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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 reason is arithmetic: on Consumer Reports' own modelling, the cheap printer is routinely the expensive one by a factor of five to ten once ink is counted.
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.
Rankings in this category
Best Home Printer
Three printers ranked on five-year running cost, print quality and features.
Read the ranking →Buying guides
5-Year Cost CalculatorPrinter Buying GuideInkjet vs LaserInk Tank vs CartridgeBest for Home OfficeBest for Students