Best Printers in 2026: Cost Per Page Decides Everything

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Our quick picks

The full case for each pick, the numbers that matter and the downsides, are all below.

You are not buying a printer. You are signing a consumables contract, and the printer is the free phone.

That is not a cynical framing, it is the business model. Printer hardware is frequently sold at or below manufacturing cost, because the margin lives in cartridges. Over three to five years of ordinary household use, what you spend on ink or toner will usually exceed what you spent on the machine, sometimes by a multiple. Which means the correct way to shop is to work out your cost per page and your annual page count first, and choose the hardware that follows from it — the exact opposite of how almost everyone actually shops.

Do that once and the whole category simplifies. Two facts do most of the work.

Fact one: an inkjet you rarely use will cost you more than one you use constantly

This is the most counterintuitive thing about printers and the reason so many households have a printer they hate.

Liquid ink dries. An inkjet printhead has dozens or hundreds of microscopic nozzles, and if ink sits in them without moving, it thickens and blocks them. To prevent that, the printer runs automatic cleaning cycles — it fires ink through the nozzles and dumps it into an absorbent pad. It does this on a schedule and whenever it is switched on after a period of inactivity. That ink is gone; you paid for it and nothing was printed.

So the household that prints two pages a month — a return label, a school form, a boarding pass — is the household whose inkjet cartridges mysteriously empty without printing anything, whose printhead eventually clogs anyway, and who ends up buying a new printer because the repair costs more than the machine. Meanwhile a small business printing two hundred pages a month keeps the ink moving and has no such problem.

Toner is a dry powder and does not dry out. A laser printer left unused for six months prints perfectly on the first page. That single fact means the advice most people expect is backwards: if you print rarely, buy a laser. If you print a lot of color, buy an inkjet. Printing rarely is the case for laser, not against it.

Fact two: cost per page differs by more than an order of magnitude

We are not printing prices here, because ink and toner prices move constantly and any figure we published would be wrong within days. But the relative ordering is stable and it is what you need:

• Monochrome laser is the cheapest per page for text by a wide margin, and high-yield toner cartridges widen the gap further. This is what offices use and the reason is arithmetic.
• Refillable supertank inkjets (Epson EcoTank, Canon MegaTank, HP Smart Tank) come next, and for color they are the cheapest option available. You buy bottles of ink and pour them in; a set of bottles typically covers thousands of pages.
• Color laser sits above supertank for running cost but produces sharper text and does not dry out.
• Standard cartridge inkjets are the most expensive per page, often dramatically so, and the cheapest machines are usually the worst offenders because they ship with low-capacity “starter” cartridges and take small, expensive replacements.

The practical test: before you buy any printer, look up the replacement cartridge or bottle, note its stated page yield, and divide. If the machine takes a cartridge with a yield in the low hundreds of pages, and you print regularly, you have found an expensive printer with a low price tag.

A note on page yield claims

Published yields follow the ISO/IEC standard test suite, which uses specific test documents at roughly five percent page coverage. Five percent coverage is a sparse business letter. If you print dense documents, tables with fills, or anything with photographs, your real yield will be considerably lower than the box says. The figures are useful for comparing two printers and misleading as an absolute prediction.

Cartridge chips, firmware and third-party ink

This deserves saying plainly because it costs people money and it is not in any product description.

Most cartridges contain a chip that the printer reads. Manufacturers have used firmware updates to change how printers treat non-original cartridges, and third-party cartridges that worked one week have stopped working after an automatic update. HP’s practice in this area, which it has called Dynamic Security, has been the subject of consumer complaints and legal action in several countries. Other manufacturers do similar things to varying degrees.

What this means for you, practically:

• If your plan for keeping costs down is third-party cartridges, understand that this can be changed remotely by a firmware update, and that you may need to decline automatic updates — which has its own downsides.
• A supertank printer sidesteps the issue almost entirely: you are buying bottles of the manufacturer’s own ink at a low cost per page, so there is no third-party arbitrage to close.
• A laser printer is the next safest, because toner is cheaper to begin with and third-party toner is generally less aggressively policed than ink.
• If you are considering an ink subscription service, read the terms carefully: these are typically page-count plans where unused pages roll over to a limited extent, the cartridges remain the property of the manufacturer, and canceling can disable the cartridges you have. For some households they are good value; for others they are a recurring charge for a printer used twice a month.

