Table of contents for No.287 - September 2018 in PC Pro

GOOGLE COULD TAKE aim at Microsoft’s Surface customers by enabling Windows to run on its high-end Pixelbook Chromebooks. Earlier this year, Google made a series of changes to the Pixelbook’s firmware, with developer forum contributors revealing an AltOS mode that would allow a second operating system to boot on the device. Eagle-eyed developer forum watchers have now spotted details of software “commits” within the Pixel development team suggesting they plan to make the hardware run Windows. Contributors to the XDA mobile software development community have highlighted that Pixelbook developers were working with the Windows Hardware Certification Kit and Windows Hardware Lab Kit. While warning that a Windows version was by no means a certainty, analysts said they could see good reasons for Google to push Windows onto its hardware. Currently,…

Driving for perfection Nicole Kobie asks, “Do driverless cars need to be perfect - or just better than us?” (see issue 287, p127). I accept that driverless cars will be on the road one day, but that day is a long way off. The problem is giving AI the intelligence. To write the code that will cater for all driving conditions is too difficult, and learning by experience has the disadvantage of causing deaths during the learning process. I have been driving for over 50 years and I am still learning. Now and again I encounter a novel driving situation. I react correctly due to a combination of foresight and intuition, and by skilfully controlling speed so as to have time to react. Knowing what that speed is in itself…

On 21 April 1914, composer Luigi Russolo and artist Ugo Piatti made history in Milan. After initially being banned by the police, a performance involving their intonarumori, experimental musical instruments, went ahead at the Teatro Dal Verme. Cue pandemonium. Boos echoed down from a Luddite faction in the audience, drowning out the music, and a frantic brawl kicked off. Russolo himself punched a critic, but was later acquitted. In the words of a witness, the concert was like “showing the first steam train to a herd of cows”. It may be an extreme example, but the riot in Milan speaks volumes about classical music’s difficult relationship with technology. After all, the adjectives “innovative” and “forward-looking” aren’t often applied to the genre. To many, it’s a dusty world of cavernous concert…

Laptops and PCs We run our own benchmarks on every Windows and macOS system we test. These are based around image editing, video editing and multitasking (where we run the video editing benchmark while simultaneously playing back a 4K video). At the bottom of each laptop and PC review you’ll find the system’s score in each of these tests, plus an Overall score. If a laptop scores 70, say, then it’s 30% slower than our reference system – a PC with a Core i7-4670K and 8GB of RAM. If it scores 160, then it’s 60% faster. We test laptop battery life by playing back a full-screen video until the battery runs out. We set the screen brightness to 170cd/m², or as close as we can get using its settings, and…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £3,142 (£3,770 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk “I’ve never seen Google Chrome snap to attention as quickly on a laptop as it does with the HP ZBook X2 G4 Workstation” The words tablet and workstation aren’t natural bedfellows, but that’s precisely the combination HP offers in the ludicrously powerful ZBook X2 G4 Workstation. If the Microsoft Surface Pro is a bantamweight fighter, the ZBook is a super heavyweight. It’s all muscles, brawn and attitude, with a chunky bezel that lends the tablet a rugged feel – it’s designed to survive the military standard 810G tests. I suspect HP won’t thank me for the heavyweight comparison, though, because this also draws attention to two key stats for anyone thinking of carrying the ZBook X2 around: its 1.65kg weight…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £208 (£250 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/287asus “If all you want to do is respond to emails, tap reports into Google Docs and watch Netflix then it’s more than capable” Chromebooks have obvious appeal. Secure, cheap and portable, they’re such a compelling alternative to Windows laptops that our own Futures editor, Nicole Kobie, has just invested in one for her travels (see p25). They also suffer from none of those annoying Windows Update problems: you can pick one up after months and it will just work. Chromeboxes, though, have never had the same X factor. They’ve only found a niche in schools and colleges, where the ability for students to log into their account with an email and password, combined with their ease of management, make them…

“Make sure you challenge your preconceptions: laser printers aren’t always cheaper to run than an inkjet, for example” This month we’ve focused on the kind of printers and multifunction printers (MFPs) that the discerning user might buy for a small office, or for creative or office use at home. There’s quite a spread, ranging from an £80 inkjet up to a ruthlessly quick £480 mono laser MFP, and each offers something different. We’ve assaulted each of them with a battery of tests, and picked four that stand out. ■ What not to buy If you walk into a big supermarket, you’ll be hit with a number of too-good-to-be-true specifications for a too-good-to-be-true price. The reason, of course, is that this is all too good to be true. You may have…

