Multifunction Printers

We collected more than 2 tons of elite machinery from Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, Sharp Document Solutions Co. of America and Xerox in our University of Wisconsin-Madison labs. IBM declined to participate, saying it had no review units available. We also invited Imagistics, Konica, Panasonic, Samsung, Tally Genicom and Toshiba, but none had products that met our requirements.

HP trusted our mechanical aptitude enough to leave the setup to us; we went from boxes to an initial print in 50 minutes. Canon, Ricoh, Sharp and Xerox representatives assembled their products on site at our University of Wisconsin-Madison labs. Canon's, Ricoh's and Sharp's printers took significantly more than 50 minutes to install. Xerox shipped its WorkCentre Pro C2636 mostly preassembled. Each product had a multifunction finisher attached (for more information on finishers, see "FYI: Photo Finish,").

Sales channels vary. Canon, Ricoh and Sharp sell only through closed distribution: You must buy or lease a unit through select local resellers. Xerox distributes its devices directly. HP follows the same open-distribution model it uses for its printers, meaning you can buy from any vendor that carries HP products.

Test TimeWe tested these high-end multifunction printers from the perspective of the IT professional needing to administer these machines for business-class use. Print quality, speed, density and color correctness, though important, were not measured for this review. Also, note that FCO (first copy out) and warm-up times are dependent on environmental conditions, including temperature and the amount of time since the device was last used.

All the products we tested print, copy, scan and fax. They provide an easy way to move information around, and if your company uses a document-management system, these devices will interact with it.

We found management quite flexible as well. We controlled all test devices over each printer's internal Web server, and all the devices interoperated with common management tools using SNMP. The vendors all provided utilities for discovery through broadcast or multicast.

Because many IT people are new to the wonders of multifunction printers, little touches meant a lot. For example, we appreciated the effort Xerox put into its Windows driver. Not only did it display exactly what the printer looked like--even changing the picture when we added the finisher--it also fetched the current configuration directly from the machine. This made setup easy and gave us a good feel for the device. Canon's imageRunner C3220 and Sharp's AR-BC320 also gathered configuration data directly. HP's LaserJet 9500 and Ricoh's Afficio 2228C could fetch some information--but the data was incomplete, and both required additional software beyond the Windows driver.

All the printers we tested can be loaded with additional software--for example, a custom document-management solution. But we ran into a problem testing such capabilities with the Canon machine. Canon's Java-based development platform, dubbed MEAP (Multifunction Embedded Application Platform), has an SDK. Yet Canon refused to send us the SDK, saying it releases the kit only to large entities with dedicated development staffs or to third-party companies looking to develop software to work on the machine. Despite our promise that we would endeavor not to break the copier, we didn't get to play. If you have better luck, drop us a line.Finally, we tested how easy it was to collect statistics on the number of pages printed, and by whom. Gartner reports that enterprises spend 1 percent to 3 percent of their revenue on document output, and we believe it: Pricing for the devices tested averaged $22,800, and Canon quoted us $167 each for yellow, cyan and magenta toner cartridges, $105 for black. The bright side is that enterprises that actively manage their document-output fleets can save 10 percent to 30 percent of their recurrent spending, according to Gartner. Usage stats regarding page-based leasing are available from every machine tested. If your organization prefers finer-grained accounting, make sure the model you want will provide it: HP's LaserJet 9500 lacks internal number-based accounting.

Each product performed reasonably well, but left us wanting in a few areas. For example, faxing has been supported on multifunction printers for a number of years, yet none of the devices tested have it down pat. Take the Xerox device: Although sending multiple page faxes from the document feeder on the device was straightforward, sending multipage faxes from the glass (physically putting each page down on the copier glass and sending them one at a time, rather than through the feeder) required a configuration option buried deep within the system. We couldn't send multipage e-mail messages from the glass at all. The Sharp AR-BC320 shared this weakness: It let us send multipage faxes but not e-mail attachments. The HP LaserJet 9500 sent neither multipage faxes nor e-mail messages from the glass.

Red Alert

As we watched the vendor reps set up their devices, a scary thought occurred to us: Each multifunction printer has a secret code that would enable service technicians to bypass our security measures. The curse of an active imagination.

Speaking of security, one standout feature found in all the printers tested is the ability to print and hold jobs securely. Be careful, though: Securely means only that we could assign a secret number to a sensitive job at our desk before hitting "print." The job didn't print until we punched that code on the printer console. Managers who share a printer with their reports will appreciate this. Each copier also has hard-drive overwrite capabilities--for an additional cost.Canon also provided us with its Canon's Copy Control Card System III. But it's, at best, as secure as a lock on a screen door. The access method to identify yourself and print secure jobs is a plastic punch card; we made working forgeries with a sheet of standard card stock, a copier and a razor blade. This method compares unfavorably with the standard, simpler, cheaper and stronger copy-number passwords.

Prince of Printers

Our Editor's Choice is the Xerox WorkCentre Pro C2636. It offered the best balance and integration among features, and we liked its simple drop-down menus and clear illustrations. The product sports slick features as well--for example, it can prevent one oddball job from becoming a bottleneck.