Choosing the type

Monochrome laser

Text documents, forms, shipping labels, homework, tax returns, contracts. Fast, cheap per page, indifferent to being ignored for months, and the printed output is water-resistant and does not smudge because toner is fused to the paper with heat rather than absorbed as liquid. It will not print a photograph worth looking at and it prints nothing in color. For a very large share of households this is the correct printer and they buy an inkjet instead out of habit.

Color laser

Text as good as mono laser, plus color that is excellent for charts, diagrams, logos, school projects and anything with flat areas of color. It is not a photo printer — toner on plain paper cannot produce the tonal smoothness of ink on photo paper — but for a home office that needs presentable color documents and does not want to think about drying ink, it is the most trouble-free option there is. Four toner cartridges instead of one is the cost.

Supertank inkjet

Refillable reservoirs instead of cartridges. You pour ink from bottles, and the cost per color page falls to a small fraction of a cartridge inkjet. This is the right answer for a household that prints a lot of color: children’s homework, craft projects, recipes, photos, coloring pages. The machine costs considerably more up front because you are pre-paying for the ink you are not being overcharged for later.

The drying caveat still applies — it is still an inkjet with a printhead. Supertanks are better than cartridge inkjets at surviving neglect, partly because the large ink volume keeps the head wetter, but a supertank printer used twice a year will still clog. Buy one because you print, not just because the running cost looks good.

Cartridge inkjet

The cheapest machines on the shelf and the most expensive to run. There is one good case for them: you print very little, cannot justify a laser, and want the smallest cheapest thing that will produce an occasional color page. Even then, be aware that the ink will likely dry out before you use it, and that the money you saved will go on replacement cartridges you did not print with.

Dedicated photo printer

A separate category and worth understanding. Dye-sublimation photo printers use a ribbon and heat to transfer dye into a coated paper, and the output is a genuine continuous-tone photographic print — no dot pattern, water-resistant, and it comes out dry. They only print photos, at one or two sizes, and the consumable is a paper-and-ribbon kit with a fixed number of prints so the cost per photo is known in advance. If you want physical photos, this is a much better tool than asking a document inkjet to do it.

The features that matter, and the ones that do not

• Automatic duplex printing. Prints both sides without you reloading. Halves your paper use and makes documents look professional. On anything you will use for real documents, insist on it.
• An automatic document feeder (ADF). Lets you scan or copy a stack rather than one page at a time. If you ever scan multi-page documents — forms, receipts, contracts — this is the difference between a two-minute job and a twenty-minute one. A duplex ADF that scans both sides is better still.
• Flatbed scanner. Needed for books, passports, ID cards and anything that will not go through a feeder. Almost all all-in-ones have one.
• Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi. Underrated. A printer on a cable is a printer that always works; Wi-Fi printing is the single most common source of printer frustration, and most of it is network flakiness rather than the printer.
• Paper tray capacity. A 150-sheet tray means refilling constantly. A 250-sheet tray means you forget about paper. Also check whether there is a separate single-sheet or rear feed for envelopes and card, because feeding thick media through a main tray often jams.
• Mobile printing support. AirPrint and Mopria are the open standards; a printer supporting them will print from a phone without the manufacturer’s app. Prefer that to an app-only implementation.
• Monthly duty cycle. A specification manufacturers publish that describes maximum capacity, not recommended use. The useful figure is the recommended monthly volume, which is usually far lower and buried further down.
• Print speed in pages per minute. Measured on the simplest possible page. Real mixed documents are slower, and for a household the time to first page — how long from pressing print to paper appearing — matters much more than sustained speed.
• Fax. Still required by some medical, legal and government processes in the United States. If none of those touch your life, ignore it entirely.

A note on brand concentration in this guide

Most of our picks below are Brother and Epson, and we want to explain that rather than let it look like a sponsorship. Two things drove it.