Inkjet SCORE PRICE £92 (£110 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/287can The TS6150 is aimed at home users with a creative bent. A monument to polished black plastic, its looks might be a matter of taste, but its squat stance and uncluttered panels both appeal – control is via a 7.5cm colour touchscreen. Despite its size, the TS6150 includes two paper trays: an enclosed one in the base, and a rear feed for plain or photo papers. There’s also automatic duplex printing and support for wireless networks. While common-or-garden inkjets plod along with four colours, the TS6150 has a five-ink setup comprising pigment black ink for bold text on plain paper, and dye-based black, cyan, magenta and yellow tanks for graphics and photos. Replacements come in standard, XL and XXL sizes. Calculated…

Colour laser SCORE PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk It’s hard to make a colour laser MFP look attractive, but Xerox has done its best. A few curves and minimal clutter help it look slightly smaller than it is, while its cream and blue plastic at least differentiates it from the laser pack. Another nice touch: the hinged touchscreen control panel is more neatly integrated than the one on Canon’s i-Sensys MF734Cdw. Overall, the 6515DNI is almost handsome. This is another highly specified MFP. In its base there’s a laser printer rated at 28ppm in both black and colour, while the 50-sheet ADF on top has twin image sensors, allowing it to scan, copy or fax double-sided originals with a minimum of fuss. You can connect it via USB,…

Mono laser SCORE PRICE £62 (£75 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Not everyone needs bells and whistles. HP’s LaserJet Pro M15w is a very compact, single-function printer focused on delivering mono text and graphics. There’s no scanner or fax modem, and you won’t need to clear an entire desktop to find somewhere to put it: with the paper trays closed, it measures 346 x 189 x 159mm (WDH). Rated at only 18ppm and with no automatic duplexing, it won’t break any productivity records, but with Wi-Fi support it’s an unobtrusive companion in a small home office. With no control panel, connecting the M15w to a wireless network is a choice of using Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) or letting HP’s install program configure it over a USB cable. We chose the latter,…

“Unfortunately, we have been disappointed by the performance of many refillable ink tank models we’ve reviewed” You don’t need us to tell you that printing is expensive. For the nine colour printers on test here, the average cost of an A4 page of mixed text and graphics is almost 11p. With a 500-page ream of colour printing likely to set you back more than £50, running costs should be a significant consideration when choosing a printer. Consumers have long sought ways to reduce print costs, from third-party supplies to refillable ink tanks. Now, manufacturers are finally beginning to offer alternatives to consumers. HP’s Instant Ink is a subscription-based service where users pay for a certain volume of printing per month. When ink gets low, the printer itself orders more cartridges.…

SCORE PRICE £739 exc VAT from networkwebcams.co.uk “Event-based actions allow the camera to respond to audio, tampering, external alarms, network disconnection and more” The name might sound boringly generic, but Samsung’s Wisenet PNF-9010R is something special – it’s the first IP camera we’ve tested with an Ultra HD 4K sensor. Yes, this unassuming discus captures video at resolutions up to 4,168 x 3,062 pixels – and it also features the latest H.265 compression technology, to help keep your captures to a manageable size. The price, of course, is a lot more than you’ll pay for a 1080p camera, but you’re getting a lot of surveillance for your money: the hemispherical design offers a full 360° all-round view from the ceiling, while mounting it on a wall delivers a 180° vista.…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £1,198 exc VAT from ebuyer.com “If you’re looking for a lot of storage in a small enclosure, you won’t do better than the Netgear ReadyNAS RR2312” If you’re hungry for storage, but short on rack space, Netgear’s ReadyNAS RR2312 could be the answer to your prayers. It’s the most capacious 1U rack NAS we’ve seen, cramming no fewer than 12 LFF hard disks into its compact chassis. This is no mean feat: it’s achieved by squeezing a micro-ATX motherboard into the back, leaving space up front for three banks of four SATA drives. While this is a clever bit of engineering, it does mean the RR2312 is unusually deep at 934mm. After installing it in our 42U 1,000mm rack cabinet, we found we weren’t quite able to…

