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Home printers
This is the one category on Picksights where we weight what a product costs to own above almost everything else: the cheap printer is routinely the expensive one, by a factor of five to ten, once ink is counted.
🏆 Best Overall4 products compared
Best Home Printer
HP Smart Tank 5000 — Best from the most popular printer brand
PS8.7/10$169.99
See why it's #1 of 4Buying guides
What actually matters here
Picksights methodology
- The purchase price is the least useful number on the box. Consumer Reports models a $128 cartridge inkjet at roughly $543 over five years once ink is counted; a tank printer runs closer to $5 a year.
- If you do not print in colour, a monochrome laser is both cheaper to run and markedly more reliable — Consumer Reports is unusually direct about this.
- Inkjets fail from disuse. A print head that sits dry for months clogs; toner does not, which is why lasers survive being ignored.
- A document feeder is the feature people regret leaving out, because scanning a stack one page at a time is what makes a printer annoying.