Despite some slight flaws, the Canon PIXMA MP970 is the perfect multifunction device for photo enthusiasts and home users.

It's rare that a product – even a very good one – balances function, innovation, and performance, but that's what Hewlett-Packard has done with the Designjet Z3100 Photo Printer. The ease of use, excellent print quality, and smart design touches have been combined into one of the best professional printers we have ever seen.

The SCX-4500 is an attractive, pleasantly quiet, and user-friendly MFD that turns in solid all-around results. The lack of an output tray is irritating, but the Samsung SCX-4500 would be a good fit in your personal office.

If you need to print large volumes of colour documents each month, this printer is ideal. It's perhaps the best colour laser printer in its class and at $1699, the initial outlay for this unit isn't extravagant.

Although the initial outlay is slightly high for a monochrome printer, the B6500N is very fast and easy to maintain, making it a good choice for a busy workplace.

Should your business need to add scanning to basic mono print facilities, the HP LaserJet M1120 MFP will cover both tasks with reasonable aplomb. It's not super fast, and you won't want to rely on it for huge print jobs, but for running off a few text documents it'll more than suffice. Should you not need scanning, though, you can find better dedicated printers elsewhere.

While the C3530n performed quite well in our tests, its hidden consumables costs make it less of a bargain than it appears.

The focus of the Brother HL-2140 is clear, and as a good little text churner this laser packs the goods. Use it extensively and, in the long-term, you'll end up paying considerable amounts. But for the typical family, this is an excellent complement to a quality inkjet and thus an ideal way to arm your home with strong text to go along with great colour graphics.

The very stylish Samsung ML-1630 flouts the monochrome laser printer's reputation for dull efficiency. It's a decent machine whose low-capacity input tray and pricey toner restrict it to individuals or small offices that wouldn't mind sacrificing some usefulness for style.

Kodak deserves credit for its economical inks and focus on photo quality. Unfortunately, these attributes together cannot overcome the Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One's disappointing speed and fairly high price.

Pumpkin-coloured people aside, the Canon Pixma MX700 is, overall, one of the strongest multifunction packages we've seen to date. It stuffs a lot of functions into a fairly user-friendly package and offers scads of software to help you along.