First, we hold a 4.3-star minimum, and printers are a category where owner ratings are brutally honest about the things that actually matter — setup, driver reliability, network dropouts and cartridge behavior. Several major manufacturers have popular current models sitting below that line, and when thousands of owners give a printer a low rating for connectivity and cartridge policies, we take that seriously rather than overriding it with specification comparisons.

Second, we excluded several nominally 5.0-star listings because they had only single-digit or low-double-digit review counts, which tells you nothing. A printer rated 4.5 by nine thousand owners is a far stronger signal than one rated 5.0 by eight.

The result is a list weighted toward two manufacturers with strong reputations for drivers, straightforward cartridge behavior and longevity. That is the honest outcome of the criteria, not a preference.

The best printers right now

All ratings were verified on Amazon at the time of writing, with review counts noted where they matter.

1. Brother MFC-L2710DW — best printer for most households

Rated 4.5 stars from more than 8,700 reviews. Monochrome laser all-in-one, wireless and ethernet, automatic duplex, automatic document feeder, print, scan, copy and fax.

If you take one thing from this guide: for the majority of households, this shape of machine is the right purchase, and this is the most thoroughly proven example of it. A monochrome laser all-in-one prints text cheaply and quickly, does not dry out when you ignore it for three months, scans a stack of documents through the feeder, prints both sides automatically, and connects over a cable if your Wi-Fi is temperamental. That covers essentially everything a household prints, and the reason people do not buy one is that they assume they need color.

Ask yourself honestly what you printed in the last year. If the answer is forms, labels, tickets, homework, tax documents and recipes, you needed none of it in color, and you have been paying inkjet running costs for nothing. Nearly nine thousand reviews at 4.5 stars is the strongest reliability signal in this entire category.

• Running cost: the lowest per text page of anything here, especially with high-yield toner.
• Why it works: toner does not dry, the feeder and duplexer cover real document work, and ethernet means it always prints.
• Best for: almost every household and home office that does not need color.

Where it disappoints: no color at all, and no usable photo printing — be sure about that before ordering. Laser printers are physically larger and heavier than compact inkjets, so measure your space. The scanner is capable but this is a document scanner, not a photo scanner. Toner cartridges cost more per cartridge than ink cartridges even though they cost far less per page, so the first replacement is a larger single purchase. And it is a workhorse rather than a handsome object.

Check the Brother MFC-L2710DW on Amazon →

2. Brother HL-L2465DW — best value mono laser

Rated 4.5 stars. Compact monochrome laser multi-function, wireless, automatic duplex, print, scan and copy.

The same logic in a smaller and less expensive package. This is the current-generation compact Brother mono laser multi-function, which means a truly small footprint for a laser — small enough for a shelf or a bedroom desk rather than needing a dedicated table. It prints, scans and copies with automatic duplex printing, and drops the fax and some of the paper handling of the larger machine.

For a single person, a student, a spare room office or a second printer upstairs, this is the sensible pick. You get the whole benefit of the laser argument — cheap text, no drying, instant readiness — at the lowest sensible price of entry.

• Running cost: mono laser economics, with high-yield toner available.
• Why it works: the laser advantages in a footprint that fits where an inkjet would go.
• Best for: students, small spaces, second printers, and anyone who prints only documents.

The drawbacks: no automatic document feeder on this model, so multi-page scanning is one page at a time on the flatbed — if you scan stacks, buy the MFC above instead. Smaller paper tray, so more frequent refilling. No color, no fax. And this is a newer model with a few hundred reviews rather than thousands, so the long-term reliability record is shorter, though Brother’s mono lasers have a consistent history.

Check the Brother HL-L2465DW on Amazon →

3. Brother HL-L2480DW — best compact laser with a touchscreen

Rated 4.5 stars. Compact monochrome laser multi-function, 2.7-inch touchscreen, dual-band wireless, print, scan and copy.

Mechanically close to the L2465DW with two upgrades that matter in daily use. The 2.7-inch touchscreen replaces a small mono display and a set of buttons, which makes walk-up copying and scanning — choosing a destination, setting a scan to a folder or an email, making a two-sided copy — something you can do at the machine rather than from a computer. And dual-band wireless means it can sit on the 5GHz band, away from the congestion that causes most home printing dropouts.