EVEN KEEPING UP with the basics is hard given tech’s pace of change, but it’s possible to stay ahead thanks to online courses. There are hours of classes, many for free, from universities around the world and digital educators such as Udacity, Coursera and FutureLearn. So there’s no excuse not to learn how to build the future, whether it’s machine learning, blockchain or automated cars. ■ Artificial intelligence AI is one of the hottest, most overhyped technologies in years, but many people don’t know their neural networks from their machine learning. If you want to get up to speed with the basics, Helsinki University in Finland offers a free online course to anyone. The aim is for 1% of the Finnish population to give it a go – that’s apparently…

▶ Asus ZenBook S The premium ultraportable laptop market is congested, but Asus is hoping its ZenBook S (UX391) can stand out from the crowd. The 13.3in ZenBook S combines 1kg portability with a rugged build, impressive specs and a creative design feature intended to make data input easier. The ZenBook S has passed tests in a variety of hostile environments to reach the military MIL-STD-810G standard, yet the standout feature remains a bizarre hinge that elevates the keyboard by 5.5 degrees. This has several benefits, according to Asus, the first being that the angle is easier for typing. Lifting the keyboard also delivers clearer sound and improved cooling. The ZenBook S takes in cool air through the extra space beneath the keyboard and expels warm air through the hinge,…

Parents will frequently moan that they can’t get the kids off their tablets. Parents of critically ill children have the opposite problem: they often can’t find the right computer equipment for them. Lifelites bridges the gap between disabled children and modern technology. It works with every children’s hospice in the British Isles to install computer equipment that has a profound impact on desperately ill kids. It might help children without speech to form a missing bond with their brother or sister, for example, or let them do something that other children would just take for granted, such as playing video games with friends. All this is managed by a small charity with a dedicated volunteer network and enormous heart. We met with Lifelites’ chief executive in the aftermath of the…

Gmail is popular for both personal and professional use, and we haven’t found a genuine contender that we would recommend in its place. But we have found something that arguably improves it, turning it into a more modern communication tool. Email remains indispensable, but collaboration services such as Slack and Microsoft Teams are definitely nibbling away at the edges, replacing much of the communications traffic that used to end up on emails cc’ed around the office. Redkix (redkix.com) aims to deliver the best of both worlds – if not entirely successfully. You log in with your work email account (it supports Gmail, Office 365 and Exchange) and are presented with an interface that will look instantly familiar to users of Slack or Teams. You can access your inbox and calendar as…

Social media just keeps getting busier and noisier. So if you want your personal profile to attract attention – or if you want your business account to perform as well as it possibly can – you need to make sure you’re posting regular content that’s worth interacting with. That may sound like a lot to ask, but there’s a wealth of tools out there that can help with both sides of the equation. Here’s how you can spend less time posting and still attract a loyal, growing audience. Cross-posting Cross-posting – posting the same content to several platforms – is an obvious way to multiply your social media reach. But if you do it carelessly or to excess, it can backfire. If your followers connect with you on Facebook, Twitter,…

“It’s the first Intel processor to hit 5GHz in turbo mode, and its first six-core processor with a 4GHz base frequency” Intel is in nostalgic mood, marking the 40th anniversary of its first 8086 processor with a special edition Core i7-8086K chip. It’s worth taking a breath to say why the 8086 chip was so special: when released on 8 June 1978, it was the first 16-bit processor and gave birth to the x86 instruction set that underpins every desktop chip and OS out there. It’s only a little ironic, then, that Intel itself didn’t really care about the 8086. It was a defensive tactic, designed to combat the threat of the Zilog Z80 processor; for those who got a B- in their Intel history quiz, Zilog was a company…

SCORE PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/287tri “With Nvidia’s G-Sync technology in tow, it’s a joy to play games on the Predator’s 15.6in Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) IPS panel” Rejoice! Gaming laptops are getting slimmer. Where once you would need a 4kg monster to house a top-end graphics card, Nvidia’s Max-Q GeForce GTX 1080 – an underclocked version of the desktop GTX 1080 – means the Predator weighs a vertebrae-friendly 2.4kg. That’s heavier than the 2.2kg Asus ROG Zephyrus (see issue 279, p68), but at 18.9mm thick this remains a highly portable gaming beast. Beast is an apt word, too. The 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor is ably supported with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1TB PCIe M.2 SSD. The Triton 700 achieved an excellent 128…

