slightly older now and need to have school work printed out or have taken up photography and are calling for a printer that will print their photos. Perhaps Mum has started working from home and needs a well-functioning printer for her new job. Let’s face it, with other technology improving so fast our printers need to keep up and sadly the family printer bought 10 years ago is just not going to cut it anymore.

So, we are on the hunt for something that will satisfy the whole family as well as the budget. It must also suit the newly revamped office space, not taking up too much space or being too noisy or looking old fashioned. A hard ask you might think, but there you would be mistaken. There are plenty of options on the market to suit every household, as we found when we did a bit of research.

Some of our favourites are reviewed below

Brother MFC-J6920DW

The Brother MFC-J6920DW is a neatly designed black and white unit which promises high speed, high volume, wide format printing with a low cost per page. It takes 4 Brother ink cartridges which are easily installed, and the black cartridge can print up to 2400 A4 pages. It has three input sources – two drawers up the front and 1 override tray on the back which can print on envelopes, forms and labels. It also has an automatic document feeder for scanning, copying and faxing. This printer can print and scan from SD cards and USB sticks as well as from alternative mobile devices like iPads, iPhones and Android devices.

Canon Pixma TR8560

The Canon Pixma TR8560 is light and compact and fits comfortably onto any desktop. It has front and rear paper feeding with each tray holding 200 sheets of paper. This printer produces high quality printing from your home or smart device. It can also fax, auto duplex print and has wi-fi and bluetooth connectivity. The SD card slot makes photo printing easy and because this printer uses 5 inks – cyan, magenta, yellow and black as well as a pigment black which darkens text and the black in photos while increasing the colour range –  the photo quality is exceptional giving vibrant and bright details.

HP OfficeJet Pro 6960

The HP OfficeJet Pro 6960 prints, scans, faxes and copies and promises to produce water and smear resistant documents. It can print up to 18 black pages per minute and has automatic 2-sided printing to save you money and reduce your carbon footprint. The 2.6-inch colour touchscreen makes this an easy printer to set up and to use. It has one paper tray with a capacity of 225 pages. This printer does not have an SD slot so is not an ideal printer for the photographers out there.

Choices, choices, choices. It can be exhausting trying to decide between products that seem to do much the same thing. So, start off by setting yourself a budget. Next decide what you need your printer to do. Some printers may offer more than you need to make a list of your family’s requirements and stick to it. Consider size of printer and speed of printing if these are important to you. You can narrow it down quite substantially before you even start looking. This makes the task of choosing less daunting. Or you could pick up the phone and call one of our friendly Ink Depot staff members who will happily help you decide on the printer that best suits your family.

Happy Hunting!