The 5 Best Home Printers

Best Overall Home Printer

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw

Capabilities	Print, scan, copy, fax
Type	Laser
Estimated Lifetime Cost of Ownership	$972
Resolution (Black)	600 x 600 dpi
Resolution (Color)	600 x 600 dpi

When you need a workhorse of a black and white printer but also want to make swift work of scanning documents, copying, and faxing, then the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw is a go-to choice to meet your needs. Lead tester Lesley Robinson notes, “this premium all-in-one printer really does it all and does it quite well.” You can expect perfect text quality from this model and good photo printing, albeit not as good as printers intended for photo printing. It is also one of the fastest and easiest printers to use, and its operational costs are better than you might expect for such a capable printer.

With many things in life, you get what you pay for. This is the case with the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw. Its premium performance and large array of features come at a premium price, and if we had to quibble, it could be better at color graphic and photo printing. If you want a more affordable model that does a decent job across all our metrics, check out the HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color below.

Read more: HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw review

Budget Document Printer

HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color

Capabilities	Print, scan, copy
Type	All-in-one inkjet
Estimated Lifetime Cost of Ownership	$646
Resolution (Black)	1200 x 1200 dpi
Resolution (Color)	4800 x 1200 dpi

The HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color is an affordable printer that offers a great balance of performance and features for its price. Its text is fairly sharp, and we think most people will be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the text of this model versus that of other premium home printers in our lineup. Additionally, our testers noted, "this model is capable of printing high-quality photographic prints, has relatively low operating costs, is easy to use, and gets simple jobs done swiftly."

The HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color performs well across the board at the trade-off of not being exceptional at any single task. It is essentially the jack of all trades and, albeit quite good at those trades, is the master of none.

Read more: HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color review

Best Budget All-in-One Printer

Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820

Capabilities	Print, scan, copy, fax
Type	All-in-one inkjet
Estimated Lifetime Cost of Ownership	$634
Resolution (Black)	4800 x 1200 dpi
Resolution (Color)	4800 x 1200 dpi

The Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820 is the most well-rounded home printer we tested when it comes to performance, all-in-one capabilities, operating costs, and budget. It does everything you could want a printer to do in a home office environment, and it's reasonably priced. Our testing demonstrated that the WF-4820 balances fast reproduction of text and photos without sacrificing a whole lot of quality. Our testers noted the Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820 “consistently saw crisp text and vivid colors without serious striping or major artifacts, and it prints quickly.” The setup is intuitive and quick, and the interface is strong, hosting a range of helpful troubleshooting capabilities that can help to quickly resolve any issues.

Unfortunately, Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820 doesn't automatically duplex scan, and to scan both sides of a document, you have to flip it over manually, which may not be conducive for large scanning tasks. However, minor gripes aside, the WF-4820 offers fantastic overall value-to-performance and is an exceptional budget minded option for a small home office. If cost is no issue and you are looking for a lightning-fast printer that produces top-tier text documents, you'll have to check out the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw. It offers better all-around performance but comes at a significantly higher price.

Read more: Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4820 review

Lowest Operating Costs

Epson EcoTank ET-2800

Capabilities	Print, scan, copy
Type	All-in-one inkjet
Estimated Lifetime Cost of Ownership	$301
Resolution (Black)	5760 x 1440 dpi
Resolution (Color)	5760 x 1440 dpi

If your printing requirements prioritize exceptionally low operational costs, and you're prepared to trade off some text quality, photo and graphic printing capabilities, and speed, then the Epson EcoTank ET-2800 is the premier choice in today's market. It will print 4500 black and white pages for only $14 and is also able to print 7500 colored pages for $13.99. That works out to a fraction of a penny per print, whereas other printers can set you back as much as 10 cents per page for black and whites alone.

The Epson EcoTank ET-2800 is certainly attractive due to its low operational costs, but a home office user demanding high-quality prints may want to look at a printer that offers better all-around performance and speed, even if long-term operating costs aren't quite as low. For that, we'd strongly recommend considering the budget-friendly Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820.

Read more: Epson EcoTank ET-2800 review

Great for Graphics

Canon Pixma TR4720

Capabilities	Print, scan, copy, fax
Type	All-in-one inkjet
Estimated Lifetime Cost of Ownership	$1,449
Resolution (Black)	4800 x 1200 dpi
Resolution (Color)	4800 x 1200 dpi

"The Canon Pixma TR4720 offers the ability to print impressively rich, sharp, and vibrant color photos with extreme color accuracy," lead tester Lesley Robinson notes. It is handily the best of the home printers we tested when it comes down to photo resolution, especially excelling in color representing skin tones and clothing. It also realistically captures the warm undertones of skin that are often lost in a print and keeps even the most subtle details intact.