Let's suppose Fred orders a printout requiring paper not loaded in the WorkCentre. Sue and Bill each print jobs on normal paper. The WorkCentre is the only printer we tested that will put Fred's job on hold and move Sue's and Bill's to print. As soon as Fred finishes his doughnut and loads his special paper, his job will proceed.

The Xerox WorkCentre Pro was clearly built from the ground up as a full-fledged multifunction printer, rather than just a printer or copier with extra features tacked on. We found the WorkCentre's console interface easy to use, thanks to flexible menus that Xerox calls "pathways." As mentioned, the provided driver was intuitive, offering a raft of complicated finishing options in a clear and consistent format.Besides working around one-off print jobs, the product can natively authenticate to a variety of authentication servers, including NDS, SMB, Solaris Kerberos and Windows Kerberos. This let us apply strong authentication methods on the printers. However, we had to enter information on a small touch screen, which made typing passwords difficult. Another, more serious limitation is that the authentication is good only for sending images over the network; it doesn't correlate to output accounting, which uses a separate database.

Like all the other devices except HP's LaserJet, the WorkCentre Pro performs standard numbers-based account management to track output per user; this is a must for organizations collecting usage metrics. Surprisingly, though, we couldn't manage this feature by way of the Web configuration pages. Creating accounts in bulk required a separate software tool (freely available from Xerox) to import and export accounting information over the device's USB port.

Faxing was straightforward and worked as expected. We did miss some features found on rivals, including printing to fax directly from a Windows desktop and redirecting incoming faxes to an e-mail address.

In the image-sending area, all the products can query LDAP to find names and addresses, but the WorkCentre's touch-screen interface is by far the best and gave us plenty of information when multiple matches were returned. Searching LDAP is key to minimizing not only the amount of data entry required to get these products going initially, but also ongoing data maintenance.

WorkCentre Pro C2636, $22,885. Xerox Corp., (800) 275-9376. www.xerox.com/office

The Canon ImageRunner, like multifunction printers from Ricoh and Sharp, has the air of an expensive copier supplemented with additional parts, all held together with software.One feature we appreciated was being able to configure from one screen a default tray for any type of output job. We set our printouts to default to the top tray of the finisher; copies, to the tray beneath the scanner; and faxes, to the bottom tray of the finisher. Although the other printers also let you select the output tray for different printouts, such selections are typically broken out into subfeature options.

As mentioned, we tried and failed to get our hands on Canon's SDK. Fortunately, the $3,955 third-party eCopy software loaded on our imageRunner was extremely flexible, providing three unique capabilities. First, it let us preview documents before copying, faxing or e-mailing directly from the device's touch-screen interface. None of the other products offer this feature. Also, if we wanted to add, delete or replace a page, we could do so easily using a neat graphical display.

The second function we really liked was the ability to program buttons directly on the printer to do tasks. We could assemble a set of generic building blocks to perform complicated functions, then bind them to buttons; eCopy calls these "quick connects." We programmed our imageRunner to scan from itself to the laser printer in our lab. There are countless possibilities for these quick connects.

Finally, we like that eCopy lets outbound scans go through standard MAPI calls to an e-mail client, like Outlook. The scans then become part of the e-mail record, which is great for auditing requirements.

The system does have a number of drawbacks, however. As mentioned, security is lacking, and the printer as tested costs nearly $8,500 more than the others we tested, not counting the eCopy application. On the bright side, as with all the multifunction printers we tested except HP's, pricing is la carte. If you don't need analog faxing, you can save a few hundred bucks.

Finally, the imageRunner was the slowest to warm up. When you want to make your first printout or copy in the morning, send it before you grab a cup of coffee--it will take about six minutes for the device to awaken from deep power-save mode. The only other device that was nearly this slow was the LaserJet 9500, with a slightly better five-minute warm-up time from deep sleep. During the day, the imageRunner was ready within 30 seconds.Cannon imageRunner C3220, $31,349; eCopy Share Scan, $3,995. Canon USA, (800) OK-CANON, (516) 328-5000. www.usa.canon.com

The Sharp AR-BC320 is a decent multifunction printer with a good console interface and efficient client-side tools. The user interface clearly showed the machine. There are two "Go" buttons: one for color, the other for monochrome. The clear "Job Status" button quickly showed who was tying up resources and the print-fax and image-send queues. Finally, the system provides easy hooks to Sharpdesk, a Windows-based tool.

With Sharpdesk, we created several destination profiles on the AR-BC320. We entered items directly to the address book on the AR-BC320 for otherwise complicated tasks. For example, one destination caused Sharpdesk to send out a scan through our local MAPI e-mail client. We also made destinations for PDF and TIFF image files and were able to OCR a document straight into Microsoft Word. One note about using OCR: We got much better results with a high resolution--the 200-dpi default resolution didn't work nearly as well as the 600-dpi high-resolution scan.

