What Printer Should I Buy For Home Use

When shopping for the best printer for home use, you're likely looking for something versatile enough to satisfy everyone's needs. Your family might need to copy documents to sign, scan delicate old photos, or print long essays or reports at a moment's notice. Having good scanning features is important to ensure you can digitize your work quickly and efficiently, while a low cost-per-print is a must to help keep you within your budget. Having a variety of connectivity options is ideal if you want to print with ease from any device.

what printer should i buy for home use

We've tested over 120 printers, and below are our recommendations for the best home printers you can buy. You can also check our picks for the best all-in-one printers, the best photo printers, and the best office printers.

The best home printer we've tested is the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550, a supertank inkjet all-in-one. It produces sharp, high-quality documents as well as incredibly detailed and colorful photos. Unlike printers with ink cartridges, it has an ink tank that you can refill as you go with bottles of ink. A full tank yields thousands of prints, and replacement ink is cheap, so you don't need to worry about high maintenance costs. Its flatbed scanner performs incredibly well, as it can pick up even the tiniest details, so it's excellent for digitizing your old photos. There isn't an automatic document feeder, so you'll have to scan each page manually.

Another great feature is its support for wide format paper up to 13" x 19", so it's a fantastic option for making posters. If you don't need wide-format printing, you can get its little brother, the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500, which will save you some money. It gives you the same print quality but only supports paper sizes up to 8.5" x 11". Regardless of which model you choose, remember that this is a photo printer first, so if you only plan on printing documents, you can easily find cheaper models suitable for that task, like the printers we recommend below.

If you only need a printer for document printing and general office tasks, get the Epson EcoTank ET-3850 instead. Like the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 above, it's also an all-in-one color inkjet model with a refillable ink tank, so it's a great choice for households that print a lot, as a full tank yields thousands of pages. It prints black and color documents well and does so at a decent speed, churning out 15 black or seven color pages per minute. Printed photos look good but aren't as detailed or color-accurate as the pictures the ET-8550 produces since it's more of a general-purpose printer.

For connectivity, it has Wi-Fi, USB, and Ethernet, as well as support for Apple AirPrint and Mopria Print Service, making it easy for every household member to access the printer. The scanner produces exceptionally high-quality scans and is equipped with an automatic feeder to process multi-page documents. However, it's slow, as it can only scan up to three pages per minute and doesn't support duplex scanning. It's compatible with Epson's mobile app, which you can use to print, scan, copy, and perform maintenance tasks.

If you want to save money with a more modest mid-range model, check out the Brother MFC-J4335DW. This all-in-one inkjet model yields around 2200 black and 800 color pages, and you can get XL cartridges that'll last even longer. Of course, it'll never match the page yield or cost-per-print of a supertank printer like the models we recommend above, but for a printer that uses ink cartridges, it's mighty impressive. It produces high-quality black and color documents, and although it doesn't have the best color accuracy or color range, printed photos still look very detailed.

Our pick for the best budget home printer is the Brother MFC-J1205W, also known as the Brother MFC-J1215W if you're shopping at Walmart. It's a good option if you print a little more than the occasional project. It produces sharp-looking documents, so you aren't compromising document print quality. For photo printing, it's excellent at reproducing very fine details but struggles with bright, saturated tones, so pictures tend to look a little flat. The ink cartridges are good for around 1100 black and 700 color pages, meaning you won't have to replace them all too often, and they're relatively cheap, which helps keep running costs low.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty slow printer. It takes longer than most inkjet printers to initialize and only prints up to nine black or three color pages per minute. It supports automatic duplex printing, so you don't need to flip the pages manually when printing double-sided. It has USB and Wi-Fi connectivity, supports Apple AirPrint and Mopria Print Service, and is compatible with Canon's mobile app. The scanner produces excellent scans; the colors look a little washed out, but there are a lot of fine details.

