Modern printers have come a long way from their significantly more humble predecessors. In addition to improved speed and quality, today’s devices boast a plethora of beneficial features to help you optimize your organization’s workflows, protect your information, and reduce your environmental impact. From finishing to security to connectivity to two-sided printing/scanning, there’s no shortage of features beyond simple printing, copying, or scanning to help you do business.
Advanced printer finishing options will remove manual tasks involved in putting together presentation-worthy documents, brochures, and more. Modern printers can be equipped with finishing options that perform tasks such as folding, hole punching, and stapling. Removing these tedious tasks from your employees’ plates frees them up to spend their time on more meaningful work.
Modern multifunction printers are essentially large computers. They include hard drives that store images of documents that have been printed, scanned, or copied, preserving the information within them. Connecting these devices to networks makes them vulnerable to prying eyes with bad intentions. Not to mention the possibility of someone walking away with a hard copy of a printed document left at the printer. These risks can be mitigated through the advanced security measures available on today’s devices. Security features—such as user authentication, pull or ‘follow-me’ printing, hard drive encryption, and disk overwrite security—can help keep your sensitive data out of the wrong hands.
Today’s workforce is exceedingly mobile, often working away from their desk on a variety of different types of devices. Thankfully, modern printers can be equipped to securely accommodate mobile devices, such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Mobile printing provides the flexibility and convenience that comes from accessing networked office printers from these devices.
Eco-friendly workplaces know that printing on one piece of paper is better than two. Duplex or two-sided printing enables you to automatically print documents on both sides of the sheet, reducing the amount of paper used by half without requiring any manual intervention. Likewise, duplex scanning allows you to automatically scan both sides of a document, improving efficiency by saving you time and eliminating errors.
Taking advantage of printer features such as these will help your device play an even more beneficial role in your workflows and increase the value you get out of it over its product life.
