All-in-One Printer

This name describes the body, not the ink. Underneath the flatbed lid you may find a cartridge inkjet, an ink tank, a monochrome laser or a color laser engine, and that choice still governs what a page costs. Treat the printing half and the scanning half as two separate purchases that happen to share a power cable.

The scanning half is a sheet of glass with a lamp and sensor bar beneath it, and on better models a document feeder above. Home feeders hold 20 to 35 sheets and run 15 to 25 pages a minute. A single-pass duplex feeder carries two sensor bars and reads both sides in one pull. A reversing feeder pulls each sheet through twice, roughly doubling both the time and the jam risk.

Consolidation costs you redundancy. One paper jam, one dead logic board or one empty color cartridge can take printing, copying and scanning offline together. The lid and feeder add 4 to 6 inches of height and need clearance to open. Fax, where it still appears, needs an analog phone line. Internet-based phone service breaks it often enough that it should not decide the purchase.

Check the flatbed covers a full letter or A4 sheet, since some compact models stop short and force two passes on a legal page. Confirm the machine copies and scans both sides unattended, and whether it sends scans straight to email or a network folder with no computer awake. If your laptop carries only USB-C sockets, as covered under Laptops, budget for an adapter to the printer's square USB-B plug or use the network instead.

Households that print, copy and occasionally digitize paperwork get more from one body than from three separate machines. Anyone scanning hundreds of pages a week should pair a cheap printer with a proper Document Scanner instead, because the small feeder here is the first part to feel slow.