My family’s looking to get a new all-in-one. We’ve got a home network with a router that takes wired & wireless connections. We’re interested in finding something we could pick up through CompUSA (several in our area are having closing sales), but I’d like to shop around. I know there’s more than a few techie types on this board, so I wanted to tap your wisdom on this.
First off, all our computers are windows systems (mostly different versions of XP, one ME). I’m looking specifically for a flatbed that can scan, copy, and print with good image quality that can can be connected directly to our router.
It doesn’t have to be a wireless solution (that’d be nice) but the old all-in-one we have doesn’t have the port for a router cable, and my family doesn’t want to have to relay through the computer it’s connected to whenever we want to use it.
The fourth thing I’m looking for is that I don’t want a floor model (like you’d find in an office). I’m looking for one that’d fit on a desk area roughly 2 ft x 2 ft or less.
You don’t say how much you want to spend so here’s a selection of HP multi function printers. We have a PSC1315 that has given us great service over the past 2 years. The only complaint is the software, HP thinks it needs to run 5 processes on my machine all the time, I have no idea what they’re doing besides eating memory and sucking CPU cycles. Other than that it’s been great!
If you want all the functions to work over the network, you’re looking at some pretty high dollars. Most combo units with network ability only network the printer part.
You can also look at simply hooking up your current printer to a wireless print server, which will accomplish the same thing without buying a new printer.
Yep - it generally takes some serious MFD hardware to give you network-capable scanning (printing and copying are easy). The ones I have seen allow you to set up a PIN number before you scan, then you download the scanned documents from a web browser (or custom program), using the PIN to access only your documents.
I don’t know anything for the retail market that has that sort of functionality - it’s hard enough to find retail printers with ethernet interfaces.
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Thanks for the replies!
Well, we originally started looking into it because there was a good chance of saving some money, but on the whole we really want it for the convenience, so price isn’t actually much of an issue (within reason, I’m looking to spend something like $100-$300, but I could go a little higher).
Hmm, I didn’t know about the scan/copy over network issues. In all honesty being able to print over the network is the real interest here, so that might not really matter, but it’s something to talk over with my family, thanks.