The best home printers are exactly what you need for all your printing needs for this new age of hybrid working. Whether your daily printing demands include work documents you’re printing from your home office or mostly kids’ homework now, you don’t need a pricey behemoth you’ll find in most offices. These printers are just as multi-functional and reliable while keeping things affordable, compact and perhaps more importantly reliable.
With so many working from home because of the pandemic, having one of the best home printers is more important than ever. And, they’re just as capable as their commercial counterparts of handling all the work documents you have to print as well as producing high-quality greeting cards, printing vacation pictures, and even scanning important documents to produce digital copies.
So, unless you require the high capacity capabilities of a business printer, you can save space and money as one of the best home printers will more than suffice. Here are our top picks, from ink-based options to laser all-in-one printers. No matter what size of household and family demands you have, you’ll find something ideal here. Also check out our best small business printers roundup.
Best home printer: How did we choose?
Best home printer: How did we choose?
Now that most home printers are being used to print important documents for school and work, selecting the best possible device has become more important than ever. In this review, we assessed numerous printers for price (including the cost of replacement ink cartridges), reliability, speed, ease of use, and its ability to manage different paper sizes. We also wanted to ensure that we reviewed printers from a range of different manufacturers, including heavyweight players like HP and lesser-known brands, such as Kyocera. If you’re looking for a home printer review that covers a wide range of options, then keep reading.
1. HP Envy Pro 6420 printer
The HP Envy Pro 6420 is a compact and inexpensive inkjet with all the features you could ask for from a home office printer. It can print, scan, copy and even fax via your smartphone. The print speed is slow, but it can duplex print and photocopy a stack of up to 35 pages with its inbuilt ADF (automatic document scanner). Instead of an Ethernet port, you have both Bluetooth and self-healing Wi-Fi built in, making mobile printing via HP’s iOS/Android app particularly easy.
We were impressed by its ease of use and overall print quality, while its lack of an LCD display, the limited paper capacity and slow print speed can all be overlooked if you’re printing on a small scale. Just bear in mind that the Envy Pro works best with HP’s ink subscription service, Instant Ink which ties you to a (low) recurrent monthly fee.
2. Lexmark MB3442adw
It might be small, but the Lexmark MB3442adw has the features and specifications of an accomplished office printer. It’s a four-in-one device, which means you have a fax facility (assuming you have a landline) in addition to printing, scanning and photocopying. Printing at a rate of 42 pages per minute places this among the fastest laser printers around. There’s plenty of room for paper too with a 350-sheet main tray and the option to upgrade, so it’s unlikely you’ll ever need another home printer.
The duplex printing and scanning is well executed and the touchscreen and front USB ports are certainly convenient. It can print large documents such as manuscripts very quickly and above all, the quality is consistently high. If you need to print lots of pages and you require the added functionality of a scanner and ADF, then this is the AIO (all in one) device for you. Just bear in mind that the cost of the toner.
The core selling point is that beyond the cartridges there are no other supplies that need replacing – e.g. no separate photoconductors, developers and even the waste tone bottle is a lifetime item. So while you might feel the cartridges are expensive – other elements that can require replacing on competitor products don’t need replacing.
3. HP Envy 5055 printer (Envy 5010 UK)
This humble all-in-one can scan and copy, but its real strength is in printing photos. Frustratingly, there’s no Ethernet port, nor a USB port for printing from a flash drive and it churns very slowly, but the results are surprisingly good for such an affordable inkjet. The supplied starter cartridges are rather light on ink, but if you replace them with high-capacity carts, then the running cost is competitive too.
Note that this model is known as the HP Envy 5010 in the UK.
4. Epson WF-7210DTW printer
Printers aimed at the home office that can handle A3 paper are not common, but ones that can automatically print on both sides of an A3 page are downright rare. The WorkForce WF-7210DTW is one such beast and it does so quite successfully. Print quality is impressive, be that monochrome text, or a glossy photo. The long list of features includes both Wi-Fi and NFC connectivity and the two paper trays can hold 500 sheets combined.
5. Kyocera Ecosys P5026cdw printer
This stout laser printer takes up relatively little space, given its high capacity for paper and toner. It means you can keep printing quickly and efficiently and with lower running costs than an equivalent inkjet. The display that comes with the Kyocera Ecosys P5026cdw is rather fiddly, but in all other respects, this color printer is easy to use and can be relied upon for immaculate mono and color documents time after time.
