The printer for business cards is the Brother HL-L3220CDW, for anyone printing and cutting runs of fifty or a hundred: $284.99, dry toner that can be guillotined immediately, and automatic two-sided printing for the reverse. If your card is a photograph or runs color to the edge, the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 is the only machine here that publishes borderless printing. The budget pick is the EcoTank ET-2800 at $239.99, which prints the cheapest color pages on this page if you are willing to trim.
Can you print your own business cards at home?
Yes, and the printer is the easy part. A color laser such as the Brother HL-L3220CDW handles card stock and produces sheets that can be cut immediately, which is why we lead with it. What usually ruins home-printed cards is the cutting, not the printing — a cheap guillotine or rotary trimmer matters more to the result than any specification on this page.
How we picked
Cards are a small, heavy, cut print job, so the usual ranking does not apply. These are the four questions in the order they decide the purchase.
- Where does the card stock go? One input tray means unloading plain paper every time, and a tight paper path means heavy stock jams or curls. We only list machines whose maker publishes a second input, a manual slot or a straight-through path.
- Is it dry when it lands? A card gets cut, and a blade through wet ink drags. Toner is finished when it reaches the tray, which is the main reason a laser leads an otherwise ink-tank-leaning site.
- Can it print to the edge? Borderless is a printer feature, not a paper feature, and only one model in our registry publishes it. On everything else, full bleed means printing oversized and trimming.
- What does a run of a hundred cost? Cards are heavy coverage, which is the most expensive thing you can ask a printer to do. Every figure is our arithmetic on dated published supply prices.
The real problem is the cutting, not the printing
Ten cards to a sheet means nine cuts, and nine cuts on a hundred sheets is nine hundred chances to be a millimeter out. This is what separates a home-printed card from a professional one, and no printer solves it. Scissors are hopeless. A craft knife and a steel rule are better. A rotary trimmer or a small guillotine, which costs less than a cartridge, is what actually works, and if your design has a border, a card that is a hair off center shows it instantly.
Two practical consequences for the design. Keep critical content well inside a safe margin, so a small cutting error does not clip a phone number. And if you are running color to the edge, add a bleed of a few millimeters past the trim line and cut into it, which is what a print shop does and the only way to get a clean colored edge without borderless printing.
What a run of a hundred cards costs in ink
| Printer | Per ISO color page | Ten sheets |
|---|---|---|
| Canon MegaTank G3270 | ~0.8¢ | $0.08 |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2800 | ~1.1¢ | $0.11 |
| Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 | ~1.4¢ | $0.14 |
| Brother HL-L3220CDW | Several times the above | Still cents, not dollars |
Our arithmetic on dated published supply prices divided by rated ISO yields. An ISO page is a 5% coverage test page and a business card is nothing like that, so treat these as the floor — the ratios are what survive heavier coverage. The method.
The honest conclusion from that table is that ink is not the cost of printing your own business cards. The card stock is, and so is your evening. That is worth knowing before you choose a machine on cost per page.
The honest alternative: don’t print them
For a single batch of five hundred standard cards, an online printer will beat you on price, on the cut and on the stock, and it is not an argument we are going to pretend otherwise about. They print on card you cannot buy in a twenty-pack, they cut dead straight at scale, and they can do rounded corners, spot finishes and heavier weights.
Printing them yourself wins in three situations. When you are iterating — a new role, a changed number, three designs you want to hold. When the run is small and frequent, like a market stall needing forty cards this weekend. And when you already own the right printer, in which case cards are a free capability on a machine you were buying anyway. That last case is most readers here, and it is why the budget pick is on this list. Our invitation and greeting card picks make the same argument about weddings.