There are two big reasons for choosing an all-in-one printer. This costs less than buying each of the four devices separately. This also is great space-saver as you need a single space area instead of four. Well, a multi-functional printer is endowed with four capabilities – printing, faxing, photocopying and scanning. However, if you are looking for very small printers, you may not find one that has these four functions.
A shopper of an all-in-one printer has to check on the individual features for each of the functions. In printing, the resolution and speed are the main concern. Resolution is measured via dots per inch while speed is gauged by the number of pages per minute.
The photocopier part of the device uses xerographic printing which is identical to the technology being used by digital photocopying machines. The images are produced via direct scanning of the laser beam.
The scanner functionality can use two types of scanning technologies. These are the charge-coupled device and contact image sensors. In choosing the scanning function, you have to check on how the documents are scanned. The two ways are scanning by feeding a sheet at a time or scanning over a flat-bed.
The faxing function is very simple and is chosen on the basis of speed. The minimum fax speed should be 55 Kbps. There are different fax features like color faxing. The more sophisticated the features are, the more expensive the all-in-one printer is.