Tested By A Teacher: Three Refillable Multifunction Inkjet Printers For Every Budget

Ask any teacher and they'll tell you, paperless classrooms are a myth.

Digital is nice, but paper copies still rule the classroom

Sure, you can get a class supply of tablets or have students do work on laptops but at the end of the day, the unassuming paper handout is king. It's simple, easy to use, and you can definitively say that you sent an assignment (or form, or informational letter) home. Students can't claim to have "sent the email" or missed the online form submit button. Paper in hand has been part of education from the beginning and it always will be.

Which is why it's frustrating that so few schools get paper technology right.

District print shops are quickly overwhelmed each school year and get progressively slower to respond to copy requests as the school year grinds on. If you're lucky enough to have a copier locally, chances are it's always flooded with other teachers trying to get their print jobs done or it's jammed or it's out of ink or it's just broken and no one knows why. If you have a school-supplied printer in your room, congratulations! Except it's 10 years old and no one makes ink for it anymore.

That's why having a reliable multifunction printer at home is a key piece of any teacher's arsenal. But you've got to be careful what you choose. Sure, there are dirt cheap printers on the market but as soon as you go to buy ink for it, you'll discover that the cost of the ink is as much as a new printer. So you throw the whole thing away and buy a new one. It's a source of an astounding amount of e-waste.

You could get a laser printer (indeed, I've even recommended that before). They're incredibly fast and can churn out tens of thousands of copies but you can buy two or three inkjet printers for the price of one toner cartridge.

So let's split the difference. Ink tank printers have come a long way since they were introduced a few years back. The initial cost is higher than what you'd pay for some multifunction printers but instead of being disposable, they have reasonably-priced ink refill bottles. Since you're more likely to keep them around, they're built to last, and they offer tons of features.

Here are three of my favorites, from least expensive to most.

HP Smart Tank 7301

The HP Smart Tank 7301 prints, scans, has a top-mounted automatic document feeder (ADF), and can print wirelessly. No it doesn't fax. These are teachers, not doctors, they don't need faxes.

It prints in black and white at a rate of 15 pages per minute (ppm) and 9ppm in color, with automatic two-sided printing (which, admittedly, slows things down a bit). The 35-page ADF is excellent and feeds large stacks of paper without an issue.

The color printing surprised me. Comparing pictures printed by the Smart Tank 7301 to more expensive devices on this list, the HP printer won every time. Printed images were clear, crisp, and vibrant. Not that I'll be printing a lot of pictures on the HP, but it's nice to know the option is there.

The Smart Tank 7301 does use a bit more power as it relies on heat to bond color ink to the paper (it only uses pigment-based ink for black and white). The interface can be frustrating as well, depending on where you've placed the printer. While its small size is perfect for sliding under a desk, you'll find yourself crouched down and squinting trying to read the monotone LED display.

But you'll forgive the printer its foibles when you fill it up with ink and then proceed to forget about supplies for the next two years (well, two years for the average household, a teacher's print requirements are far more than "average"). Even when you churn through the 6,000 black and white and 8,000 color pages offered from each bottle of ink, it only costs around $50 for a full set of ink refills, the most cost-effective on this list. That's why the HP Smart Tank 7301 costs more up front. But, honestly, it's better to pay more for a printer that performs reliably and can easily be

Speaking of reliable, the "self-healing" WiFi works as advertised. No matter what was going on with my network, the HP Smart Tank 7301 stays connected. If things are unplugged, network hardware changes, whatever it is, the HP rolls with it. It's also the one printer that my testing-teacher's laptop could connect to every time without fail. It doesn't matter if a printer can churn out more pages in a minute if you can't connect to it.

While extremely large print jobs (things like 10-page, double-sided handout packets) could test your patience, I found that the majority of day-to-day tasks thrown at the HP Smart Tank 7301 were handled with aplomb. Highly recommended. You can learn more on the HP website.

HP Smart Tank 7301 (left) Canon Maxify GX7021 (right)

For those teachers moving up the food chain, the Canon Maxify GX7021 packs a huge amount of capability in a surprisingly small footprint.

