What Is The Best Printer To 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 is the best printer to 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-8500, which is a cheaper variant of the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 we tested. The difference between the two is that the ET-8550 supports wide format paper up to 13" x 19" and is more expensive. Most people probably don't need wide-format printing, but if you do, you can just get the ET-8550. Now, let's talk about what this printer can do. 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.

You can connect to the printer via Wi-Fi, USB, or Ethernet, and you can also print directly off an SD card. Its flatbed scanner performs incredibly well, as it can pick up even the tiniest details, so it's excellent for digitizing your old photos. However, there's no automatic document feeder, so you'll have to scan each page manually. Regardless of which variant 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.

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 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.

As this is a budget model, there are a couple of tradeoffs, like the lack of an automatic feeder and slow printing speeds. It also doesn't support automatic duplex printing, meaning you'll have to flip the pages manually when printing double-sided sheets. Lastly, the scanner produces high-quality scans but has a hard time capturing very fine details, so it might not be the best option if you're looking to digitize photos and expect every little detail to be captured perfectly.

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. The Canon also 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 where 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 difference between an inkjet and a laser printer comes down to what is used to create the printed image. As their names suggest, inkjet printers use ink, and laser printers use a laser. Inkjet printers need replacement ink cartridges, while laser printers need replacement toner cartridges."}},"@type": "Question","name": "Do all printers work with Macs and PCs?","acceptedAnswer": "@type": "Answer","text": "Each printer includes a list of compatible operating systems in its specifications sheet. Most of them support commonly used operating systems, including those in Mac and PC computers and laptops. You may need to update your operating system or other software to work with your printer, especially if your computer is older or has not been updated recently."]}]}] Skip to contentPEOPLESearchPlease fill out this field.Magazine Subscribe Manage Your Subscription Give a Gift Subscription Get Help Newsletter Sweepstakes Subscribe SearchPlease fill out this field.NewsNews Crime Human Interest Politics EntertainmentEntertainment Celebrity TV Movies Music Country Awards Sports Theater Books Royals LifestyleLifestyle Style Fashion Beauty Parents Home Health Food Travel Pets Tech StyleWatch ShoppingShopping People Tested Subscribe MagazineMagazine Subscribe Manage Your Subscription Give a Gift Subscription Get Help Newsletter Sweepstakes Follow Us

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News Crime Human Interest Politics Entertainment Celebrity TV Movies Music Country Awards Sports Theater Books Royals Lifestyle Style Beauty Fashion Parents Home Health Travel Pets Food Tech StyleWatch Shopping People Tested SubscribeShoppingPeople TestedThe 8 Best Home Printers of 2023, Tested and ReviewedOur winner was the Canon PIXMA MG3620 Wireless All-In-One Color Inkjet PrinterBy

The difference between an inkjet and a laser printer comes down to what is used to create the printed image. As their names suggest, inkjet printers use ink, and laser printers use a laser. Inkjet printers need replacement ink cartridges, while laser printers need replacement toner cartridges.

Each printer includes a list of compatible operating systems in its specifications sheet. Most of them support commonly used operating systems, including those in Mac and PC computers and laptops. You may need to update your operating system or other software to work with your printer, especially if your computer is older or has not been updated recently.

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.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e makes a good impression the moment it comes out of the box, starting with its stylish two-tone design and streamlined appearance. And it continues to impress once installed, cranking out pages nearly as fast as a laser printer and offering nearly every feature a home user is likely to need.

The HP OfficeJet 9015e is about as versatile as home printers get, with a 250-sheet paper input tray, automatic double-sided printing and a 35-sheet auto-duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) that can copy, scan and fax double-sided documents without manual intervention. It also has a USB Type-A input on the left side, so you can easily print from and scan to a USB drive. The only thing missing is any kind of bypass tray for fast feeding of envelopes or photo paper. 041b061a72