A family printer is a shared appliance, and shared appliances fail differently from personal ones. It gets print jobs from four devices, three of which are phones. It is asked for a color poster, a boarding pass, a homework sheet and a recipe in the same week. And it is then left alone for a fortnight, which is the thing that quietly kills most of them.
How we picked
Four requirements, in this order. The printer has to be reachable from phones and laptops without anyone installing anything unusual. It has to be cheap enough per page that nobody feels they need permission to print. It has to handle color, because a family that cannot print a color page will find that out at the worst moment. And it has to need no subscription, because a shared printer with a page allowance becomes an argument.
We ranked on cost per page from the supply each model takes, then weighted toward models with a document feeder, because the paperwork a family generates arrives in stacks: forms, applications, signed slips.
What makes a family printer different
A printer bought for one person can be optimized. A printer bought for a household has to be the least-wrong answer to four different jobs at once, and the compromises are not the ones people expect.
| Printer | Color | Document feeder | Auto duplex | Per mono page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epson EcoTank ET-4800 | Yes | Yes | Not stated | ~0.4¢ |
| Canon PIXMA MegaTank G3270 | Yes | No | Not stated | ~0.3¢ |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 | Yes | No | Yes | ~0.3¢ |
| Brother MFC-L2820DW | No | Yes, 50 pages | Yes | ~3.3¢ |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2800 | Yes | No | No | ~0.4¢ |
Features as published on each model's manufacturer specification page. 'Not stated' means the manufacturer did not publish the feature on the page we read, which is not the same as the printer lacking it. Cost per page is our arithmetic on published yields and the prices we read.
No row in that table has every box ticked, and that is the honest finding. The ET-4800 has the feeder but no stated duplexer; the ET-2850 duplexes but has no feeder; the Brother has both and no color. Which compromise you take depends on whether your household’s paper arrives in stacks or in long documents.
Why cost per page matters more in a family
In a one-person household the owner self-regulates. In a family, the printer is used by people who have no idea what a page costs and should not have to care. That is an argument for buying the cheapest-to-run printer you can rather than the cheapest one.
At about 0.3 of a cent a mono page, a hundred pages costs roughly thirty cents in ink. On a mono laser at about 3.3 cents, the same hundred pages is a few dollars. Neither is ruinous — but the laser figure is the one that makes a parent say “does that really need printing?”, and a printer that gets rationed is a printer nobody uses.
Printing from phones, which is most of it now
In practice a family printer spends most of its life receiving jobs from phones. Two things to check on the box. Apple AirPrint, if the household runs on iPhones and iPads — Brother publishes it on the MFC-L2820DW, and Epson publishes AirPrint and Mopria on the ET-4950. And a wireless radio that actually reaches wherever the printer lives, which in a thick-walled house is a stronger argument for Ethernet than most people realize.
You do not need the manufacturer’s app or an account to do any of this. A desktop driver and AirPrint both work without one, and the printers with an Ethernet port can be set up over a cable and never shown the internet. We wrote that up separately in can you use a printer without the internet, and the broader Wi-Fi picture is in the wireless roundup.
How much color does a family actually need?
Less than it thinks, and more than zero. The honest pattern is a few color pages a month — a school project, a photo for a card, a map — against dozens of black ones. That argues for a tank printer, where color costs about 1.1 cents a page, rather than a color laser, where four cartridges make every color page expensive.
If photographs are genuinely the point rather than an occasional extra, that is a different purchase and a different page: best printer for photos at home. For school and household color, any of the tank printers here is more than enough.
Why we would not put a family on a plan
A page allowance in a shared household is a built-in argument. Four people print at unpredictable rates, nobody tracks the count, and the month somebody prints a 90-page PDF is the month the overage lands. Supplies bought outright at a known cost per page are both cheaper at family volumes and quieter.
There is a second reason, which is what happens if you stop paying. On bottle-fed printers the question cannot arise — there is no chip in a bottle. On cartridge printers enrolled in a plan, canceling has left people with a printer that will not accept the cartridges in the drawer: what to do when that happens, and which brands ask what of you.