A3 copiers and printers for Gold Coast offices

An A3 inkjet or an office A3 copier?

Walk into an office supply store and most of the A3 printers on display will be inkjets. For the occasional A3 sheet at home, or in a business of two or three, they do the job.

The office A3 copier is a much bigger piece of equipment, sold under names like A3 multifunction printer or A3 MFP. One machine handles copying, printing and scanning. Several drawers keep hundreds of sheets loaded, a document feeder reads both sides of each original in a single pass, and it is built to produce thousands of pages every month for years on end. If something goes wrong, the technician comes to your premises.

Once more than a few staff share it, or scanning is a big part of the day, the office machine earns its place.

A3 printers from Brother, Epson, Canon and OKI

Look up A3 printers online and you will mostly find inkjets from Epson, Brother, HP and Canon, the EcoTank range from Epson included, as well as OKI's A3 colour printers. These suit A3 jobs that come up now and then. Expect a tray or two of paper, ink or toner bought cartridge by cartridge, and no one to call out when it stops.

What most people call a copier is really an A3 MFP built for the office. Up to four paper drawers, stapling and folding if you want them, A3 printing, copying and scanning, and servicing on site that is folded into a fixed cost per page. That is the starting point for A3 work in a business.

The right A3 machine for most offices

Our usual advice is an A3 colour laser MFP somewhere between 25 and 35 pages per minute. At that speed several people can share it without queuing, each page costs little, and double sided originals scan in one pass. A busier floor may want more speed; a business that hardly prints colour can save with an A3 mono model.

New A3 machines come from HP, Kyocera, Lexmark and Toshiba. Secondhand, we have A3 machines from every major brand. Keeping costs down? See cheap A3 copiers.

Do you need colour?

Colour has become the norm for office copiers, and you will see these machines called colour copiers, A3 colour photocopiers or A3 colour MFPs. Each colour page costs more to produce than a black one, though. A real estate agency printing listings will want colour; a trades office printing quotes and job sheets may be better off with mono. If you are unsure, take colour and set black and white as the default.

Does your business need A3 at all?

If no one prints A3 and your team is under about ten people, an A4 machine may cover everything, and it takes up less room. See office printers.