Best SMB Office Printer: Tech Awards 2023 Editor's Choice series

Best SMB Office Printer: Tech Awards 2023 Editor's Choice series

Best SMBOffice Printer

If your business needs to print out documents, flyers, claims, or reports, having a printer that can multitask different jobs and handle a large print volume is invaluable for a small business. (For recommendations for home-based printers, this is our pick for a Value SOHO printer.)

A good SMB printer should be able to print a large number of pages at an affordable cost and without constantly running out of ink. Pages should print quickly, and ideally, these printers should have additional features like duplex printing or an automatic document feeder (ADF) that can help simplify your printing.And for an SMB printer that is what you need; a workhorse printer that does the work quietly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.

This year, we looked at printers targeting SMBs that were priced under S$700, had high-volume, high-capacity printing capabilities, and came with print-friendly features and options. The only difference is that they were launched within the last two years. The reason for this is unlike our usual qualification criteria to consider only new products launched within the last 12 months, printer manufacturers have increasingly diversified their offerings and launch cycles, making it almost impossible for us to pick a set of candidates to meet our Tech Awards requirements. Due to the uneven release cycles for printers, we've decided to qualify suitable contenders launched within the last 24 months that meet our category of test requirements (and that they've not participated in any previous awards category). The extended qualification period may become a necessity for other segments that see a slowdown of new direct contenders in a shrinking field of adversaries, but for this year, this exception is only for the printer categories.

Nominees:

Epson L5590Canon Maxify GX3070

And the winner is…

Following our tests, we accorded the Canon Maxify GX3070 as the Best SMBOffice printer for Tech Awards 2023. While it wasn't perfect because, at this price point, you can't have all the creature comforts, we found it to have the best mix of features and results to be the winner in thiscategory.

First was its build quality. The Canon Maxify GX3070 looks like what an SMB printer should look like, all blocky and square with functional touchpoints tucked away neatly. More importantly, it also feels well put together and sturdy.

Second were its features. It is ink-tank based and is compatible with Canon's high-yield GI-76 series inks, which can deliver 6,000 greyscale pages, and 14,000 pages in colour. With the Economy Mode print setting turned on, you get even more with up to 9,000 and 21,000 pages in greyscale and colour, respectively.

It also has a 1.35-inch LCD (not a touchscreen), a 250-sheet paper cassette, and dual rear paper feeds where one of them allows a straight paper path to handle thick single-sheet materials up to 0.7mm in thickness, and an app for both business and consumer use. It has a recommended monthly print volume of up to 2,500 pages.

For the third, user-friendliness, the GX3070 is capable of auto duplex printing, and it comes with Canon’s Maxify Cloud link that allows you to print images and PDFs from Cloud storage sites like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. But not everything is hunky-dory as theLCD doesn’t tilt, nor is it large, so it can be hard to see menu details and status quickly. Then there's the lack of anADF, but as we pointed out earlier, in this category segment and price point, office printers will prioritize on helping businesses print affordably and fast over other aspects.

Finally, its print results. If you’re an SMB looking for a printer, then the Canon Maxify GX3070 won’t disappoint. Text in our test documents came back richly black and crisp. Serifs and punctuation marks were clear and sharp, with little ink running. For our test image, while the printouts were clear, the blacks were slightly too saturated and deeper coloured than our test image. In terms of print speed, it printed our twenty-page test document with an average speed of just under 22 seconds, so it's reasonably fast.

While more expensive than the Epson counterpart by a good margin and having slightly higher running costs than it (even if both were ink-tank printers), the better overall package, design, convenience and capabilities by the Canon won us over.

For more details on how we rated our nominees and to find out our usage experience of each device, check out the full reviews and articles listed in the References section below.

Meanwhile, check out our other Tech Awards 2023 Editor's Choice winners from the team behind HardwareZoneand HWM.

References:

Epson L5590 reviewCanon Maxify GX3070 review

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