Reliability, quality, and speed are all things you want in a tech product, especially printers in the workplace, where subpar equipment can affect the bottom line. When you need the best of the best, there’s one printer brand PCMag readers return to, year after year.
In the first three years of the Business Choice awards for printers, it was a close call, and Brother shared the award with other vendors like Canon and Epson. Those days are gone.
Brother’s 8.7 score (out of 10) for overall satisfaction—the number we consider most important—is the highest it has ever been. On likelihood to recommend, which underscores how much a person would push a printer brand on a colleague who needs one, Brother jumped from 8.6 last year to 8.9 in 2021. That’s high praise.
Brother doesn’t have the best score in every sub-category we ask about in our survey. For example, it has our lowest scores for direct printing (7.4) and for photo print quality (7.0), which can sting depending on your needs. But when Brother leads, it leads big. It has a 9.1 for reliability, 8.9 for ease of use, and a 9.1 for paper handling. It has a 9.2 for both copier functions and ties with HP for document print quality.
Should you not be feeling the Brother-ly love, HP lands at an overall 8.3. It’s not on top of any of the sub-categories except for that aforementioned tie, and also ties Brother and Canon with an 8.8 for network sharing. It’s at the bottom of the heap for tech support (along with Canon at 6.9).
Interesting spikes in the scores appear for Epson, which has the highest score for setup (9.1), and Xerox for print speed (8.9). The companies to avoid, according to our readers, are Ricoh and Dell. If they didn’t have the lowest score in a sub-category, it’s probably only because we didn’t get enough responses from readers on that question.
We also asked questions about how people feel about the toner/inks they get for their business printers. Everyday document consumables all scored a 9.1 for Brother, HP, and Canon, plus a 9.0 for Xerox—as long as they were consumables made by the company for their own printers. Third-party consumables for documents dropped to 8.8 (Brother and HP) and 8.6 (Canon).
The consumables for photo printing take a bigger hit no matter who makes them, in particular for Brother—it had the lowest score on ink/toner no matter the source. The cost of brand-made consumables is also not a beloved topic with readers; scores ranged from a 5.9 for HP to a still-dismal 6.3 for Epson.
For more, read PCMag’s roundup of The Best Business Printers of 2021The Best Business Printers of 2021.
Full Results
The PCMag Readers’ Choice survey for printers was in the field from July 12 to August 2, 2021. For more information on how our surveys are conducted, read the survey methodology.