Unfortunately, while the Canon Pixma TR4720 is an exceptional photo printing home printer, it isn't the best for most other home or home office tasks. It is also absurdly expensive to operate, averaging over 20 cents per printed page, and requires somewhat frequent ink refills. For the lowest operational costs, we recommend the Epson EcoTank ET-2800.

Read more: Canon Pixma TR4720 review

Compare Products

Compare select up to 5 products to compare

	Score	Product	Price
	80	HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw Best Overall Home Printer	$549
	75	Canon Color imageCLASS MF656Cdw	$450
	74	HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color Budget Document Printer	$160
	71	Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820 Best Budget All-in-One Printer	$220
	65	Epson EcoTank ET-2800 Lowest Operating Costs	$280
	54	HP DeskJet 2755e	$85
	53	HP Envy 6055e	$130
	49	Canon Pixma MG3620	$80
	49	Canon Pixma TR4720	$100

How We Tested

We've tested dozens of printers over the years. For this review, we pit 9 top-rated home printers against each other in side-by-side tests to find out which ones are the best. We spent hours comparing and contrasting every metric that makes a printer worthy. We print thousands of pages to compare A/B text, photo, and graphics quality among the competitors. We compare form factors and ease of setup, use, and connectivity. Overall, our team conducted more than 150 individual tests to help you find the perfect printer to match your needs and budget.

Anything you could want to know about one of these devices, we've tested it against every other printer we found worthy of comparison. We want a printer that will strike a balance between performance and value. So each printer we test undergoes 5 specific tests that evaluate text quality and compares that to the ink cost — for black and white and color cartridges — and a calculated lifetime cost of ownership. The results of the Text Quality and Operating Cost scores each account for 25% of the overall score. We're proud of our testing efforts, and this comprehensive review highlights the best home printers on the market. We hope you can use the information here to select the perfect product to fit your needs and budget. For those interested, take a look at our full in-depth article on how we test printers.

Our in-depth testing process of printers breaks down into five rating metrics:

• Text Quality (25% of overall score weighting)

• Graphics and Photos (25% weighting)

• Operating Cost (25% weighting)

• Ease of Use (15% weighting)

• Printing Speed (10% weighting)

Why Trust GearLab

Even when our product testers Genaveve Bradshaw and Lesley Robinson aren't testing products, they're comparing their potential purchases, whether it's tech, outdoor gear, or groceries at their local co-op. With so many companies and products vying for our attention and capital, we need to either invest our own valuable time and energy into vetting every purchase for ourselves or look for a third party to help us out. That's where we come in. We see you, we see the clutter, and we're here to help sort through it all to make sure you never feel like you're wasting your hard-earned dollar. We hate that feeling too, and our goal is to be the best resource for you when you're looking to make a purchase but don't know where to start.

Analysis and Test Results

Printers may not be the most glamorous or exciting piece of tech in our homes or offices, but they're an essential tool in our lives. In our ideal home office setup, we like to have a top-rated office chair and keyboard as well as a great mouse. A dependable, economical, and quality printer completes the home office. It's important to own one you can rely on to perform the tasks you need without hurdles or failings. While they can be frustrating when they don't perform how we expect them to, they've come a long way over the years in terms of convenience, reliability, and ease of use. We think our analysis and test results demonstrate some very strong performers in today's market.

The front-runners we uncovered perform exceptionally well at the metrics we've outlined here. Even outside of our awards, there were strong performers amongst the many models that we tested side-by-side. We're confident that our weeks of testing, analysis of results, and explication in these reviews can lead you to a purchase you feel good about. Our expert advice will save you time and can potentially save you from wasting money on a product that doesn't fit your needs.

What's the Best Value?

The value of any particular piece of office equipment will vary depending on your needs. If you're running a small office with a high output of printed documents and graphics or images, a printer that performs fast with exceptional quality may be valuable and worth a larger investment. If your child prints the occasional essay at home, an award-winning home printer with perfectly crisp text is probably not worth much to you. Beyond these considerations of value, we've also analyzed each model's estimated lifetime and operating costs in our lineup. So, once you've decided what type of printer you need for your situation, you can look at our cost analysis of each model you've honed in on. For example, maybe the graphics quality is more valuable to you than the cost of cartridge replacements. Regardless of your needs, we hope to provide you with all the information here that will help you find the product most valuable to you.

We determined some of the home printers to be great values based on the different considerations and specific needs that people have in a printer. These are the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4820 and the HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color. While these are different in their initial purchase price and overall function, each provides great value to its target audience. The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4820 is affordable and also inexpensive to operate for an all-in-one model that offers solid performance all-around.

Long-term costs should also be taken into consideration. The Epson EcoTank ET-2800 offers the lowest operation costs of any printer in our lineup, with an estimated lifetime cost of only $301, whereas other printers can cost over $1000 within their lifetime. This unit also has a fairly affordable upfront cost. That said, you'd be sacrificing photo quality, and this unit doesn't print very quickly. But if those features aren't important, this could be a great budget option for your home office.