SCORE PRICE $78 per year from ipvanish.com “The Quick Connect mode gets you protected in a few clicks, while the server list lets you browse a mass of useful information” IPVanish recently had a major redesign, but we suspect it will still appeal to its target market of more technical users. While some VPNs launch in a minimal, applet-style window, this one is a big, multi-tabbed affair full of bandwidth graphs and real-time info updates. Even the Quick Connect mode is more in-depth than rivals, letting you select not just a country, but an individual server in a specific city. It’s not difficult to use, but the emphasis is clearly on control rather than simplicity. This makes it ideal for advanced users who like to tinker. Want to change the…

Inkjet SCORE PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com HP’s PageWide Pro 477dw is by far the most expensive inkjet in this group, but it’s unlike any other. The clue’s in the name: while the print heads in a normal inkjet whizz back and forth across the paper, which has to wait for them to cross, in HP’s PageWide system there’s a single set of heads spanning the full width of the page. Freed from the need to wait for moving print heads, the paper can get a shift on. For the 477dw, HP quotes a maximum speed of 55 pages per minute – the realm of high-end workgroup laser printers – although at the default quality it’s a more modest 40ppm. The PageWide Pro 477dw isn’t really out to…

Inkjet SCORE PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/287bro Brother’s DCP-J774DW is a compact inkjet MFP aimed at home users. At this price, though, its specification disappoints. While duplex printing is supported, there’s no fax modem, USB host port or automatic document feeder. Creative users are similarly short-changed: while it’s nice to see a dedicated photo paper tray, there’s no SD card slot for direct photo printing. The DCP-J774DW uses a capillary ink system, where the heads are fed via tubes from stationary ink cartridges. Replacements aren’t cheap: we calculated running costs of 11.7p per A4 colour page, of which black ink costs a whopping 3.6p. Tested over Wi-Fi, this printer delivered our 25-page mono letter test at a leisurely 8.3ppm, although switching to draft quality literally doubled the speed.…

Inkjet SCORE PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Epson’s Expression Home XP-5105 is a compact inkjet MFP. At its core it’s virtually identical to the WF-2860DWF (see p88), but here it’s tuned to home and photo use, with an SD memory slot on the front panel. There’s automatic duplex printing, and you can join it to a wireless network, but otherwise there’s nothing exciting about the specification. The XP-5105 is exclusive to the Dixons Carphone group – its sister model, the XP-5100, ships without bundled optical character recognition (OCR) software, but is otherwise identical. Start using the XP-5105 and you will notice that it’s remarkably quiet, with high-resolution scans in particular being almost inaudible. Unfortunately, the next thing you’re likely to notice is a low ink warning, as the…

Colour laser SCORE PRICE £143 (£172 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/287ky2 If you don’t need scans or copies, but colour is all-important, Kyocera’s Ecosys P5021cdw might just fit the bill. It’s a reasonably compact colour laser printer, capable of a claimed 21ppm speed in black or colour. Its standard 250-sheet paper tray is supplemented by a 50-sheet multipurpose feed – you could add another 250-sheet tray, but doing so will cost almost as much as the printer itself. Duplex printing comes as standard, along with wireless networking and Gigabit Ethernet. As with other Kyocera Ecosys printers, the P5021cdw features a ceramic, long-life drum – here it’s guaranteed for the first of three years or 100,000 pages, and in practice it’s likely to last for the printer’s lifetime. In theory, that cuts…

SCORE PRICE £137 exc VAT from ebuyer.com “The lens is surrounded by a generous 14 IR LED illuminators, which give a promised night-vision range of 20m” The DCS-4802E mini-dome IP camera is designed to be equally at home indoors and outdoors. Its IP66 rating confirms that it’s fully weather-proof against dust and heavy jets of water, while its modest dimensions make it ideal for low-key surveillance. It should be mounted high enough to be out of harm’s way, however, as it doesn’t have a vandal-proof IK rating. That’s not to say it’s flimsy. The camera dome casing is held in a sturdy mount, and its three-axis friction joints allow it to be manually rotated and adjusted both vertically and horizontally. A captive, waterproof 65cm Ethernet cable emerges directly from the…