That second point is worth dwelling on, because Wi-Fi flakiness is the number one complaint about home printers and it is usually a 2.4GHz congestion problem rather than a printer problem. A dual-band printer is meaningfully less likely to make you reinstall drivers on a Sunday afternoon.

• Running cost: mono laser, same toner economics.
• Why it works: a real touchscreen for walk-up jobs, plus dual-band Wi-Fi that avoids the most common source of printer trouble.
• Best for: a household where several people use the printer directly rather than through one computer.

The catch: no ADF, so multi-page scans are manual. No color. It costs more than the L2465DW for features that are convenience rather than capability — if one person drives the printer from a laptop, you will not use the touchscreen much. And Brother sells several similar-numbered models in this family, so check the exact model and feature set on the listing you open.

Check the Brother HL-L2480DW on Amazon →

4. Brother MFC-L3770CDW — best color laser

Rated 4.5 stars from around 600 reviews. Color laser all-in-one, wireless and ethernet, automatic duplex, automatic document feeder, touchscreen, print, scan, copy and fax.

This is the machine for a home office that needs color and refuses to babysit an inkjet. Color laser gives you sharp black text at laser running costs, plus flat, saturated color that looks excellent on charts, diagrams, logos, presentations and school projects — and it does all of that after sitting idle for two months, because there is no liquid to dry.

It is a proper office-class machine rather than a household one: ethernet alongside Wi-Fi, a duplex unit, an automatic document feeder for stack scanning, and a touchscreen for walk-up work. If you run a small business from home and printing is part of the job rather than an occasional chore, this is the configuration that stops costing you time.

• Running cost: higher than mono laser because there are four toners, lower than a cartridge inkjet, higher than a supertank for heavy color.
• Why it works: color that never dries out, sharp text, and the document handling of a real office machine.
• Best for: home offices and small businesses that print color documents regularly.

Where it falls short: it is large and heavy — check your desk before ordering. Four toner cartridges means four things to replace, and replacing a full set is a significant single purchase even though the per-page cost is reasonable. It is not a photo printer and will disappoint if you buy it hoping for one. And around 600 reviews is a solid but not enormous sample, so read recent ones for anything that has changed.

Check the Brother MFC-L3770CDW on Amazon →

5. Epson EcoTank ET-4760 — best for high color volume

Rated 4.3 stars from more than 3,200 reviews. Cartridge-free supertank color inkjet all-in-one, automatic document feeder, automatic duplex, wireless and ethernet, print, scan, copy and fax.

If you print a lot of color, this is where the money is. A supertank inkjet replaces cartridges with refillable reservoirs, and a set of ink bottles typically covers thousands of pages rather than hundreds — which collapses the cost per color page to a small fraction of a cartridge inkjet. Epson states savings of up to ninety percent on ink against cartridge printers, and while “up to” deserves the usual skepticism, the direction and the rough magnitude are real.

The ET-4760 is the version with the office features: an automatic document feeder for scanning stacks, automatic two-sided printing, ethernet, and fax. That combination makes it the supertank to choose if it is your only printer and it has to do document work as well as color.

• Running cost: the lowest available for color pages.
• Why it works: refill bottles instead of cartridges, with proper document handling attached.
• Best for: families printing lots of color, and anyone whose current inkjet cartridge bill is the reason they are reading this.

What owners complain about: it is still an inkjet, so it will clog if you leave it unused for long periods — supertanks tolerate neglect better than cartridge machines but they are not laser printers. The up-front cost is high because you are pre-paying for ink. Filling the tanks the first time is a careful, slightly messy operation, and spilled printer ink stains permanently. There is a maintenance box that collects waste ink from cleaning cycles and eventually needs replacing, which is a consumable people do not expect. And at 4.3 stars it sits at our threshold — most of the criticism in this range concerns setup and wireless rather than print quality, but read recent reviews.

Check the Epson EcoTank ET-4760 on Amazon →

6. Epson EcoTank ET-3830 — best supertank for a home

Rated 4.3 stars from more than 1,200 reviews. Cartridge-free supertank color inkjet all-in-one, wireless, automatic duplex, print, scan and copy.

The same supertank economics in a smaller, less expensive, more household-shaped machine. It drops the fax and the office-grade document handling of the ET-4760 and keeps what a family actually uses: cheap color printing, a flatbed scanner, automatic two-sided printing and wireless.

