Business Choice Awards 2016: Printers

Do you have a paperless office? If you said yes, you're probably lying. Paper is still part and parcel of the business world, and having a printer on hand is a must.

Every year as part of our Readers' Choice Survey on printers we make sure to ask the readers of PCMag.com for their opinion—not just on the printers they use at home, but the printers that keep their business humming, from a sole proprietorship up to an uber-mega-corp-conglomerate. Below you'll get a hint of just which brands they recommend most for work printing.

You can be part of Business Choice! Sign up for the Readers' Choice Survey mailing list to receive invitations in the future.

Looking for expert opinion? Read The Best Printers of 2016, or focus on the Best Laser Printers or Best Multifunction Printers.

Printers for Work

It's no surprise to see Brother International at the top of this list; it's been a consistent winner of our Readers' Choice awards for almost a decade, and has long topped Business Choice, too. Brother also continues to outpace the competition in the workplace. Three years ago it was in a clear lead; last year it tied with Epson and Xerox on the overall score. But this year it pulls ahead once again, garnering an 8.5 overall (out of 10), up from last year's 8.4.

That said, the jump up for Brother isn't as egregious as the drop for Epson (which last year shared the Business Choice award); it fell all the way to a 7.7, as did Xerox. It looks like last year was the anomaly for those two companies as Brother stayed pretty consistent. It has the high scores in all our categories with only one exception: in the category of customers who needed printer repairs, Brother and Canon tied for second place at 5 percent. The winner in that spot was usual also-ran Dell with 3 percent. Brother's best score: 8.9 for the initial setup of its work printers.

We noted last year that Samsung had a fighting chance if it could improve things. Samsung landed in second place with an overall score of 8.3, but that's the same as it got last year. It wasn't enough to distinguish the company even for an honorable mention, especially since Canon—a onetime darling in all things printers, until last year at least—managed to score a better likelihood to recommend score, an 8.2 compared to Samsung's 7.8. (Both of those scores are also down from last year for those two manufacturers, as well.)

In fact, the only companies to show much in the way of improved scores are Brother and Dell (the latter's overall score went from 7.6 last year to 7.9 this year).

Let's make note of the amount of tech support and repairs needed for printers these days. Xerox has always been notorious in our surveys for needing a lot of repairs, but this year managed to drop that score from 24 percent down to 21 percent (while 24 percent of users still needed tech support). However, Lexmark was worse, with 25 percent of users making help calls. The company with the lowest need for repairs is Dell, followed by Canon and Brother at 5 percent. But the companies with the lowest amount of tech support are Samsung and Brother, tied at 8 percent.

WINNERS: PRINTERS FOR WORK

Business Choice seal

Brother
Brother continues to distinguish itself from the competition in almost every way. It's scores for initial setup outpace everyone, as does printer reliability and the likelihood that someone will recommend a Brother printer to a colleague. It is still, and has been for a long time, the first manufacturer any business should consider first.

Methodology

We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. The surveys are hosted by SurveyMonkey, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from June 20, 2016 through July 11, 2016.

Respondents were asked to rate their printer using multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.

Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the email marketing solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the email marketing solutions' rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your work printer?"

Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.

Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors). (For more, read PCMag's Top Consumer Recommended Companies for 2015.)

If you would like to participate in PCMag's monthly Readers' Choice surveys and to be eligible for our monthly sweepstakes promotion, please sign up today.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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