What Is The Best Printer To Buy For Home Use

What Is The Best Printer For Home Use

What kind of printer you get for your home depends on what you plan on printing. As a general rule, if you churn out lots of text-based pages, a laser printer will do the trick. If color documents or photos are on your agenda, youâll want to go with an inkjet. If you plan on doing any scanning or copying, you should look to an all-in-one or multifunction printer. Decent AIOs arenât that much more costly than their printer-only counterparts, and they offer a ton of additional features.

Best Printers 202: The Best Home Office Printers Tested

We’ve put some of the most popular home office printers to the test to bring you our list of the best printers to buy in 2022.

Printers come in all shapes and sizes, offering buyers a sometimes baffling number of options. Whether youre after the best printer for your home, or something better suited to a small office or home office, the sheer number of variables can be confusing.

Do you want an inkjet printer vs a laserjet? Do you need to print in colour, or do you just need to run off documents, and therefore only need a mono printer? Do you need something that can print photos on glossy paper? Do you want a scanner and a copier with your printer, or do you just want a standalone printer? All or none of the above? Still confused?

Protect the planet by recycling HP ink cartridges

HP is a printer company that takes sustainability seriously. Its ink cartridges are not only designed to produce outstanding and reliable print quality but their plastic can easily be recycled using the free HP Planet Partners program.

The recycling scheme has kept 875 million HP ink cartridges, 114 million clothes hangers, and 4.69 billion plastic bottles out of landfills around the world.

From standard to high-yield, Currys has the cartridge for your printing needs, and you can save up to 20% by buying a pack of two or four instead of individual inks.

Here, we explain in detail how we tested everything and why weve picked the models below.

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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 manufacturers 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 products versatility, design and build quality. The overall score reflects all of these parameters and overall value for money.

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Top 6 Best Printers For Infrequent Use

While most printers are designed for regular use, some options are suitable for occasional use as well. I have tested the most popular models and hand-picked the most reliable ones that will serve you for years to come. After reading this article, you will easily select a decent printer for infrequent use. When making your choice, you need to pay attention to several things, such as reliable performance, high-quality output and price.

What Does It Cost To Print

With any photo printer, check the running cost and total cost of ownership if you can. Unfortunately, this may be impossible for near-dedicated photo printers, since there’s currently no widely accepted standard for calculating cost per photo with devices like these. For snapshot-style printers, however, the cost per photo is typically easy to calculate, because most manufacturers sell print packs with enough ink and paper for a given number of photos.

To get the cost per photo for one of these, simply divide the cost of the print pack by the number of photos it will print. To get the total cost of ownership, multiply the cost per photo by the number of photos you expect to print over the printer’s lifetime, and then add the printer’s initial cost. This total is the best basis for comparing prices.

One additional photo-cost consideration is with certain inkjet printers that work with ink-subscription services, like HP’s Instant Ink. In these cases, you pay a monthly fee for a set number of pages you can print in a month, whether photos or text . So it’s easy, in these cases, to calculate what a photo-printed page will cost if you go that route, and it can be a way to get cheap photo prints.

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Best Budget Printer Options

Brothers MFC-J895DW is an inexpensive multifunction inkjet printer that offers easy-to-use print, scan and fax features and fast print speeds. With an affordable initial price point, this is a great entry-level inkjet with a low operating cost. An intuitive color display navigates seamlessly across printer commands, or print wirelessly from your smartphone using a favorite app or cloud service option like Google Drive or One Drive. A 20-sheet automatic document feeder keeps you copying, scanning and faxing for longer without interruption and an automatic duplexer prints on both sides of the page with the push of a button.It includes four individual printer cartridges and cartridges are sold in either a standard or high yield size. High yield cartridges are generally a better deal if you print regularly due to their higher ink capacity.

The printer uses both LC3011 standard yield or LC3013 high yield cartridges. Brother sells the high yield black cartridge for $23.99, offering a yield of 400 pages. The high yield color cartridges print the same number of pages and go for $13.49 apiece. LD brand compatible cartridges are a great way to cut down printing costs get the black cartridge $9.99 and the color cartridges for $7.99 each.