This is the printer for a household with children where the printer prints projects, coloring pages, worksheets, recipes and the occasional photo, and where the pain point is running out of an expensive color cartridge at 9pm on a school night. Bottles of ink in a cupboard solve that.

• Running cost: supertank economics, very low per color page.
• Why it works: the cheap-color argument without paying for office features a household will not use.
• Best for: families who print in color regularly.

The downside: no automatic document feeder, so multi-page scanning is manual. Still an inkjet, with the drying and maintenance-box caveats above. Photo output on photo paper is good but a dedicated photo printer is better. And as with the ET-4760, 4.3 stars means a meaningful minority of owners had a frustrating experience — most commonly during wireless setup.

Check the Epson EcoTank ET-3830 on Amazon →

7. Canon SELPHY CP1300 — best photo printer

Rated 4.6 stars from around 750 reviews. Compact dye-sublimation photo printer, wireless, prints postcard-size and smaller.

If what you actually want is physical photographs, stop asking a document printer to do it and buy the right tool. The SELPHY is a dye-sublimation printer: it uses heat to transfer dye from a ribbon into a coated paper, which produces a continuous-tone print with no visible dot pattern, finished with a clear protective layer so it is water-resistant and handles fingerprints. Prints come out dry and ready to handle.

The other advantage is predictability. The consumable is a paper-and-ribbon kit containing a set number of sheets, so your cost per print is fixed and known, with no cleaning cycles quietly consuming it. It is small, it runs from wireless or a memory card, and it is the printer people actually use at birthdays and holidays rather than the one that needs a driver reinstall first.

• Running cost: a fixed, known cost per print from paper-and-ribbon kits.
• Why it works: dye-sublimation produces a real photographic print, dry and water-resistant, with no ink to dry out.
• Best for: anyone who wants physical photos, events, and printing straight from a phone.

What you give up: it only prints photos, at postcard size and smaller — this is a second printer, not a replacement for a document printer. You must buy the matching paper-and-ribbon kits; ordinary photo paper will not work. Larger prints are not possible on this model. And it is a specialist purchase: if you print two photos a year, a print service costs less.

Check the Canon SELPHY CP1300 on Amazon →

One we did not pick, and why

The Canon PIXMA TS6420 is a popular compact cartridge inkjet all-in-one with more than 2,400 reviews, and it sits at 4.2 stars — just below our 4.3 threshold. We mention it because it is exactly the machine a lot of people will end up looking at: small, inexpensive, prints color, does everything a bit.

Our view is that its rating reflects the category rather than the specific product. Compact cartridge inkjets generate frustrated reviews for the structural reasons set out at the top of this guide — low-yield starter cartridges, expensive replacements, cleaning cycles consuming ink between infrequent uses, and printheads that clog when the machine sits idle. If your use case is a few color pages a month, that is the experience you are buying regardless of brand. We would rather point you at a mono laser for documents and a dye-sublimation printer for photos than recommend a machine whose economics work against its most likely owner.

A quick way to decide

• You print documents, rarely, and in black: a monochrome laser. This is most people, and they buy an inkjet instead.
• You scan multi-page documents: insist on an automatic document feeder. It is the single biggest time-saver in the category.
• You print a lot of color: a supertank inkjet. Nothing else is close on cost per color page.
• You need color documents but print irregularly: a color laser. Color that never dries out.
• You want photographs: a dye-sublimation photo printer, alongside whatever prints your documents.
• Your Wi-Fi is unreliable: buy a printer with ethernet and use it. Most printer problems are network problems.
• You print two pages a month: a mono laser, or print at a library or copy shop and own no printer at all — which is a legitimate answer nobody offers.
• Before you buy anything: look up the replacement cartridge, note the page yield, and divide. Two minutes, and it decides more than any review.

Setting it up so it keeps working

Use ethernet if you can, and 5GHz if you cannot

The most common printer complaint is “it keeps going offline,” and the most common cause is a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band crowded with every other device in the neighborhood. A cable removes the problem entirely. Failing that, a dual-band printer on 5GHz, or a router setting that gives the printer a fixed address on your network, solves most of the rest.

