How to choose the perfect printer for your needs
Want a great printer for your home or small office? While everyone’s needs are different, here are the key things to look for
In this test, we have looked at a range of the sort of printers and multifunctions you might want to buy for your home – from a fast, heavy-duty colour laser printer, right the way down to one of the cheapest home inkjets you can buy. It’s a diverse field, capable of fulfilling many roles.
When you’re making a buying decision, the first step is to work out what needs doing and then find the right class of device for the job. For the minority of people who never need to scan or copy a document, a straightforward printer may be ideal, but you can do far more by adding some kind of a scanner. While you could pair a hand-chosen printer with a flatbed or document scanner, a multifunction peripheral (MFP) includes both, and integrates their functions in powerful and intuitive ways. Add in a fax modem and you have a device that covers all the needs of a small home office.
Here, we look at nine MFPs and three single-function printers. The group comprises nine inkjet and three laser devices. Received wisdom has it that the former are typically slower, less reliable and more expensive to run than the latter, but that’s not always the case. While our three lasers are the fastest printers, two of the inkjets are much cheaper to run, and it’s a close-run thing elsewhere.
For most purposes, a colour printer is ideal, but it’s still hard to beat a mono laser for quick, crisp text – we’ve included a quick and compact contender, but the other 11 devices here all print in colour.
Feature upgrade
Choose the right class of device, and the next challenge is to make sure it has the right features. These generally boil down to connectivity, paper handling, speed and running costs. Generally, we recommend choosing a printer that can automatically print on both sides of each sheet of paper (duplex printing). In most cases, on printers that can’t, the driver will guide you through manually reloading printed pages to achieve the same effect.
Cheap printers usually have one smallish paper tray, but a bigger tray means less time spent refilling it. Additional trays add flexibility, and prevent you having to unload a stock of plain paper to print on special media. If you print a lot, look for a main tray that holds at least 200
“Received wisdom has it that inkjets are typically slower, less reliable and more expensive to run, but that’s not always the case”
“Laser printers often have more complex needs, requiring separate toner, drums, belts, fusers and waste toner bottles”
pages, or preferably a ream (500 pages), but ensure there’s a big output tray to collect the pages afterwards.
Cheap MFPs, and those aimed more at general-purpose or creative use, tend to feature a standard flatbed scanner, but more office-focused ones often include an automatic document feeder (ADF). This lets you make unattended scans, copies or even faxes of a multipage document. Get one that’s duplex-capable and it will capture both sides of an original, adding flexibility. Duplexing ADFs fall into two camps: cheaper ones manually flip the page around, while more expensive ones have two sensors to capture both sides in one go. The latter are much faster, so they’re best if you do lots of archiving.
All but the cheapest device in this test can connect to a network. That’s essential if you have multiple users, but these days it also enables cloud features. Our networked printers all support printing via Google Cloud Print, but some let you build new print and scan workflows using services such as Office, Dropbox or Google Drive. Wi-Fi is common, and is reliable if the printer and router are close, but, if not, a wired Ethernet port may make dataintensive jobs such as scanning faster or more reliable.
Manufacturers quote print and scan speeds based on ISO tests, so they’re more accurate than they once were. Even so, there’s often a discrepancy between stated speeds and the results in our tests. We will mention the most important speeds and any notable results in our reviews.
Running costs can be a little trickier. For a start, inkjets and lasers use different standards, meaning the per-page prices for each are not fully comparable. Laser printers in particular often have more complex needs, requiring separate toner, drums, belts, fusers and waste toner bottles. For each printer there’s also usually a choice of different capacity ink or toner – the biggest are almost always the best value, so we list them in our table overleaf.
Our running cost calculations include all the consumables and maintenance items for which the manufacturer provides an estimated page life – we’ll mention in the review whether toner-only costs are much cheaper. Remember that the cost of real-life printing may be different, and consumable prices may change – it’s best to consider our running cost calculations as indicative.