The Best Tech And Apps For Your Home Office: Reviews By Wirecutter

A solid machine with dirt-cheap toner. For home offices where printing is mostly limited to mailing labels, packing slips, and the occasional document, the dirt-cheap cost of ownership is the best thing about the HL-L2340DW. Each page costs just 2.7 cents’ worth of toner and drum wear, less than with any other printer out there. The HL-L2340DW also provides automatic two-sided printing, a paper-saving feature that’s missing from competitors costing twice as much. On top of that, this model supports mobile printing standards like AirPrint and Google Cloud Print, as well as printing over Wi-Fi (though in a small office it’s probably easier and more reliable to connect to the printer via USB). And because the HL-L2340DW is a laser printer, it’s low-drama compared with any inkjet. Unlike ink cartridges, toner cartridges have a high capacity, which reduces the chance that you’ll find yourself out of toner when you really, really need to print. Laser printers don’t need to run lengthy cleaning cycles, either.

You give up color printing with a cheap laser printer, but that’s more trouble than it’s worth at this price. With worry-free installation, great software, cheap ink, and sharp results, this printer is easily the least annoying all-in-one you can buy. When it comes to printers, that’s really saying something. After more than 35 hours of research and testing, we’re convinced that the HP OfficeJet Pro 8720 All-in-One Printer is the best all-in-one (AIO) printer for your home office. If you need a jack-of-all-trades—and master-of-none—machine for your home office or your family, this model will get the job done. It can print, scan, fax, and copy most regular documents, it runs faster than many inkjets at this price, and it feels sturdier than other AIOs we’ve tested over the years. HP’s interface seems more polished than any other company’s, and that makes installation, everyday use, and even troubleshooting relatively painless.

Per-page print costs are lower than those of most competing inkjets, at 1.6¢ per page for black and white and 8.1¢ for color. Though it’s best suited for document printing and scanning, it’s actually decent at printing photos when the need arises, too. This model is as close as you can get to a great, affordable all-arounder. Let’s be clear: All printers are disappointing, particularly color all-in-ones. Yes, that statement even includes this HP model. Even the most popular, highest-rated printers will probably find a way to let you down at some point during their life cycle. And no matter which one you choose, it will use up lots of ink. If you can get away with it, avoid a printer entirely. If you don’t need color, look at a black and white laser printer; if you only occasionally need scanning, our portable scanner pick can accept up to 20 duplex pages. The ES-300W delivers the fastest scan times we’ve seen to date, outstanding text recognition, and cord-free operation with battery power and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Don’t let the “portable” label fool you: The Epson ES-300W is the best tool for getting a large amount of scanning done at your desk, keeping your space tidy and your documents organized. If you scan a lot of photos or books that won’t fit in a sheet-fed scanner, grab a cheap flatbed scanner. 250 sounds steep, try our recommended scanning app for free on your phone. Incredibly easy to use for sharp images and good OCR. Incredibly easy to use for sharp images and good OCR. It’s a strong enough phone app to eliminate the need for a document scanner for most people. In choosing the best scanning app, we tested factors such as document detection (finding the document on a surface, framing it, and lining up the crop lines with the paper’s edges), multi-page support, and image quality. And while not everybody needs it, good OCR was a necessary feature for our top pick, as it can be had for such a low cost. We also favored apps that allow easy sharing to outside cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Scanbot launches right into a capture window, ready to find documents or receipts.

The image detection algorithm is able to differentiate between a sheet of paper and the surface you have it on. Other apps require you to draw the frame yourself or find it after the shot. Once the edges have been found and the content in focus (on-screen prompts tell you to move closer or hold still), the app automatically snaps its shot. Your scan is then uploaded to your cloud service of choice, if you have that feature set up, or you can jump in and edit the file. The app’s image quality is the best of those we tested. Text is crisp and clear, with great contrast. Images reproduce accurately, in both color and black-and-white scans (scans are color by default, but can be switched to black-and-white after the shot). The OCR is about as good as can be expected from a mobile app. We counted about seven mistakes in a 200-word document.