Known by names such as, All-In-One Printers or Multifunction Office Printers these jack-of-all-trades devices give you several capabilities in one product.  With printing, copying, faxing and scanning being part of the combo, these machines are  designed for a small office space or a home office environment.

Nowadays a basic model is running about the same price of an inkjet printer, the downside is that often, a model that excels in one aspect sputters on others.  However if you are not using it 24/7 and you are only occasionally using the other features you found the right choice.

To help you make the best decision the following definitions might assist you depending on your work needs:

Low Work Flow - If your requirements are for basic printing, scanning and copying then your are extremely well catered for in the all-in-one market.  A basic machine with a flatbed scanner will assist you to print documents, scan images and photocopy documents.

                                        
                                            

Medium Work Flow - If you are running a small business from home then you should think about an all-in-one that combines fax technology to help you keep in touch.  You might also think about a device with optical character recognition (OCR) that can help you scan documents into your computer for editing later and a machine automatic document feeder for consecutive scanning or faxing.  A laser printer all-in-one may give sharper, cleaner text outputs and is worth considering if the majority of your usage is text rather than image-based.

                                    

                            

Advanced Work Flow - Some higher priced all-in-ones can be a more practical alternative over individual printer and scanner choices for people who want to scan and transmit high-quality images.  Printing photographic images onto high quality paper is also possible at this level.  You will be looking for an inkjet all-in-one that allows direct input of images from digital cameras, probably using PictBridge technology, and which can output to a variety of media types including paper, CD and DVD. 



                                            

We suggest you weight in your options so you shouldn't have to pay for more functions than you'll use.  If you don't anticipate to use two of the functions in your near future, you'll probably be better served bya a regular inkjet or laser printer.