Reviewing all in one inkjet printers Brother, Lexmark, Epson

Home office printers cost less than ever, yet buying a cheap printer that doesn’t work has no benefit.

My Brother Multifunction Center printer remains my favorite printer for my home office compared to the Lexmark printer we bought next and our current Epson NX305. The Brother Multifunction Center cost us around three-hundred dollars. It lasted for five years reliably.

Our Lexmark x5320 was less than fifty dollars but I found myself sitting in my home office crossing my fingers and hoping it would print.

The Epson we bought during a sale at Office Depot for under thirty dollars. It’s reliable, I still miss my Brother printer.

The Brother Multifunction Center took up more room than the Lexmark we eventually bought. But I could use it confidently. Faxing several pages from it was easy. The feeder took up to a dozen sheets I could fax without mishap. The scanner on it seemed to work all the time and worked nicely with my desktop at the time and then my PC laptop.

A clerk at Office Depot told me he was going to buy the Brother MFCJ615w Wireless Inkjet. He said in his opinion it was the best low cost printer for a home office even though it cost slightly more than the Epson printer we purchased.

Brother printer rating

That model Brother printer is rated 4.2 stars out of 65 reviews on buzillions.com.

Our original Brother printer eventually stopped copying clearly. Streak marks were showing up. But again, that was after five years of heavy use and I was printing several dozen pages a month to over one hundred pages a month regularly.

Our Lexmark x5320 we bought at Office Max during a sale and we got a steep discount when we also bought a Kodak Easy Share camera. We used it for about two years. The scanner never did work effectively with either a PC laptop or our MacBook Pro. I see Lexmark printers in use all the time so it may be that we picked up a bad printer. When we purchased it, my need for regular printing had dwindled dramatically.

Multi-page faxing was not an option. I had to fax one page at a time including faxing a large legal document. It took me an hour to stand at the printer and fax each page. The ink cartridges seem expensive with the Lexmark.

Lexmark ratings

A rating for this particular model which may not be selling any longer was “cheap but had problems.”

Epson NX305 is our current printer. It seems like it works well. We bought it for twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents so who’s going to complain if it doesn’t work, right? However, no one wants to throw thirty dollars away.

The Epson is performing its functions well. When it prints, there is a fairly large clacking noise as the paper moves through the feeder. It seems unnecessarily loud. Yet, it was a noise we read about on a review so it wasn’t a surprise to us.

It seems a bit confusing at first to copy, as though the buttons on the keypad aren’t clear which I find strange.

Epson rating

This model Epson printer gets 4.1 stars out of 5 with 67 reviews on product-reviews.epson.com.

The Epson and Lexmark seem to go through ink fairly quickly while the Brother used toner efficiently. Buying ink at a discount or getting cash back at an online store like 123inkjets can save significant money.

I may like my Epson. But as I wrote this Hub I thought about a good ad for the other company. It could be a campaign like “I miss my Brother—printer that is.”