Multifunction Printers Do It All

The Duo look at all-in-one print-fax-scan combo devices.

So you've got everything tucked away on your computer--photos, videos, your great American screenplay. How do you get them off your hard drive and somewhere you can use? This week the Duo are talking aboutoutput--awful word, crucial computing function.

We'll start with printers. These days, many people simply use the printer that came free with their computer--buy a machine, get a printer, pay and pay and pay for ink. Steve feels that a lot of people will do fine with a free or cheap inkjet, but Angela's a veteran of one of those deals and still feels that the company should have paid her to take that piece of junk off its hands. (The Duo contemplated staging a public execution of said inkjet on camera, but cooler heads prevailed and Angela was encouraged to dispose of the device in a manner both dignified and legal.)

But there are better printers to be had: a special category of peripherals that will cost you money, but may be a better deal for a lot of people. That would be the category of so-called multifunction printers, or MFPs for short. Some companies call them AIOs, which sounds too much like "Old MacDonald" for Steve but means, of course, "all in one." And Steve, always up for butchering a Romance language, likes to call thempluribus unums--"from many, one." (Yes, we know he left out theEat the beginning.)

Call them what you like, these gadgets not only print but do at least two other useful things, and sometimes three. You can use them as scanners to capture pages of text or photos to your computer (yes, that would be input, but work with the Duo here), or as copiers; some also toss in the ability to do faxing, which is getting to be less important in the age of digital documents, but sometimes it's still handy.

So: It prints! It copies! It scans! Maybe it faxes! Now, what would you expect to pay for one of these beauties? A million dollars? A thousand? How about a hundred? It's true, and that's an amazing deal. Steve paid considerably more for his several years ago, and he says he'd never consider going back to a plain old printin' machine.

There are a lot of these multifunction printers on the market. So how do you choose? The Duo reveal all in the next segment.