PRINTERS FOR EVERY BUDGET
14 on test from £75
Having tested hundreds of printers over the 27 years (and counting) of PC Pro, we can say one thing with absolute and horrific certainty: the perfect printer doesn’t exist. One that instantly produces sumptuous photos one minute and churns out dot-perfect reports the next. One that never runs out of ink or toner, that always works perfectly, that costs fractions of pence per page.
But we have good news. Slowly, so very slowly, we’re edging closer to that dream machine. This month, we see a potentially perfect office workhorse in an HP Neverstop laser; it’s quick, incredibly cheap to run and produces high-quality results. In, ahem, mono.
Ah, you want colour as well? We aren’t going to pretend that the bottle-fed inkjets from Canon and Epson are going to produce astonishing results. We aren’t even going to pretend that they’re cheap: it’s telling that both companies strip out features as they attempt to produce hardware for a cost that isn’t going to scare buyers away.
Nevertheless, we love this direction of travel. And there’s an honesty about paying a chunky amount for a printer but not being bled dry for original cartridges – or sacrificing quality (as a rule of thumb) by going the third-party route. We’ve never liked the “razor and blades” model and suspect that ultimately it’s the consumer who pays the price.
If you want it all, though, cartridges remain the only route. Printers such as the Canon Pixma TS8350 and HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw are kings of their respective kingdoms, with running costs to match. And, spoiler alert: they’re also the top choices from their categories.