“In this Internet of Things age, your business is likely to need to manage an ever-growing swarm of connected devices” ■ Software-defined networking? What’s that? Simply put, a software-defined network (SDN) is one where specialised software handles the decision-making, while comparatively basic hardware does the regular donkey work of shunting data packets around. To use the industry jargon, the control plane is separated from the data plane. ■ Is that a new thing? We’ve been using router configuration scripts forever. The idea – like most good ones – does have roots in earlier approaches, such as Perl scripts that pass configuration settings to routers. But SDN is a more centralised concept. Rather than pushing out individual scripts to every single router and switch, SDN lets one controller application run a…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £634 exc VAT from transparent-uk.com “With its up-to-date CPU and big memory capacity, the DS1618+ is a great choice for storage duties – and for several other roles besides” Synology launched its first six-bay NAS, the DS3018xs, last year; now it’s following up with the DS1618+, a serious-looking appliance aimed at small businesses. It features a current-generation Atom C3538 CPU and a respectable 4GB of DDR4 RAM, expandable to a huge 32GB, making it one of Synology’s most powerful desktop NAS units. At the back of the chassis you’ll find four Gigabit Ethernet ports, three USB 3 connectors and dual eSATA ports – each supporting one of Synology’s five-bay DX517 expansion units, for a maximum of 16 drives. There’s space for a single PCI-Express card too, so…

“You may be picturing secondhand equipment, but much refurbished or recertified hardware has never been used” Some refurbished kit is safer than new,” Scan Computers’ Keith Williams told us, before admitting that he isn’t a fan of the word “refurbished” at all. When products have been retested, re-warrantied and put back on sale, he describes them as being “recertified”. He described the tortuous route a product might take from the Far East to a British desk: a dozen time zones, countless distribution centres, from hot and humid factories to cold and dry aircraft. Every step of the way there’s potential for something to work its way loose. Whatever it is, Williams claimed, “it’s normally an easy fix – and then, when they’re retested at the local centre, they’ll do double…

Artificial intelligence is creeping into every aspect of our lives – and that terrifies plenty of people. Even setting aside fears of technological apocalypse brought about by machine learning, AI could further embed existing problems in society. AI-based systems are already working on medical diagnoses and bail decisions – even though they mirror biases and assumptions. For example, a 2016 study by ProPublica in the US revealed racial bias in an algorithm used to determine the risk of offenders committing crimes in the future. Making AI behave better than humans isn’t easy, but a group of tech rights organisations has taken the first step by laying out a detailed set of warnings and advice for developers and engineers to consider when building systems. It’s called the Toronto Declaration for Machine…

APPLE MIGHT NOT be the only company set to jettison Intel’s processors. Microsoft has ported Windows 10 to its own chip architecture, giving Intel’s shareholders cause to be very nervous indeed. Microsoft has been working on a processor architecture – E2 – for several years, but the project is receiving fresh attention with reports claiming the company has managed to port both Windows 10 and Linux onto the processors. While the chips might not be destined to appear in PCs, they could play a role in a wide Windows ecosystem, experts said. “Microsoft has experience designing processors for specific applications, such as the SoCs for the Xbox,” said Shane Rau, research vice president for computing semiconductors at research firm IDC. “The E2 experiment suggests that Microsoft is researching what would…

23% Of course it’s possible. People used to think Yahoo could never be beaten. 28% Who cares? If Google services do everything you need, why switch? 49% It’s too late. Google has an unassailable position across too many parts of the web. Look out Google: many of our participants are already switching. “I use OneDrive as it integrates well with Microsoft Office apps,” wrote Neil McKenzie. “I disabled Chrome on my OnePlus 3 as it seemed to be draining battery, tried Dolphin but settled on Firefox.” On the desktop, several of you wrote to say that you use Firefox in place of Chrome and DuckDuckGo instead of Google’s search engine. Dropbox was also a popular alternative to Google Drive. “As for Android, the only true competitor is iOS, which is…

If there’s one area where Google remains an immovable, dominant force, it’s search. Yet, there are interesting alternatives to Google, most of which don’t compete on the strength of their results, but the strength of their values. Here are a few ethical alternatives to Google to consider: Ecosia Ecosia is the up-and-coming search engine. It’s offered as one of the preset search engines in Vivaldi and is a Bing-powered search engine that’s trying to save the planet. Ecosia pledges to return 80% of its profits from search ad revenue to tree-planting projects around the world. You can’t fault its transparency: it publishes a monthly financial report (documents.ecosia.org) revealing exactly how much has been earned in spent. In April 2018, for instance, it donated more than €340,000 to tree-planting projects and stuck…

