The nineteen-nineties issue of this magazine spent its longest feature counting the ways a beige box could refuse to look like every other beige box: Canon’s cartridge minimalism, Sharp’s rotating drawers, Panasonic’s heraldic badges, Océ’s rounded, drum-hearted machines from Venlo, which won industrial-design prizes for looking like nothing else in the catalogue. Xerox put touch glass on a console before the telephone had any. The variety was real, if largely accidental. This edition, the research department is obliged to report, has produced a single answer, badged twelve different ways.

Open any brochure in this register and the silhouette is the silhouette: an off-white or pale-grey box, waist height, a hinged feeder for a hat, and — on every flagship — a tablet on an articulating arm where the exposure dial, then the membrane keys, then the CRT once sat. The product photograph has quietly become a render; nobody photographs these things in a studio, because there is nothing left for a studio to add. Ricoh and Toshiba Tec, joined in 2025 by OKI, now build most of their machines in the same joint-venture factory and sell them against each other in the same tenders. Canon spent 2025–26 retiring two entire product families into one nameplate, imageFORCE, in pursuit of “a clearer, more value-driven proposition.” Visually, there is nothing left to tell apart.

None of this is decline. A photocopier in 1994 was furniture: it stood where visitors could see it, had a face, and somebody in facilities argued about which one to buy the way people argue about carpet. A photocopier in 2026 is infrastructure — provisioned by IT, governed by a print contract, judged on cost-per-page, and looked at by nobody without a service ticket open. Design converged because the argument moved rooms. Nobody designs a router to be liked, either, and the copier has finally joined it.

There are exceptions, noted here with relief. The production presses still have presence: Xerox’s Iridesse lays gold, silver and fluorescent pink in a single pass, and Sharp’s BP-1200S carries a sixth toner station just to match the Pantone book — a press that colour still gets an opinion. Toshiba Tec’s e-STUDIO5008LP prints in a hue it calls Erasable Blue, the one shade here that is neither cream, black, nor the trade’s permitted red. Epson’s heat-free inkjets, lacking a fuser or drum to house, are quietly reshaping the box from within. The white rectangle is not a failure of nerve. It is the honest shape of a machine that no longer needs selling from a showroom floor — and honesty is a design virtue too.