What does an all-in-one office printer do?

An all-in-one or multifunction printer is a staple in today’s offices. You’ll usually find it in some corner, a behemoth of a machine that smoothly spits out page after page with barely a whisper of sound. Home offices will generally have smaller versions of these printers, but their function remains the same. All-in-one printers are called as such because they perform three key functions: print, scan, and copy.

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They print pages, they scan pages, and they print a copy of a scanned page. These are simple enough roles, but what sets an office printer apart from a regular home printer is its capacity and capability. Home printers are designed for low volume printing, have smaller paper trays, and generally accept only one size of paper at a time. Office all-in-one printers are more versatile and of course, more complicated, and thus expensive. Let’s look at the three primary roles in more detail.

Print

Office all-in-one printers are usually laser printers. This is because offices need to print a lot of documents at a time, and very quickly at that. Time is money, of course. These documents can come in various sizes and complexities. Sometimes you’ll need to do duplex printing – printing on both sides of a document, for example, which office printers can do automatically.

Some office printers even have built-in, industrial-grade staplers for stapling large documents together. The paper trays of such printers hold a huge volume of paper, and sometimes several varieties of paper as well. For context, home printers will hold about 50 sheets to an office printers’ 500+.

Scan

This process is straightforward. All-in-one printers generally have a scan function built in, which allows users to scan documents and convert them into digital copies. Here again office printers are superior because they have several advanced scanning functions, such as the ability to automatically scan books or large stacks of documents. Regular home printers and scanners only scan one page at a time, and that too at a much slower rate, making the process longer.

Copy

The third function – copy – takes advantage of the advanced scan and print features of all-in-one office printers to copy, i.e. scan and print large documents and books with minimal intervention from the user. Again, home printers do have a copy function, but these printers only copy one page at a time.

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All-in-one printers are little marvels of engineering in their own right, and despite how they might at first appear, they are really cool. Spend more time on that unsung hero of office work, you will be pleasantly surprised by how much you can do with one.