Top 5 Multifunction Printers

Some of the MFPs produced high-quality prints or scans rivaling those made by stand-alone devices, but none of the three we tested this month generated very attractive photocopies.

Our current Best Buy, Canon's MultiPass MP730, is the fastest copier and printer--for both text and color graphics--on the chart. It produced very detailed prints of line art and attractive color scans, but its monochrome scans looked less detailed than those from the other MFPs in the Top 5. Both the MP730 and the new, fifth-place HP PSC 2175 printed attractive color glossies that rivaled those made by dedicated photo printers. The PSC 2175 also generated the best-looking monochrome scans. It's the only MFP on the chart that doesn't send faxes.

Hewlett-Packard's PSC 2210 at number three printed very attractive color photos and very sharp text, but it fell a little flat on color scan quality. The new Lexmark X6170's color scans scored slightly higher than the PSC 2210's, but the second-place X6170 took less than half as long to scan the pages at 1200 dpi. Though the X6170's black-and-white scans looked sharp, colors appeared cloudy in graphics printouts, and skin tones in color glossies sustained a slightly gray cast.

One That Missed

Of the three new MFPs we tested this month, only the Dell A920 missed the chart. The A920's print quality trailed that of all the other models we tested, showing marked banding on our line-art test, for example. Textures on color glossies looked spotty and lacked fine detail, though skin tones were realistic. The A920 scanned color images at an impressive clip (slightly faster than our Best Buy) and generated good-looking scans, but that wasn't enough to gain it a spot on the chart. Nonetheless, you won't blanch at the price: The A920 costs only $89.