Canon® Pixma® TR8620

Should You Buy A Refurbished Printer

Printing technology doesnât update often, so buying a printer thatâs a few years old isnât going to mean sacrificing any groundbreaking technology. If you do buy a refurbished or used printer, get it from a trustworthy source, make sure it has been recertified by the manufacturer, and look for a reasonable warranty and return period. Here’s what to know before buying refurbished electronics.

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Hp Deskjet 2755 Wireless

Best for cloud printing.

If you do not have time to stay in your home or front of the printer all the time, the HP DeskJet 2755 Wireless is the best option for you. This device comes along with an effective speed of 5.5 pages per minute for color printing. With an option of Wi-Fi connectivity, it allows you to print from anywhere in the world.

Features:

Verdict: As per customer reviews, the HP DeskJet 2755 Wireless comes with a simple print, scan, and copy mechanism that saves time. Users have found this device to get easily connected and also provide you with the best results. The HP DeskJet 2755 Wireless comes with instant printing technology with cloud support as well.

Price: It is available for $77.10 on Amazon

Printers For The Modern Paperless Home

Many printer buyers in the 2020s face a conundrum of a different sort: Their homes are largely paperless, and most of their work is digital. Yet, they still need a printer for the occasional photo art project or scanning and sending in a signature. To buyers like these, a big printer may not be worth it, especially when it comes to the space they take up and their ink cartridge maintenance.

A new type of printer has risen in popularity in response compact, often-portable home printers that are made for the odd job here and there without taking up any space or effort. One example is theCanon Pixma iP110 wireless printer. Another choice is the highly portable HP Tango X. Printers like these are designed to work right from your phone or laptop and can fit nearly anywhere.

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Editors’ Recommendations

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Hp Officejet Pro 9015

HP OfficeJet Pro 9015

We finish it off with another All-in-one printing solution from HP. This time, the showstopper is the OfficeJet Pro 9015.

The Officejet pro 9015 comes with many similar features as its ancestor, 8025. It prints at an impressive speed of 22 pages per minute, that too, with a provision for 2-sided printing.

The double-sided printing and scanning are entirely automatic. There is no need for you to keep changing or flipping the documents for this.

Its automatic document feeder can hold up to 25 pieces of regular paper in it. Within a matter of seconds, the feeder can soak in the sheets for fast printing or scanning.

As it’s a cordless device, you get to connect it to your computer and smart gadgets using the Wi-Fi network. If you are using the HP Smart app for the connection, you can use the printer from a distant place, as well.

Similar to the OfficeJet 8025, this one also comes with a self-healing Wi-Fi system. If the Wi-Fi signal of the system somehow breaks down, the machine will follow a three-step solution to bring it back to normal.

Pros

• The LCD screen is a bit tiny for regular use

Best Home Inkjet Printers

If you are in the market for an ink efficient printer, this series may be hard to beat. Part of the highly rated Inkvestment line, the MFC-J775dw is specifically designed to work with super high capacity ink cartridges, offering more prints at an affordable price point. Brother sells both a standard version and an XL version of the printer. High volume users will find a better value in the slightly more expensive XL model as it includes 3 times more ink than the standard option. Print, copy, scan and fax capabilities come standard and an automatic duplex function makes it easy to print on both sides of the page. The printers NFC function is a neat feature that lets you print from your smartphone without connecting to a wireless network. Connect directly by touching your phone to the NFC mark on the printer and instantly print with the Brother iPrint& Scan app! The LCD touch screen also gives you quick access to a number of cloud-based apps like Evernote and One Note, making it easy to print essential files.

At $20.99, an original LC20EBK black cartridge prints around 2,400 pages at a cost per page of less than 1 cent. Original cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges go for $13 apiece, printing up to 1,200 pages at around 4.7 cents per page. Compatible replacement cartridges bring operating costs down even further. LD brand compatible black cartridges are only $8.49 and each color cartridge is just $7.49, more than half the price of an original!

HP® OfficeJet® Pro 9015

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Print Speed And Additional Features

Speeds quoted by manufacturers are almost never matched by real-world performance. If you often need to print in a hurry, look for independent reviews when choosing your printer.

Other useful features to look out for include additional USB ports and memory card slots that will allow you to print photos direct from a camera.

High-capacity paper trays capable of holding hundreds of sheets of paper, or an automatic document feeder that can handle scanning and copying work while you go and do something more important, might be worth looking out for.

Double-sided printing is handy for halving your paper usage.

