How do I choose a printer for home use?
Answer four questions in order: how many pages a month, how much of it is color, how often you print, and whether you are willing to pay a monthly fee. Volume and color decide ink tank against laser; frequency decides whether an inkjet is safe at all; the fourth rules out most subscription models.
Printer specification sheets are long and almost none of it matters. Four things about your own printing decide the purchase, and feature lists only become useful once you have answered them. Work down in this order.
1. How many pages a month?
This sets your budget priority. Below about 40 pages a month, the purchase price dominates and cost per page is almost noise — buy cheap and competent. Above roughly 100 pages a month, the reverse is true and the supply decides everything.
| Supply | Per page | 20 pages a month | 100 pages a month | 400 pages a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canon GI-21 bottles (MegaTank) | ~0.3¢ | $1 | $4 | $14 |
| Epson 522 bottles (EcoTank) | ~0.4¢ | $1 | $5 | $19 |
| Brother TN830XL toner | ~3.3¢ | $8 | $39 | $157 |
| Canon 125 toner | ~6.1¢ | $15 | $73 | $291 |
Mono pages only, our arithmetic on supply prices and manufacturer-rated ISO 5% yields. At 20 pages a month the differences are trivial; at 400 they exceed the price of a printer within two years.
Most people guess high. If you are not sure, look at when you last bought paper. A ream is 500 sheets; if one lasts you a year, you print about 40 pages a month.
2. How much of it is in color?
This question decides the technology more cleanly than any other. If more than a handful of pages a month are color, buy an ink tank: color on bottled ink costs about 1.1 cents a page, where a color laser runs four separate cartridges and published industry figures put color laser pages at between 12 and 15 cents a page, attributed to Toner Buzz.
If the honest answer is “almost none, but I want the option”, a mono laser plus the occasional trip to a print shop is cheaper than owning a color laser. And if photographs are the point rather than an occasional extra, that is a different purchase: best printer for photos at home. Full comparison: color laser vs ink tank.
3. How often, not how much?
Volume and frequency are different questions and the second is the one that breaks printers. An inkjet that prints 200 pages in one burst and then nothing for three months is at risk of a clogged print head; a laser in the same pattern is fine, because toner is dry powder.
4. Will it ask you for a monthly fee?
Several manufacturers offer a supply subscription during setup: a monthly charge for a page allowance, with overage above it. It can genuinely cost less for a very light user, and it has two risks worth knowing before you agree. Pages you do not use may not roll over indefinitely, and on cartridge printers enrolled in a plan, canceling has left owners with cartridges the printer refuses to use.
Every printer on this site can be bought and fed without a plan. If avoiding one is the point of your purchase, start at printers without a subscription and read which brands ask what of you.
Only now, the features
With those four answers in hand, the feature list is short. These are the ones that genuinely change the experience, in rough order of how often they matter.
- Automatic duplex printing. Halves your paper, which on a cheap-to-run tank printer is the largest remaining cost. Duplex lasers · duplex tank printers.
- An automatic document feeder. Only matters if you scan multi-page documents, and transformative if you do. Tank printers with an ADF.
- Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi. Underrated in a house with thick walls, and the way to run a printer that never touches the internet. Printing without a connection.
- AirPrint or Mopria. How phones print without installing the manufacturer’s app. AirPrint lasers.
- Cartridge or bottle family. Not a feature on any spec sheet, and the single biggest determinant of what the printer costs you. Every printer ranked by cost per page.
What to ignore
Print resolution figures in dots per inch, on any printer sold for documents — they have been higher than the eye needs for twenty years. Monthly duty cycle, which is a maximum rather than a recommendation. And the bundled software suite, which you will use once.
Pages-per-minute figures deserve a smaller caveat: they are real and tested to a standard, but on a home printer the difference between 19 and 36 pages a minute is noticeable only on jobs most households never print.