Give it a static address

A printer whose address changes each time it reconnects is a printer your computer will lose. Assigning it a fixed address in your router’s settings, or in the printer’s own network menu, is a five-minute job that prevents a recurring annoyance for years.

Install the manufacturer’s driver, not just the generic one

Operating systems will print to most printers with a built-in driver, which is enough for basic printing and often loses duplex, tray selection and scanning. If features are missing, the driver is why.

Do not switch an inkjet off at the wall

Inkjets park and seal the printhead when powered down through their own button. Cutting power at a switch or a power strip can leave the head unsealed, which is how nozzles dry. Use the printer’s own power button and let it finish its shutdown.

Print something every week or two on an inkjet

A single color page every week or two keeps ink moving through all the nozzles and prevents the clogs that end inkjets. It costs almost nothing and it is the single most effective piece of inkjet maintenance there is. Set a recurring reminder if you have to.

Use the paper the printer expects

Laser printers fuse toner with heat, so paper intended for inkjets — particularly glossy photo paper with a coating — can melt onto a fuser and cause expensive damage. Never put inkjet photo paper through a laser printer. Conversely, laser paper in an inkjet simply gives poor results rather than damage.

Buy the high-yield cartridge

Almost every cartridge is sold in a standard and a high-yield version, and the high-yield version is nearly always cheaper per page. The standard version exists to make the shelf price look lower. Check for an XL or high-yield equivalent before reordering.

Frequently asked questions

Is laser really better than inkjet?

For text documents and for anyone who prints irregularly, yes, clearly — cheaper per page, faster, smudge-resistant output, and no drying. For heavy color printing, a supertank inkjet is cheaper per page and produces better photographs. The two are tools for different jobs, and the mistake most households make is buying the inkjet for a laser job.

Why did my ink run out without printing anything?

Cleaning cycles. The printer fires ink through the nozzles to stop them blocking, on a schedule and at every power-on after idle time, and that ink goes into a waste pad rather than onto paper. The less you print, the higher the proportion of your ink that is consumed this way. It is the intended behavior, not a fault.

Are third-party cartridges safe to use?

They generally work and they are much cheaper. The risks are that quality varies between suppliers, that a leaking cartridge can damage a printhead, that using them may affect a warranty claim for damage attributable to them, and — the practical one — that a firmware update can stop the printer accepting them. Supertank and laser machines make the question much less pressing because the original consumables are already reasonably priced per page.

What is a maintenance box and why does my printer need one?

On many inkjets, particularly supertanks, waste ink from cleaning cycles collects in a replaceable absorbent cartridge called a maintenance box. When it fills, the printer stops until it is replaced. It is an inexpensive part but it surprises owners who thought bottle refills were the only consumable, so budget for it.

Do I need an all-in-one, or just a printer?

Most people should buy an all-in-one, because scanning and copying come up more than you expect — forms, receipts, documents to email, ID copies — and a phone camera is a poor substitute for anything official. A single-function printer is right only if you already own a good scanner or never need one.

Can I print from my phone without an app?

If the printer supports AirPrint (Apple) or Mopria (Android), yes — printing is built into the operating system and needs nothing installed. Look for those two names specifically. A printer that only prints from a phone through the manufacturer’s own app is a printer that stops working from a phone when that app is discontinued.

How long should a printer last?

A mono laser used at household volumes will commonly outlast a decade, and the parts that wear — fuser, rollers, drum unit — are replaceable. An inkjet printed on regularly should manage several years; an inkjet used twice a year often dies of a clogged head before that, which is the argument for laser restated one more time.

If you only read one section

Work out the cost per page before you look at a single machine, and count how much color you truly print. For most households the honest answer is a monochrome laser all-in-one with a document feeder and a duplexer, and the reason they own an expensive inkjet instead is habit. If you do print a lot of color, a supertank is the only sensible way to pay for it. If you want photographs, buy a dye-sublimation printer and stop asking a document printer to do a job it is bad at. And whatever you buy, plug it into ethernet if you can, because most printer problems are network problems wearing a printer costume.

Ratings and product details were verified at the time of writing. Availability and specifications can change — check the retailer page before buying.

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