8 Best Printers in 2026 for Home, Office and Photos

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Printers are the one category where the price on the box tells you almost nothing about what the thing costs. Cartridge printers are sold cheap on purpose and recovered on ink, which is why a $70 all-in-one can quietly run $60 a year in refills while a $250 tank printer ships with two years of ink in the box. Before you compare models, answer two questions about yourself. First, what do you actually print — black text, or color photos? Second, how often? Those two answers decide the technology, and the technology matters more than the brand. Laser is for people who print documents and print them irregularly, because toner is a dry powder that cannot clog or dry out between jobs. Inkjet is for people who need color and photo output, but an inkjet left unused for a month will spend ink clearing its own nozzles. Tank inkjets solve the running-cost half of that problem but not the clogging half. These 8 printers are real, currently-listed Amazon picks for 2026, sorted by ink cost, print volume, color needs and budget.

Best Overall

The ET-2800 is the default recommendation for a household that prints a bit of everything. It replaces cartridges with refillable tanks you fill from bottles, and the economics are not subtle: a full set of replacement bottles costs about what two cartridge sets cost and prints many times more pages. Epson quotes up to 90% savings on ink, and it ships with enough in the box to cover roughly two years of typical home use. Print, scan and copy are all here, borderless 4×6 photos look good, and setup is a phone app. The honest limits: 10 ppm is slow next to any laser, there is no automatic two-sided printing, and there is no document feeder, so multi-page scans mean lifting the lid each time. If you print constantly it will frustrate you. If you print a few things a week and hate buying ink, it is the right machine.

Epson EcoTank ET-2800 Wireless Color All-in-One Supertank Printer — cartridge-free refillable tanks, print/scan/copy, up to 10 ppm black, borderless photo printing, dual-band Wi-Fi with mobile printing, up to 90% ink savings with roughly two years of ink included

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Best for a Home Office

The ET-4850 is the ET-2800 with the three things a working-from-home setup actually runs into: an automatic document feeder, automatic duplex printing, and a color touchscreen instead of a row of blinking buttons. The ADF is the one that changes your day — scanning a 12-page contract becomes loading a stack and walking away, rather than twelve lid lifts. It is faster too, at 15.5 ppm black and 8.5 color, adds Ethernet for a wired desk, and still faxes if a client or a clinic insists. You pay meaningfully more than the ET-2800 for those additions, and the tanks and per-page cost are the same, so this is worth it only if you scan multi-page documents or print double-sided regularly. If you do neither, buy the cheaper one.

Epson EcoTank ET-4850 Wireless All-in-One Supertank Printer — cartridge-free tanks, print/scan/copy/fax, up to 15.5 ppm black and 8.5 ppm color, 30-page auto document feeder, automatic 2-sided printing, 2.4-inch color touchscreen, Wi-Fi and Ethernet

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Best Black-and-White Laser

If you print text and only text — shipping labels, homework, tax forms, boarding passes — stop looking at inkjets. The HL-L2460DW prints 36 pages per minute, does automatic duplex, has a 250-sheet tray so you are not refilling it constantly, and will sit unused for three months and then print perfectly on the first try. That last point is the real argument for laser in a house that prints occasionally: there are no nozzles to clog and nothing to dry out. It is print-only, with no scanner, and it does not do color at all. Buy the XL version if you can, which ships with roughly 4,200 pages of toner instead of the small starter cartridge and works out cheaper than buying a replacement later.

Brother HL-L2460DW Wireless Compact Monochrome Laser Printer — up to 36 ppm, automatic duplex printing, 250-sheet tray plus manual feed slot, dual-band Wi-Fi, Ethernet and USB, AirPrint and Mopria mobile printing, print-only with no scanner

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Best Laser All-in-One

Same reliability as the printer above, with the scanner, copier and fax bolted on. The MFC-L2820DW runs at 34 ppm, carries a 250-sheet tray and a 50-page automatic document feeder, and handles duplex printing. For a home office that pushes paperwork rather than pictures, this is the machine that disappears into the background and stays there for years, which is more than most inkjets manage. The XL configuration is the one to buy: six times the in-box toner, about 4,200 pages, which covers most households for a year or more before the first refill. The trade is that everything it prints is black and white, so pair it with a cheap photo printer if you also want prints of the kids.

