Business Choice Awards 2020: Printers

When you need a business printer, be it in a skyscraper or home office, you need easy setup, reliable performance, the knowledge you can get it repaired or easily supported, and speed and quality to spare. Only one brand handles all that and more, according to PCMag readers.

BrotherBrother has long dominated the PCMag Business Choice survey for printers. Since we started rating business printers in 2013, Brother has shared the top spot a few times, but not this year. Epson, which came in second, earned some excellent numbers, but Brother stands alone in the most important categories—overall satisfaction (8.5 out of 10) and the likelihood to be recommended to others (8.6).

Brother's latest win also comes with the lead scores in areas like setup (9.1), reliability (8.9), and repairs (8.1). Those numbers are all up from last year, as are its scores for document quality (from 8.9 to 9.1), photo quality (from 6.7 to a still pretty dismal 6.9), copier functions (from 8.7 to 8.9), and scanning (8.5 to 8.8). Almost all its other scores held steady from 2019.

Last year, Brother shared the top spot with Canon, both of which got an 8.4 overall satisfaction score. But while Brother went up, Canon went down to an 8.1, putting it out of the running for 2020. Still, if your primary function at work is to print photos, you don't want a Brother; its 6.9 for photo quality is the brand's worst score and is consistent year to year. For photos, you want a Canon or an Epson, which both get an 8.0 for photo quality.

Epson's never had a strong showing in our Business Choice survey but that ended this year, with scores that in a few cases even outpaced Brother. Epson is ahead when it comes to ease of use (8.7), direct printing (8.6), and copier functions (9.0). It ties with Xerox on network sharing (8.9), while its 8.6 for paper handling tops Brother but both are behind the 9.0 for Ricoh and Xerox.

In 2019, Epson only had an overall satisfaction rating of 7.7, so it climbed more than half a point this year, a pretty astounding boost. The company is doing something right, and if it can keep it up, it might give Brother some serious competition in this survey in 2021.

Bottom of the business heap, surprisingly, is Dell. It placed third last year with an 8.3 overall, but dropped to 8.0 this year. It's even more surprising since it scored so well in the at-home version of this survey, Readers' Choice.

For more, read The Best Business Printers of 2020The Best Business Printers of 2020.

Full Results

Business Choice 2020 Work Printers -- Full table results

The PCMag Business Choice survey for Work Printers was in the field from June 22, 2020, to July 13 , 2020. For more information on how our surveys are conducted, read the survey methodology.

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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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