Most people start this decision by asking which brand is best. It is the wrong first question, and the evidence for that is easy to find.
Ask a room full of IT managers which office photocopier to buy and you will get flatly contradictory answers. One will tell you Kyocera has been rock solid for years. The next will say it was the worst brand they ever had to deal with. Canon is described as both entirely reliable and a nightmare, sometimes in the same thread.
They are not all wrong. They are describing something other than the machine, and once you understand what, the whole decision gets simpler.
The Thing That Matters More Than The Badge
The consistent view among people who manage fleets of these machines is that the major brands are all broadly fine, and that the difference in your experience comes down to who services them.
As one put it, all the major brand devices work perfectly well for the first few years of service life. Another was blunter, advising people to forget about the hardware and instead find a supplier they can actually work with. A third described choosing a brand they liked slightly less because the local dealer gave them genuinely good service, and being happier for it.
That is why the brand arguments contradict each other. Someone with a good dealer had a good experience. Someone with a bad dealer and the same machine had a miserable one.
So the real question is not which photocopier. It is which supplier, and what they are contractually committed to doing when the machine stops.
Start With Your Actual Volume
Sizing is where most buyers go wrong, in both directions.
Buy too small and you will wear the machine out early, replace consumables constantly and listen to complaints about queues. Buy too large and you have paid for capacity that sits idle, in a device with a bigger footprint and a bigger price.
The key consideration is choosing a machine that is properly sized for your actual print requirements. A device that regularly handles more work than it was designed for can experience greater wear, reduced reliability and a shorter service life.
| Office size | Rough monthly pages | Typical fit |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 people | Up to about 3,000 | A4 multifunction, mono or entry colour |
| 10 to 30 people | 3,000 to 10,000 | A3 multifunction, mid range colour |
| 30 to 100 people | 10,000 to 30,000 | Faster A3 device, finishing options |
| 100 plus, or heavy print | 30,000 and up | Production class, often more than one device |
Do not guess these numbers as volume can be driven by your industry and business type. Your current machine can tell you exactly what it has printed. Our guide on how big your office printer should be goes into the sizing question in more detail.
A3 Or A4
This one decision changes the price bracket substantially, so it deserves a moment rather than a default.
A4 devices are smaller and cost less, and they cover everything most offices actually produce, which is letters, reports, invoices and forms. A3 devices handle larger sheets, which matters if you produce plans, spreadsheets, posters, menus or booklets such as brochures or proposals that need folding.
The honest test is to count how many A3 pages you genuinely produced last year. Make sure you know what you have donein the past or what you want to do in the future… if you dont need it, dont buy it -our A4 office printers will serve you better and cost less.
Colour Or Mono
Colour costs meaningfully more per page than black, so the question is what proportion of your output genuinely needs it.
If it is client facing material, proposals and marketing, colour earns its place. If it is internal documents that nobody looks at twice, it does not, and a colour device with everything defaulting to colour is a quiet drain.
A sensible middle path is a colour device with mono set as the default, so colour becomes a deliberate choice. Australian government printing guidance recommends exactly this, along with defaulting to double sided. Our comparison of which colour printer suits your business covers the options.
The Things IT Will Care About
If your business has anyone responsible for technology, involve them before you sign. These are the criteria they will raise, and they are frequently absent from sales conversations.
Drivers
An underrated selection criterion, raised by people who have suffered for ignoring it. A device that needs an enormous driver bundle to function will create more problems than it is worth. What you want is a driver that installs silently, without user intervention, across every operating system you actually run.
Ask to see the driver package before you commit. It is a fair request.
Authentication And Integration
Modern devices should join your domain and authenticate users at the device’s control panel, ideally with the same credential or pass they already use. That unlocks the useful features.
- Scan to, and from your own email, sent from your own address rather than a generic device mailbox.
- Scan straight to cloud storage, like Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox or into the user’s own cloud based folder.
- Per user or project based tracking, so you know where volume actually goes.