Text Quality

Above all, the most important feature of your everyday printer is its ability to print clear text. If the text is blurry or illegible, it's not performing its most basic function. A model that scored 10 out of 10 in this metric has flawless text quality under a microscope; a score of 1 means the text is not considered legible from any distance. We printed thousands of pages of text of various sizes and densities to sort from best to worst. After printing, we then studied the text in both dim, natural, and artificial lighting before arriving at our final score.

Our two points of analysis on printed text were Black and White Text Quality, where we noted how consistently black the ink was within each character under various lighting conditions, and Text Resolution, which entails assessing the sharpness of each character, looking carefully for bleeding or blemishes.

The Canon Color imageCLASS MF656Cdw and the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw were head of the class with what we can only describe as perfect text quality. Even under microscopic scrutiny, it is difficult to critique the results of either printer. If we did quibble, those critiques would not matter to the naked eye anyway.

The Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820 also earned a place in the top half of the lineup, although it did exhibit a tiny bit of bleed-through in addition to a loss of sharpness on smaller fonts that was slightly more obvious than what was produced by the other aforementioned models.

Graphics and Photos

Graphics and photos are not everybody's top priorities, but if it's important to you to be able to produce high-quality photographs, we put our lineup through its paces to help you make the most informed decision. We printed hundreds of graphics, charts, and photos and compared them side-by-side.

The Canon Pixma TR4720 impressed us with its unmatched graphic and photo printing abilities. This modestly priced home printer excelled at printing crisp graphics as well as clear and color accurate photo prints. However, worth mentioning is that those stunning prints will cost about 22 cents per page, and the operating costs are extremely high, even though its upfront purchase price is very affordable.

The Canon Pixma MG3620 was a small step back from TR4720 and did not excel at producing the same level of clarity and quality in business graphics. However, the photos and photographic quality of the prints were nearly identical to the clarity of the TR4720, and it is also significantly cheaper to operate at about 10 cents cheaper per page to create those prints.

One of the other home printers that also shone in our graphic and photo testing is the HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color. From a short distance these photos looked fairly clear, though under our microscope we noticed the photos it prints sometimes lack the fine details present on the two leading Canons. Black and white gradients also have the occasional slight streaking, and blues are a little over-saturated.

There were a few printers that passed our clarity tests, namely the HP Envy 6055e and HP DeskJet 2755e. These came in closely behind the front runners and displayed sharp graphics. The 6055e has a special ability to produce warm color tones with greater accuracy. Both models excelled at textural displays and subtle color variation but also exhibited oversaturation of blue colors.

Adding to its all-around workhorse status as an all-in-one printer and home or home office solution, the Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820 presented us with respectable graphic and photo printing, although not nearly as nice as any of the other leading home printers for this metric. However, its prints meet the requirement for what we would consider good quality and also achieve that above-average standard at an affordable five cents per page.

Operating Cost

Generally, most people want to print documents and forget about their printers. Constantly needing to buy expensive ink cartridges is a headache. Likewise, it's not in everyone's best interest to buy the cheapest printer with the cheapest cartridges they can find and regularly deal with subpar prints or errors. That's why we spent the time and calculated the exact cost per page of every printer on our list so you can decide where your price point sweet spot is.

Another consideration is how all of these costs accrue over the lifetime ownership of each printer. We calculated each printer's estimated 3-year lifetime cost by adding the MSRP to our cost-per-page analysis. This way, you won't have any surprise costs when considering one of the printers in our lineup, and you can make the best decision for your specific needs.

The Epson EcoTank ET-2800 has by far the lowest operation costs and produces an impressive 7,500 printed pages per replacement cartridge(s). Its cost per printed page is so low, 1/100ths of a cent. That fraction eventually adds up to about $1.55 per 500 black and white pages and 93 cents for color pages. In short, the ET-2800 is the least expensive home printer to operate and makes it a fantastic choice for buyers looking for the best bang for their buck over the long haul.

The Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820 offered a good balance of both black and white as well as color printing with respectable performance. You can expect its costs to average about 6 cents per black and white print, and 5 cents per color print.

The HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color followed the leaders in economical printing with black and white costs of 7 cents per page, and an impressive color cost of 4 cents per page.

If you want the overall lowest lifetime cost, the Epson EcoTank ET-2800 is your best bet. Its lifetime cost of $301 is hundreds of dollars less than most other units in our lineup. On the other hand, the Canon Pixma TR4720 is wildly expensive in comparison, with a calculated lifetime cost of $1,449. It excels with graphics and photos, but eats through its pricy ink.

While each model varies in operating and purchase costs, each performs different functions better or worse than the others. Hopefully, our cost analysis can provide enough compiled data to help you quickly sort through the overall costs of owning and operating each of these printers and make the best choice for your needs.