6. Brother MFC-J5945DW Printer
This big Brother blurs the line between home printer and office printer by combining the fast print speed and high capacity of a laser machine with the superior photo finish of an inkjet. We would recommend it for both applications because although it is smaller than the laser equivalent MFC-L8690CDW, the inkjet MFC-J5945DW can handle A3 paper. There’s really nothing that this fully featured 4-in-1 can’t do and it carries out all tasks satisfactorily.
7. Xerox Phaser 6510DN
You probably associate Xerox with office printers, but the brand’s entry-level range would suit a home office well, especially one with high print demands. The Xerox Phaser 6510DN has a rapid print speed of 28 pages per minute and room for 250 sheets of A3 in its main tray. This is expandable to 850 sheets and it ships with enough toner for 1,000 color or 1,500 mono pages. It also has all of Xerox’s usual high build quality and security features. Choose the DNI model if you need Wi-Fi in addition to the Ethernet port.
8. Brother HLL2395DW
The Brother HLL2395DW is an ideal printer for any small business that needs to do a lot of printing and to do it quickly – but it’s also one of the best home printer on the market. While you may be limited to black and white with this printer, you’ll be able to print up to 36 pages in a minute and could probably spit out a whole book before having to reload the printer, thanks to a 250 page capacity. Like other recent Brother printers, it has an intuitive display that allows you to print from and scan to cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive as well as its NFC “touch to connect” printing which allows you to access it from a mobile device without even needing a network connection. All-in-all, this is a pretty nifty printer.
9. Brother INKvestment MFC-J995DW
Despite its compact size, the Brother MFC-J995DW INKvestment is a monster printer. It’s incredibly efficient, being able to print for up to a year without having to change its ink cartridge. And, it’s also a feature-rich and intuitive machine perfect for any home or small business office. You can print to it from just about any device wirelessly and, for mobile, you don’t even need a network to do it, thanks to its NFC (near field communication) technology that connects directly to the printer. While interfacing with its 2.7” color display, you can even print from and scan to the cloud.
10. Epson EcoTank ET-3760
Whether you’re trying to run a more eco-friendly household or you’re just fed up with having to run out go get ink at the most inconvenient times – in the middle of printing your important documents, for example – you might love the Epson EcoTank ET-3760. This all-in-one printer is cartridge-free and comes with refillable bottles that contain up to two years’ worth of ink instead. It doesn’t have a massive paper capacity, only 150 sheets at a time, that’s hardly a deal-breaker, especially if you’re just mostly using it for personal stuff. It’s a bit expensive, but think of all the money you’ll save not having to run to the store and get replacement cartridges all the time.
Best home printers: How did we test them?
Printers are not like smartphones so don’t expect the ones from five years ago to be significantly different from the ones launched last year. Printing resolutions, connectivity and features haven’t changed significantly and so have our printing tests.
Each printer we source for testing is measured on our test bench and the results are critically compared with every other model we have reviewed. Rather than relying on the manufacturer’s quoted figures, we time the first page out and print speeds in single sheet and duplex mode using a standard ten-page document and a stopwatch app.
To compare print quality, we print out the same set of test documents on every machine. These twelve test pages include text of varying font sizes and colors, mixed image and text pages, a set of photos and a series of test patterns designed to assess sharpness, color fidelity, contrast and grey scale.
We also calculate running costs, compare functionality and consider each product’s versatility, design and build quality. The overall score reflects all of these parameters and overall value for money.
Finding the right printer
With many of us now working from home, the best printers have become essential devices in our homes and offices. However, the printer market is absolutely rammed with different makes and models. You can choose printers by manufacturer, such as Epson or HP. Not only that, but there are inkjet, laser, or black and white printer considerations as well.
There are also situations in which you may need a different type of printer, such as wireless or even portable, or even one specifically for a Mac.
This abundance of choice is good in some respects – it means no matter what type of printer you need, you’l be able to find one that’s perfect for you. However, because there is so much to choose from, it means finding that perfect printer can be a lot more tricky. However, that’s where our best printers guide comes in.
No matter if it’s a home printer or business printer for your office, the best printers on this page can help you quickly and easily print off documents in perfect quality, all while keeping running costs low.
For your sake and sanity, we put together a list of the best printers. We’ve got all-in-one printers that can do scans and photocopies, photo printers that can produce lab-quality prints of your images, and even solid black and white laser printers for fast – and cheap – printouts for office use,
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