This multifunction printer can scan, copy, print, and fax. You can connect it to your network, print directly from your mobile device, or even plug in a USB drive. Even better, it comes with enough ink in the box to print 6,000 black & white and 14,000 color pages.

Print speed is an impressive 24 ppm black & white, 15.5 ppm color. The auto-document feeder has a 50-page capacity and can scan double-sided documents in a single pass. Output is crisp and professional. Though I was surprised to see that the HP was a little better when it comes to photos. The Maxify GX7021 can't print borderless photos either, something that seems like a major oversight from a photo product company.

The ink refill implementation on the Canon is the best that I've seen. Each color has a different-shaped port on the printer, there's simply no way to mix up what ink goes where. That extra bit of engineering probably accounts for the Canon's higher ink costs, it's around $125 to refill all four ink tanks. But given the massive capacity you get from each bottle, it still costs around $.02 per page. The Maxify GX7021 uses pigment ink, just like professional printers. They're fade-resistant and set quickly without extra heat.

The one Achilles heel of the Maxify GX7021 is its output tray. Despite having a 600-page capacity between the two front cassettes and rear tray, the output tray holds far less. You'll need to be vigilant on large print jobs or you'll end up with paper jams.

Canon has worked hard to make the cost of ownership low on the Maxify GX7021, with print heads and a maintenance cartridge that are user-replaceable.

Canon Maxify GX7021

With the largest capacity of any of the printers on this list, an absolutely massive volume of ink, super-fast print speed, and low overall cost of ownership, the Canon Maxify GX7021 is ready to be the last printer you ever need to buy. You can learn more on the Canon website.

Some teachers you just can't surprise. Nothing fools them, nothing shocks them. They know that there's a mountain of copies that need to be made and messing around with anything other than top tier is just wasting their time.

Larger than your average cat

For these valiant souls, look to the Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850. It's the most expensive model of the three at $949. That price makes sense when you consider it's part of Epson's business-class lineup. But it takes the printing capacity of an office to keep grade-schoolers in handouts.

And the EcoTank Pro ET-5850 delivers on that promise. It churns out 25 ppm, color or black & white, with no time wasted waiting for the printer to warm up. Got a single page newsletter for your class? Press print (or copy, the document feeder on the top is welcome) and a minute later, you've got enough for your whole class. It has auto-duplex capabilities, so you can cut down on paper waste with double-sided copies automatically.

Got more than a single page to print (and who doesn't)? The two high-capacity paper cassettes hold up to 500 pages of paper. Given the size of the ET-5850 (you won't be hiding this one under a desk), the output tray can handle tons of paper without jamming. It even has an automated tray that extends when you start a job so that your papers don't end up on the floor (finally!).

The ET-5850 is easy to refill, though I did find it fairly easy to end up spilling a bit of ink when removing the bottle, so watch out. It costs around $100 to refill all four colors of ink, not that you'll have to do so often. You get 6,000 color and 7,500 black and white pages from a refill set. It's an impressive savings over laser cartridges. Epson also uses pigment inks, which are fade-resistant and produce impressive color output.

If you need it, there's a flatbed copier, scanner under the lid, a rear paper tray for one-off and specialty papers, and even a fax. The ET-5850 is very judicious about power use, keeping itself in sleep mode until you need it. The large color touchscreen LCD folds out of the way when you don't need it.

The only real problem I ran into when testing the Epson was keeping it connected to my network. It seems that the onboard software views mesh routers as separate routers instead of one big network. But once I manually entered my network name and password, it was able to figure things out. Of course, you can print directly to the Epson without connecting it to a network at all. It's that versatile.

Epson ET-5850

If you can budget for it, the Epson EcoTank ET-5850 is a life-saver for those weeks when the print shop can't get you your class copies or for those last minute handouts that you didn't print at school. It's easy to use, has a low cost of ownership, and, best of all, is fast enough that it won't keep you waiting. Definitely head-of-the-class material. Find out more on the Epson website.