It’s also worth thinking about the bundled software that comes with your printer. Some printers include software that provides basic editing features, such as red-eye removal or adjusting the colour balance some even allow you to perform simple editing tasks using controls on the printer itself.

Whats The Best Printer In 2021

Looking for a printer for your home or small office? Then weve got you covered, as weve reviewed some of the best printer options currently available and ranked them in order of recommendation.

Weve included picks from HP, Epson and Canon, and will be updating this list frequently as we continue our search for the very best printer, whether you need something to print out documents on a daily basis, spit out the occasional parcel label or you fancy a machine that can bring your social media snaps to life.

So without further ado, here are our top recommended printers of 2021.

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Print Speeds And Quantities: Do They Matter

Don’t worry too much about print speed in these classes of hardware. For photos, quality matters more, and even the slowest printers today offer tolerable print speeds, at about 2 minutes for a 4-by-6 on our tests. Keep in mind, too, that measured speeds are typically slower than claimed speeds, and the speed for any given printer may vary depending on the source from which you’re printing.

The usual rule for printers is to find out the printer’s monthly duty cycle , as well as its recommended duty cycle, and make sure the latter number covers more pages than you plan to print. Unfortunately, this is almost impossible with most dedicated and near-dedicated photo printers.

That’s because most manufacturers don’t rate the duty cycle for these classes of printer. That’s as inexcusable as a car manufacturer not telling you how often to change your oil, but, for now at least, it’s the state of the business. Our rule of thumb for these printers? If you’ll be printing enough photos that you’re concerned about the duty cycle, and the manufacturer doesn’t rate the duty cycle, don’t buy the printer. You may need to look instead for printers aimed strictly at professional photographers and retail stores.

Better Print Quality And Speed Than Most Inkjet Printers

Amazon

Purchasing a color laser printer and keeping it filled with compatible toner, by default, will cost more than a full-color inkjet printer. However, depending on your home office printing needs, laser-printed output will look more professional than business correspondence or other documents printed on an inkjet printer.

The HP Color LaserJet M479fdw offers wireless printing capabilities, supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, as well as USB and Ethernet wired connectivity, and has a built-in 4.3-inch touchscreen display for controlling the printer. Being Amazon Alexa-compatible, you can also use voice commands to control the printers functionality.

As a multifunction device, this includes full-color printing, a flatbed scanner, fax, and copierwith single-pass/two-sided printing, copying, and scanning capabilities. In terms of printing speed, this printer can handle up to 27 pages per minute . Being a laser printer, the HP LaserJet M479fdw is not designed to be a home photo printer. Instead, its designed for higher-capacity printing needs.

The HP LaserJet M479fdw has a built-in 150-sheet output bin, and a 300-sheet input capacity for the paper tray. You’ll need to keep this printer stocked with both an HP414A and HP414X toner cartridge . The HP414A cartridges will generate approximately 2,100 printed pages, while the HP414X will generate approximately 7,500 printed pages before needing to be replaced.

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Input And Output Trays

Most current printers work by pulling paper in from the front, running it around the drum or roller, and then popping it out to the output tray. However, if youre printing on heavier stock, you dont want to bend the paper in that case, you may want to look for a printer that has an input tray coming from the back of the printer, so that the paper is pushed through on a straight line.

Some printers also allow you to have more than one paper tray in front, letting you choose different colored paper, for example, or having one tray hold letter-sized paper and the other hold legal-sized.

You also want to know how many sheets of paper your input and output trays are capable of holding. If you plan to, say, print out a 200-page manuscript, you dont want an output tray that is only capable of handling 50 pages, or you could find 150 of your pages strewn over your floor.

So Which Inkjet Printer Should You Buy

Above and below, we’ve compiled a pick list of the top late-model inkjets we’ve tested in PC Labs, spanning a variety of usage cases: home- and small-office printing , photo printing, and mobile document printing. For more picks, check out our favorite printers overall , as well as our top photo printers.

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Do You Even Need A Photo Printer

First, note here that we are talking mainly about snapshot printers, and near-dedicated photo printers that are built for and marketed to the photography set. Apart from them, many inkjet-based home and office all-in-one printers do print excellent photos see our guide to the best all-in-one printers for our tops picks there. You can do photo printing on other kinds of printers, and some of them are indeed photo-focused. But they are more general-use printers than the crowd we’re talking about here.