Being the tech-savvy one in the family is a doubleedged sword. It’s great to help elderly parents and other relatives, but once they know you’re willing to help them with their computer problems, you’re always on call. And, when ransomware or some other disaster strikes, it’s inevitably you they’ll turn to – not Microsoft nor their PC manufacturer’s actual tech support team – for assistance. With the best will in the world, it can be pretty annoying to find yourself reduced to the role of a helpdesk operator. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if you could prevent their computer from having any such problems in the first place? Well, one solution would be to tackle the source of many problems: Windows itself. As much as we love Windows, it’s intrinsically prone…

SCORE Price As reviewed, £1,416 (£1,699 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk “As the XPS 15 2-in-1 has a touchscreen with stylus support, it’s possible to use the display as a massive drawing or sketch pad” Small irritations are like Japanese knotweed. If left unattended, the plant can cause serious problems, and that’s exactly how I feel about one aspect of this Dell’s keyboard. It’s not the action of the fancy “MagLev” magnetic key switches; they’re noisy, perhaps, but also comfortable. responsive and spacious. It’s one element of the layout that’s the problem. The Page Up and Page Down keys lie immediately on top of the left and right cursor keys, like buttercream on a sponge cake, so it’s horribly easy to catch one of the former by accident. When you use…

SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk “All those easy upgrades mean this laptop should keep going for years – and my first upgrade would be to double the RAM” Dell isn’t putting all its gaming eggs into the Alienware basket (see p58). Back in March, it announced the G3 and G5 gaming laptops, with the idea that these 15in and 17in laptops would offer a budget alternative to Alienware kit. A sensible move, it would seem, so we were keen to test an early example. The G3 here is actually the lowest-spec model in the range. That means a quad-core Core i5-8300H processor and GeForce GTX 1050 graphics, along with a 256GB SSD, so hardly bargain basement. You can even specify a two-disk setup, but one of the…

Total value this month £152 Heimdal Pro 2018 ■ One-year, single device licence worth £32 ■ heimdalsecurity.com IT’S A SAD fact of life that not everything online is trustworthy. When you download and install software, you need to be sure it’s safe – and that it’s fully patched against vulnerabilities and exploits. Heimdal Pro provides a valuable second layer of security for your PC to bolster your regular security suite. Not only does it protect you from malicious software and similar threats, it also scans your installed applications and searches online for the latest updates. If it finds any, it will download them securely, from reputable sources, to ensure your protection is completely up to date. This month, we’re offering you the professional version of this tool, which also includes…

SCORE PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from htc.com “The U12+ is everything a modern smartphone should be: it has a tall-and-narrow 6in, 18:9, Quad HD screen that fills most of the body” The HTC U12+ might just be the least-hyped smartphone of the year. It arrives at the end of a splurge of flagship announcements and without the fanfare, glitz or glamour of many of its rivals. But this smartphone is not to be trifled with. If you aren’t seriously tempted by the end of this review, then you’re a better person than me. So what happened to the HTC U12? Fear not, you haven’t missed it. HTC is skipping its non-plus model entirely in 2018, having declared that the U12+ is its big release of the year. There isn’t…

We may be edging closer to a world of autonomous cars, but paper still rules in homes and offices around the country. Quite right too. While Instagram may be king of the pithy message, if you want to communicate serious information then the combination of paper and ink reigns supreme. So what’s new? While we investigate the power of refillable ink in a separate article on p90, the truth is that we haven’t seen dramatic changes since our last mainstream group test almost two years ago (see issue 262, p74). Print speeds continue to rise and quality edges forward, but the main changes are cosmetic: a large touchscreen is now the norm rather than the exception. Our advice also stays the same. While you’ll probably replace your phone and laptop…

Inkjet or laser, we put all printers and MFPs through a battery of tests, designed as much to bring out greatness as to uncover weaknesses. First off, we run untimed quality tests involving blocks of strong colour and regular patterns – the objective here is to show up uneven printing or inkjet colours that run into each other. We print a page of text in font sizes down to tiny 5pt, and use an eyeglass to scrutinise the results. Next, we dust off the stopwatch and send the printer 25 pages of black text. We time from the moment we click Print to the point when the first page arrives in the output tray, and continue until the last page is done to get both a time to first page…