If you would like to do the work of choosing yourself, here's the list of all our printer reviews. Be careful not to get too caught up in the details. While no printer is perfect for every use, most are good enough to please almost everyone, and the differences are often not noticeable unless you really look for them.

The first question all printer buyers must tackle comes down to a simple matter of what and how much you plan on printing. Inkjet printers use cartridges of ink that are applied wet to paper and rapidly dry, while laser printers use toner, a type of ink dust that bonds to paper for fast results and efficient resource use.

Laser printers are still a good bet for office settings when most of the printing that you need to do is in monochrome. For the most part, monochrome laser printers can be purchased at affordable prices, offer good print speed, and provide prints at a lower cost per page than a color inkjet. But you have to decide whether to give up the flexibility that a color inkjet printer offers. Color laser printers are another option, but they generally have a higher cost per page printed than a color inkjet.

Many of the printers sold only for dedicated photo or graphic use are small-size units capable of printing photos up to 4 by 6 inches in size or wide format models designed to print media up to 24 inches wide. Supplies for these specialty printers are also generally more expensive than those for the typical multifunction printer. Both Canon and Epson have models that print 8.5 by 11 inches and use five or six colors of ink to produce photos with greater color accuracy. And many all-in-one devices are capable of turning out photos up to 8.5 by 11 inches in size when you use the right paper.

Ethernet: Printers may also be equipped with Ethernet ports for wired connections to the internet. Printer data needs are fairly basic, however, and a wired Ethernet connection is rarely necessary for a home printer (it can be more useful in some office printer setups).

NFC: NFC (Near-Field Communication) is also available on some models, letting you connect your printer to a smartphone or tablet by simply touching the device to a specified area on your printer.

Every printer will feed on a fat stack of 8.5 by 11 paper, but what about legal envelopes, index cards, and glossy stock? Thankfully, many printers now include dedicated feed trays for printing on specialty papers with unusual sizes or different weights, which make it easier to deal with those situations when they crop up. Consider the size of the input tray here: Smaller trays will require you to add paper all the time, while a 250-page hopper can make it a once-a-month affair.

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.

Inkjet printers are incredibly versatile. Besides text documents, many can also print photos -- even museum-quality prints -- labels, graphics, and other types of materials. Multifunction (all-in-one or MFP) variants add scan, copy, and fax functionalities, making them ideal for small offices and home environments.

After reviewing dozens of inkjet printers from across the market, we're ready to make a few recommendations for the top spot. The best inkjet printer is the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4830, but we also have a few other favorites you should take a look at.The best inkjet printers at a glance

If you print photos often, a home printer offers instant gratification and convenience and can even save on print costs in the long run compared to going through a lab. But, thanks to technology like Zink and print-to-film, you don't even have to be at home to print your photos. From high-end inkjet models (which can handle those gallery prints) to portable wireless units, we rounded up the best photo printers for 2021.

For quick prints at home that rival the quality you'll get from a print shop, the Epson SureColor P700 is the best photo printer you can buy. No, it can't do large-format fine art prints for your gallery show, but it packs in excellent color reproduction without a crazy-high price tag.

The home printer market is a vast landscape that spans both inkjet and laser print technologies. I narrowed down that landscape and then spent weeks hands-on with 11 models to determine our picks below.

While print speed and quality are obviously key factors in evaluating any printer, I also focused on real-world considerations like ease of setup, ease of use (Does it have a convenient control panel? What software does it include?) and overall versatility (Can it copy, scan or fax as well? Does it do automatic two-sided printing?). Tech-challenged users, take note: A lot of these models are a pain to set up. I also considered the cost of replacement ink.

For the eight color printers I tested, I ran three 4 x 6-inch test photos on standard glossy photo paper. I found these printers output photos of similar quality, with good (if not nuanced) color reproduction and clarity. Unlike the PDF, which I printed from a PC, I sent the photos to each printer via their respective companion mobile app, an obvious decision given the prevalence of smartphone photography. 041b061a72