Perhaps your office has tried to go paperless—using PDFs for documents, switching to digital signatures, etc. But chances are, you still have to print things out. It's just how things still are today, in any business. But that doesn't mean your work should suffer by having a bad printer.
That's why every year we ask our readers to rate the very best printers, based on what they use every day at work. The questions take into account the reliability of the printers, services offered for tech support and repairs, but most importantly, how people feel about their work printers and if they'd ever recommend printers from the same brand manufacturers to their colleagues.
This is the fifth year we've rated work printers, and for the fifth time we're giving away the Business Choice award to the same manufacturer PCMag readers recommend to us again and again. Read on to see which brand you should use at your office.
You can be part of Business Choice! Sign up for the Readers' Choice Survey mailing list to receive invitations in the future.
Printers for Work
Brother International is in a class by itself when it comes to printers recommended for the office (and at home). Continuing a trend it began last year, Brother kicks off with an overall score that makes itt clear readers love their Brother.
It didn't take much for Brother to win—it just had to stay with the same overall score (and ancillary scores) it had in 2017. It did just that, with an overall 8.6 (out of 10 as the best), just like last year.
Brother also topped or tied in every other category we measured. It tied with HP for setup satisfaction with an 8.8. It was on top for reliability (8.9) and the likelihood to get a recommendation (8.7). That last one only translated to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 57 percent, but that's the lead for this product category, even if it's not a ringing endorsement NPS-wise. Brother also had the lowest percentage of people needing tech support (7 percent) or product repairs (2 percent)—both improvements over last year, as well.
Epson has to be singled out and not for something positive: last year it was in second place with a respectable 8.2 overall score. This year, it dropped a half point to 7.7, which is not a great sign. Epson was also down in reliability (8.0, down from 8.5) and recommendation (7.7, down from 8.2). The other vendors with results this year are big names like HP and Canon; both had an 8.1 overall score last year. Canon remains in that spot, while HP ticked up a notch to 8.2 overall. Samsung was in the mix last year, but didn't get enough responses to make the cut for 2018.
See all of our survey results for business printers.
Recommended by Our Editors
WINNERS: PRINTERS AT WORK
Brother
Oh, Brother... how do you do it? Year in and year out, the company has walked away with the highest award we can give in printers, both for play at home and for getting serious work done. This year is no exception; it would take serious missteps for the company to become anything less than beloved at this point.
Methodology
We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our What's New Now mailing list. This survey was hosted by Equation Research, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from June 4, 2018 through June 25, 2018.
Respondents were asked to rate their work 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 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 2018.)
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 for What's New Now today.