Mono laser SCORE PRICE £403 (£483 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/287kyo At just shy of £500, Kyocera’s Ecosys M2640idw is the most expensive device in this test, yet it’s based on a mono laser printer. While you don’t get colour, you do benefit from a claimed 40ppm print speed, support for wireless and Gigabit Ethernet networks, duplex everything, a fax modem and control through a 10.9cm colour touchscreen. The details are impressive, too: the 50-sheet ADF contains dual scanning elements, so it can capture both sides of an original in one pass, and you can rattle off double-sided copies or faxes with the minimum of hassle One area where Kyocera skimps is the standard 250-sheet paper tray – at this price, and with such a fast printer, we’d expect something capable…

Mono laser SCORE PRICE £96 (£115 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Brother’s MFC-L2710DW looks a bit like it’s carved out of coal, but otherwise it ought to fit the bill for a home or small office. In its base sits a mono laser rated at a giddy 30ppm, and on top there’s a scanner with a 50-page ADF. You can connect the MFC-L2710DW via USB, wired or wireless networking, and make prints, scans, copies or faxes. It’s not a bad specification for the money, but while the printer supports duplexing, the ADF doesn’t – multipage double-sided copies could be a fiddle. Setting up the MFC-L2710DW involves sliding the paper stops in the clattery and brittle-feeling paper tray, dropping in some paper, then inserting the supplied drum and toner. You get only…

Inkjet SCORE PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from lambda-tek.com At first glance, Epson’s WorkForce WF-2860DWF could be the perfect multifunction printer for a home office. It’s compact and smart, but also loaded with useful office features: think duplex printing, wired and wireless networking, and a 30-page automatic document feeder (ADF). Unlike Epson’s similar Expression Home XP-5105 (see p87) there’s touchscreen control, and even a fax modem in case you need to send messages back to the 1990s. However, that’s where the fun ends. This MFP supports the same ink range as the XP-5105 and comes with the same vacuous setup cartridges. Forewarned by experience with this printer, and given the WorkForce’s office bias, we prioritised our plain paper tests, which with an ADF involve two additional ten-page copies compared to…

Colour laser SCORE PRICE £217 (£260 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/287oki Oki’s MC363dn looks like it’s fallen through a wormhole from the 1990s: big, heavy and unapologetically strewn with buttons. While it misses out on snazzy touchscreen controls, however, its specifications are impressive for this price. There’s a fax modem, duplex, scans and copies, a front panel USB port for walk-up prints and scans, and a Gigabit Ethernet connection at the back. The only significant omission is wireless networking – this adds around £70 to the price. This MFP’s looks aren’t the only reason you wouldn’t want to share a small office with it: it’s particularly noisy, clattering away whether printing or scanning, and spinning up its shouty cooling fans momentarily even when simply scanning from the platen. It’s not especially…

Not many businesses can afford to hire a squad of security guards to sit and keep constant watch over their premises, but an IP camera can do the same job for a very modest price. Indeed, the very presence of a camera serves as an effective deterrent to opportunist thieves – and could even reduce your insurance premiums. Today’s IP cameras are versatile too, so if you’re picturing a chunky Big Brother-style CCTV enclosure, think again. Many of the latest models come in palm-sized packages, which can be strategically positioned exactly where you need them – indoors or out. And despite their size, high-definition image quality is the norm; you won’t end up with blurred or grainy images. It’s no wonder that businesses of all sizes are investing in IP…

SCORE PRICE £288 exc VAT from networkwebcams.co.uk “The tripwire feature lets you draw lines onto the live view and triggers an event if anything passes through them” Lilin might not be as familiar as the other brands in this month’s roundup, but this Taiwanese company has a solid pedigree, having been in the surveillance game since 1980. Its latest ZMR6542X mini-dome camera ticks all the important boxes – and it features a four-megapixel CMOS sensor, delivering a better-than-HD video resolution of 2,688 x 1,520 pixels at up to 20fps. It’s up to you whether you mount it indoors or out: with an IP66 rating, the enclosure can handle the worst the British weather can throw at it, should you choose to use it for external monitoring. Lilin doesn’t quote an…

“Using relevant terms in appropriate places on your website helps visitors – and search engines – quickly find what they’re looking for” Search keywords have an iffy history. In the early days of the internet, it was common for websites to stuff dozens of half-relevant terms into their metadata – the idea being to trick search engines into directing visitors to your site, almost regardless of what they were searching for. Search engines are now smarter than that – you can’t persuade Google that your site is the web’s foremost reseller of secondhand computers simply by repeating the words a hundred times on every page. But keywords are still hugely important. Using relevant terms in appropriate places on your website helps visitors – and search engines – quickly find what…