In our opinion, you can do no better than a Fuji Xerox Apeosports range of printers for an office, if you can afford it. Canon provides a great competition but not with their support services. That being said, buying one will cost an arm and a leg. Leasing one also puts you at the mercy of the contract which much cheaper the longer you contract with them, not forgetting the extra charges for each paper you print, which is how they get you.
You are still after a small business and budget need to be managed well. If you are not a law firm, you are probably not printing in the thousands each week. But if you are printing in the thousands, a Fuji Xerox equivalent printer is definitely what you need.
It is a different ball game when it comes to companies like marketing agencies and what have you, those that are printing images for presentation. Not that a laserjet is incapable of printing good colored images, inkjets are much better and less expensive too. So sometimes it is best to also identify and maybe even separate the jobs to different printers. An inkjet for images and a laser for documents.
Now for compact printers, we personally love the brother. Not as flashy as a Canon or Epson printer. It seems to be designed to work rather than look good. Which we like. Inexpensive, with some decent ones well below 400 dollars. It is a bargain. Of course, setup is a little tedious, maybe best to leave that to your IT guys. And when it is time to scale, then you would be better off getting something with a much faster printing rate. Still, the smaller printers are improving fast. And the days of the monster printers in the office may be nearing its end.
So here are the points to consider when getting a printer again:
- Monthly number of prints
- Are your prints mostly color or black/white?
- How much it will cost annually?
- inkjet or laserjet or both
- IT support for ease of installation
