After eight years of service, my printer is done. As a result, I thought I'd use part of my day off to shop for a new one.

I go into this one shop.

There's a group of sales people standing around, yukking it ip.

As I stand forlornly in the printing area about 12 feet away from them, they continue to yuk it up. Eventually, one does tear himself away from the merriment and comes over.

"Excuse me sir, can I help?" asked the baseball-cap-wearing, goateed clerk (who strongly resembled the Shaun character in Shaun of the Dead).

"Yes, I'm considering buying an all-in-one printer," I replied.

"Oh."

That question appeared to be a show-stopper. The sales guy said nothing further.

This turned into a bit of an uneasy stand-off: I kept waiting for him to say something useful, and I guess he needed more input from me before kicking into full salesman mode.

Or else he was waiting for me to leave so he could rejoin the yukfest.

Anyway, as the seconds ticked by with no one saying anything, the notion that spending any more time in this shop with this dunce would be time completely squandered became overwhelming.

So I broke the silence by saying, "well, I think I'll go now."

Sayeth the clerk: "Okay. Thanks for coming in."

I snickered and shook my head.

Retail sales training is not my specialty, but if I was a coach, I would tell the guy that asking a few questions about what sorts of features the customer was looking for and how much he'd like to spend would be excellent ice-breakers.

Anyway, if you're looking for a new multi-function printer, here's some advice I got courtesy of the good people on CAJ-L:

  • "I have a HP Officejet 6100 that I'm happy with. Printing is relatively fast, the scanner works well. It doesn't like to fax really large documents (I mean over 10 pages), but for smaller orders it works fine."
  • "I have a HP 1210 all-in-one and it's not bad, but not great. I work at a small mag and we have a pretty middle-of-the-road scanner there, but compared to that one, the HP is crap. Printing is fine, but slow. The photocopy feature is surprisingly good and in fact, doing a colour photocopy of a photograph is infinitely better than any scan I can get it to do, even with Photoshop work. It cost about $115 so I guess you get what you pay for. I get the feeling the HP all-in-ones in a higher price bracket might be better, but I've only tried the 1210 and the 1310."
  • "Generally, they all print and copy well but the scan quality is only average.  If the scanning resolution is at least 1200 X 1200 dpi it will be good enough for scanning photographs to an "acceptable", but not professional level. Stick to HP, Canon, and Epson brands."
  • "I have an HP psc 1315 xi all-in-one that is about a year old. It has been very reliable.  I have no complaints (unlike my old Canon printer) and it seems reasonable on ink. I got it at Costco and it was under $200."
  • "I have a Xerox unit that I have had for about three years. The laser copier and printer work well. I use a separate scanner because the scanning functionality is a bit primitive. It was a great price though."
  • "I have one of those all-in-one types. It does everything well (an Epson Stylus CX5400). The only complaint, and I would advise you to look into this, is the price of ink cartridges. But as to functionality, the multi-purpose scanner/copier/printer is the way to go."
  • "I have a Brother five-in-one: MFC 3220C, cheap from Staples. My Mac computer store guy was appalled; says when one function breaks the whole thing becomes useless. But four months in my only complaints are it goes through too much ink and I can't figure out how to turn off the fax-answering capacity so it doesn't interfere with my voice mail."
  • "We just bought one ... The ink cartridges cost a fortune. We have only had it for a month. So, I don't have an opinion on it yet. At home I am happy with my separate fax machine, my two scanners, and my old canon printer. "