The AR-BC320 has the flattest physical print path of all the printers tested, and that lets it print on the heaviest paper--up to 300 gsm (equivalent to 170-pound index paper; for more on paper weights see "When a Pound Isn't a Pound,"). The Sharp AR-BC320 also offers the largest number of sheets--as many as 5,750 pages with a very large side-sheet feeder. Unfortunately, Sharp has dedicated an entire tray to an automatic duplexing unit, and that limits the number and types of non-Letter/A4 size sheets available.

Although we liked the device's touch screen, the on-console configuration menus are a hodgepodge--there's little to no organizational structure, and the menus are not consistent. For instance, on the key operator (super user) menu, entries are not grouped logically, so we wasted a lot of time locating desired configuration items.

Sharp AR-BC320 Color Imager, $22,540. Sharp Document Solutions Co. of America, (800) BE-SHARP, (201) 529-8200. www.sharpusa.comOf all the devices we tested, the Ricoh Aficio 2228C felt the most like a copier with addi-tional features tacked on--in fact, many features felt barely connected. Even the Windows print driver seems underdeveloped.

The console interface was arranged in a logical manner. One useful feature is the ability to choose from autocolor selection, full color, monochrome, single color or two-color copies. The single- and two-color copies are useful if you want only, say, black and yellow. Remember that printers work in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black), not RGB, so if you want red you'll be using two colors of toner even if you select "one-color" mode.

One of our major beefs with the Aficio is its Windows print driver. First, we had to install Ricoh's SmartDeviceMonitor for Client, which installs a special TCP/IP printing port needed for the Windows driver to enable auto-updating features that other devices tested provide directly from their native drivers. If you have many Windows users, this could be a problem, depending on how you install your print drivers.

Also, by default the Aficio does not have its job queue enabled, meaning the device works exactly like a simple printer--it's online and potentially servicing a document, or offline so nothing can be submitted. If there is a fault in the Aficio, jobs cannot be submitted and may queue up on your users' workstations. With help from Ricoh, we managed to enable the queue through the telnet port.

Ricoh Aficio 2228C, $20,775. Ricoh Corp., (973) 882-2000. www.ricoh-usa.com

Even though the HP LaserJet 9500mfp came in last because of problems with its console interface and robustness, its color-image copies looked the best to us. We also liked the standard HP LaserJet functions, such as logging to a syslog server and running NTP, that are present on this platform. Although we found many of the on-console configuration menus difficult to operate, we configured the LaserJet 9500 through HP's freely available WebJetAdmin program.HP is taking a different approach to multifunction printers. The 9500mfp was reasonably priced--about half the price of the Canon imageRunner. In the right situation, it can provide tremendous bang for your buck.

HP only recently entered the multifunction printer space, and it shows. In copy mode, we disliked the on-screen display--features were hard to control, easy to reset to their defaults and tedious to re-enter. Furthermore, when copying from the glass, the 9500mfp doesn't indicate which copy it's working on. Also missing is internal accounting other than at the device level. With the 9500mfp, you'll live with device-level statistics or attach an external device to accomplish per-user accounting.

The 9500mfp can scan a two-sided document in one pass--it has a second scanner inside the document feeder. This makes the document feeder heavier, and we worry about the long-term reliability of a scanner inside a feeder that may be subject to significant jarring over time.

Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 9500mfp, $16,516.50, with multifunction finisher and 2,000 sheet tray. Hewlett-Packard Co., (650) 857-1501. www.hp.com

Jeff Ballard is the Unix systems manager for the Computer-Aided Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Write to him at [email protected].

We tested high-end multifunction printers from Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, Sharp and Xerox in our University of Wisconsin-Madison Real-World Labs®. These are big machines--upward of 2 tons of gear crowded out our former human system recovery (nap) area. We focused on what IT should look for in a multifunction printer, namely security and management capabilities and ease of integrating the unit into your network. After evaluating these factors and considering feature sets, accounting and price, we awarded our Editor's Choice to the Xerox WorkCentre Pro C2636. It is an intuitive, well-designed printer with slick features.FYI: Photo Finish

The devices we tested came with multifunction finishers, remarkably useful devices that you won't find on most standard printers. Finishers let you staple, collate, fold, saddle stitch, hole punch and more. All the finishers tested will take a stack of printouts and rotate, assemble and staple them into booklets. If a multifunction printer is not in your budget, finishers are typically available separately for high-end standalone printers.

One thing to watch out for in the world of copiers and printers is the word pound in reference to paper. The pound rating--used predominately only in the United States, Canada and parts of Mexico--refers to the weight of 500 sheets, calculated on a standard basis size. For bond paper that basis is 17 inches by 22 inches. A standard 20-pound bond paper, cut into four sections of 8.5 by 11 inches, gives four, 500-page "letter"-size reams of 5 pounds each.

However, different types of paper--like cover, Bristol and index--have different basis sizes to determine the pound rating. For example, cover paper has a basis size of 20 inches by 26 inches. Therefore, a ream of cover paper with the same pound rating as bond paper will be lighter and flimsier.

To further complicate matters, each type of paper has several names. Bond paper is commonly called copier paper, cover stock is also known as card stock and Bristol is often called postcard stock.The metric measurement, which we used in this article, uses a standard of GSM (grams per square meter) independent of the type of paper.

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