Ease of Use

There's been a great deal of progress in user interfaces and software design over the past decade. From WiFi connectivity improvements to the advent of touchscreens and supplementary mobile apps to speak to and navigate printer settings. most printers have come a long way from esoteric, slow, and clumsy onboard menus. We found that many of the printers in our lineup were quite easy to set up and pleasant to use and troubleshoot. However, as with any field of tech gadgets these days, we still ran into our fair share of setbacks and head scratches.

Some printers offer phenomenal user experiences via refined applications for both a desktop and mobile device, in addition to large modern touchscreens. However, other printers offer no touchscreens, too small an antiquated screen, and sometimes no screen at all. Combinations of mobile printing apps, desktop interfaces and the physical interface of these printers can range greatly, but HP dominated the test group in general.

The HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw stood apart from the rest of our test lineup in just about every ease of use submetric, including initial setup, wireless setup, customer service, and interface ease of use. It includes a USB cable to make a direct connection to a device, even though it also works via WiFi connections and mobile apps.

The HP OfficeJet 8015e Wireless Color and even the more modestly priced HP DeskJet 2755e were on almost on par with the most user-friendly models, which is an especially pleasant surprise with the 2755e as it is a fraction of the cost of other top-tier models. These models are simple to set up on a wireless connection with the HP smart app, which is straightforward to use. The 8015e uses a large touch display screen that is simple to navigate, while the HP DeskJet 2755e opts for a smaller screen and more buttons.

The Epson Workforce Pro WF-4820 also deserves a mention here. It is easy to unbox and set up, and once operational, its large 2.5-inch by 4-inch touchscreen makes navigation and selections a breeze. What kept the WF-4820 from doing even better in our ease of use metric was a weak connection that required customer service support to resolve, as dated instructions and manuals were less than helpful.

Printing Speed

Not everyone will find it important for their printer to shoot out documents at lightning speed. Still, for those who print a high volume of documents and are time-crunched, high-speed printers might be a valuable resource. We put our lineup through the wringer, printing mixed text and photos, high res photos, 10-page documents duplex, and simplex (double and single-sided). We then tallied up the speed of each test to arrive at our overall scores. The lasers, as expected, excelled in this metric; however, some of the inkjets performed strongly as well.

The HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw and Canon Color imageCLASS MF656Cdw proved they have legs in this race. They performed very well, offering printing speeds up to nearly 20 pages per minute for simplex document prints, but also offering a significant step up in text and graphic printing quality.

If you believe the old adage that haste makes waste, then you won't be surprised that when it comes to printing speed, the fastest printers don't necessarily do the highest-quality job.

Lastly, the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4820 also did well, with a nice balance of speed, quality images, and text. The WF-4820 printed 24 pages per minute, which is above the manufacturer's claimed speed of 15 pages per minute. Again, the deciding factor here is really what your top priorities are for your specific printer needs.

How to Choose the Best Home Printer

Whether you're replacing your old printer or looking to upgrade the home office, we've provided four key buying considerations, including budget, features, and printer type, to help find the right printer for you.

Inkjet or Laser?

Deciding on an inkjet or laser printer will come down to how frequently you print, your budget, and the type of documents you print. Inkjets typically have a cheaper upfront cost and do a wide range of tasks decently, but will accumulate in cost over time due to the high price of replacement ink. Laser printers have a higher upfront cost but typically work best for printing text documents with precision and speed. An inkjet is a great option if you need occasional printer use for a wide range of tasks, while a laser printer will suit folks with more demanding printer needs for frequent home or office use.

How Much Do You Print?

For those with at-home businesses and small office sites, a printer capable of high volume and fast printing is necessary to handle workloads and consistent use. If this sounds like you, consider laser printer options with a large monthly duty cycle (the number of pages a printer is capable of printing per month) and higher page-per-minute capabilities. These specs can often be found in the product specifications from most manufacturers, and help gauge the true capabilities of each printer.

What Features Do You Need?

Some features, such as wireless connection, are standard on printers today, but other features, such as a touchscreen, auto duplex printing, and faxing documents, vary based on the printer. If you have printing needs that require a specific feature, do a little digging to make sure the one you're eyeballing comes with the right set of features for you.

Is Photo Printing a Priority?

If you want photo printing capabilities, consider inkjet options that can produce high-resolution photos. While a dedicated photo printer is your best bet, those who want multi-functionality between photos and text printing can find a printer that prioritizes image and graphic quality. Specifications such as the dots per inch and the color range of ink can help you locate a model with more reliable photo printing.

Conclusion

We hope our efforts have produced valuable data and guidance for you as you hunt for the perfect printer for your needs. We made sure to highlight the most important factors and detractors for each printer here for you to compare and contrast.