- Secure release, where jobs are held until the person authenticates at the machine.
That last one is worth pursuing even if nothing else on the list interests you, because it eliminates the pages that get printed and never collected.
Security
A photocopier is a networked computer with a hard drive that has kept an image of a great many documents. That stored data is a genuine business risk, and networked devices are treated as part of the attack surface by anyone taking security seriously.
Ask how data on the drive is protected, whether it is encrypted, and what happens to it when the machine is returned at the end of a lease.
Scanning Deserves As Much Attention As Printing
For a lot of offices this is now the feature that gets used most, and it is routinely an afterthought in the buying process.
Look at the document feeder and whether it does single pass duplex scanning, which captures both sides in one trip through the feeder rather than reversing every sheet. On a large batch that difference to your efficiency is substantial.
Then check what file formats it produces. Searchable PDF is the one that matters most, because optical character recognition turns a scanned image into text you can actually search. A scanned document you cannot search is a filing problem rather than a solution.
If you are still deciding whether you need a full multifunction device at all, our explainer on what a multifunction device is sets out what these machines actually do.
Speed, Paper And Finishing
- Pages per minute. Useful and relevant to office bottlenecks or the people who just cant wait for their print job. Warm up time and time to first page can often matter too.
- Paper trays. More trays means fewer interruptions to swap stock, and lets you keep letterhead, thick paper or other stocks you use loaded permanently.
- Duplexing. Should be standard and should be the default setting.
- Finishing. Stapling, hole punching and booklet folding inline can save a lot of time and are worth specifying if you produce documents by hand today.
- Media handling. Check card, labels and heavy stock if you use them.
Our checklist of essential features to look for covers the specification side in more depth.
Buy, Lease Or Rent
Worth understanding before you get a quote, because it changes what the number means.
Buying outright means you own an asset that depreciates and that you are responsible for maintaining. The catch people report most often is the tail end. Around the five year mark, parts on an ageing machine start to get expensive, and by then you own the problem.
Leasing and rental spread the cost, and some suppliers offer bundled maintenance and toner up to an agreed page count. That is why a great many businesses end up renting rather than buying, and why the service terms usually matter more than the sticker price.
Questions To Ask Any Supplier
- What is your response time here, and what happens if you miss it.
- Are your technicians employed by you or subcontracted.
- What is included in the rate, and what gets billed separately. Get staples and paper clarified.
- What is the recommended monthly volume for this device, not the duty cycle.
- What does the driver installation look like across our operating systems.
- Does it authenticate against our systems, and can we do secure release.
- What happens to the hard drive when the machine goes back.
- Is there sector pricing. Education and not for profit organisations are often eligible for better rates.
- What are the exit terms and the notice period.
The answers to the first two tell you most of what you need to know about who you are dealing with.
What To Do Next
Work out your monthly volume, decide whether you need A3 and colour, then talk to suppliers about service rather than specifications.
Our range of multifunction devices covers the options across office sizes, and our service centre shows how support works once a machine is installed, which is the part that will define your experience.
If you would rather have someone size it with you, book a consultation and we will work through your volumes and requirements before recommending anything. For a second perspective on the same decision, our seven tips for finding the right multifunction printer is worth a read.
The Short Version
- Brand can matter far less than who services the machine, which is why brand reviews contradict each other.
- Size on recommended monthly volume and your need for speed, not maximum duty cycle. Use your current machine’s counter as a guide.
- Only pay for A3 if you need it.
- A colour device defaulting to mono is usually the sensible compromise.
- Ask about drivers early, because a bad driver package causes years of small problems.
- Authentication unlocks scan to self, print tracking and secure release.
- Scanning is now the most used feature in many offices, so check single pass duplex and searchable PDF.
- Ask what happens to the hard drive at end of lease.
- Many businesses lease or rent rather than buy, because ageing machines get expensive to maintain.
Choose the supplier as (if not more) carefully as the machine, because in five years the machine will be the same box and the supplier will be the difference between a working office and a running argument.