Brother MFC-L2820DW XL Wireless Monochrome All-in-One Laser Printer — print/copy/scan/fax, up to 34 ppm, automatic duplex, 250-sheet tray, 50-page auto document feeder, dual-band Wi-Fi, up to 4,200 pages of toner included

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Best Color Laser

Color laser is the answer for anyone who prints color documents — presentations, invoices with a logo, worksheets, marketing sheets — but not color photographs. The HL-L3280CDW does 27 ppm in color and black alike, which is dramatically faster than any inkjet at color work, and the output is dry the instant it lands in the tray, so it will not smear. It has a 2.7-inch touchscreen, duplex printing, Ethernet and dual-band Wi-Fi, and can pull files straight from Google Drive or Dropbox without a computer. Know the boundary before you buy: color laser renders flat graphics and charts beautifully and photographs merely acceptably, and four toner cartridges cost more to replace than one black one. If your color printing is documents, this is the efficient choice.

Brother HL-L3280CDW Wireless Compact Digital Color Printer — up to 27 ppm color and black, automatic duplex, 2.7-inch color touchscreen, dual-band Wi-Fi plus Ethernet, cloud printing from Google Drive and Dropbox, ENERGY STAR certified with toner-save mode

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Best for a Small Business

The OfficeJet Pro 9125e is the pick when several people share one machine and the work is mixed — color proposals one hour, a stack of contracts to scan the next. It prints 22 ppm black and 18 color, holds 250 sheets, and does something most printers in its class do not: two-sided scanning through the feeder, so a double-sided document becomes a single pass. The dual-band Wi-Fi self-diagnoses dropped connections, which matters more in an office than it sounds. One caveat deserves real weight. It arrives enrolled in HP+ and Instant Ink, a subscription model that ties the printer to HP cartridges and can stop printing if the plan lapses. Read the enrollment screen carefully during setup and decide deliberately rather than clicking through it.

HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e Wireless All-in-One Color Inkjet Printer — print/scan/copy/fax, up to 22 ppm black and 18 ppm color, 250-sheet tray, automatic 2-sided printing and 2-sided scanning, auto document feeder, 2.7-inch touchscreen, dual-band Wi-Fi, 3-month Instant Ink trial included

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Best Budget Pick

Some people need a printer twice a month for a return label and a permission slip, and for them the cheapest competent all-in-one is the correct purchase. The PIXMA TS3720 prints, scans and copies over Wi-Fi, works with AirPrint and the Canon app, and takes up very little desk. It is slow at 7.7 ipm black, the screen is a 1.5-inch LCD, and there is no duplex. Go in knowing the trade you are making: this is a cartridge printer, so the ink is the expensive part over time, and at low volumes an occasional nozzle-cleaning cycle will burn some of it. That is an acceptable deal at this price, and a bad one if your print volume grows — at which point a tank printer or a mono laser saves real money.

Canon PIXMA TS3720 Wireless All-in-One Printer — print/scan/copy, up to 7.7 ipm black and 4.0 ipm color, 1.5-inch LCD, dual-band Wi-Fi 2.4 and 5 GHz plus Wi-Fi Direct, AirPrint and Mopria support, compact footprint for small desks

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Best for Photos

A general-purpose printer that also prints photos is a compromise in both directions. The SELPHY is the opposite: it prints nothing but 4×6 photos, and it prints them better than any all-in-one here. It uses dye-sublimation rather than ink, laying down color in passes and sealing each print with a protective coat, which produces a true photo-lab finish that resists water and fading and is dry the second it emerges. It runs off Wi-Fi from a phone, an SD card or a USB drive, offers gloss, semi-gloss and satin finishes on a 3.5-inch screen, and with the optional battery it prints about 54 photos away from an outlet. Paper and ink come as a matched set, so cost per print is fixed and known. It is a companion to a document printer, not a replacement for one.

Canon SELPHY CP1500 Compact Photo Printer — dye-sublimation 4×6 prints with protective overcoat, water- and fade-resistant, built-in Wi-Fi with SD card and USB input, 3.5-inch tilting LCD, gloss/semi-gloss/satin finishes, optional battery for about 54 prints per charge, includes RP-108 ink and paper set

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How to Choose

Price the ink, not the printer. Find the replacement cartridge or bottle cost and its page yield before you buy. A $70 printer with $60 cartridges is more expensive in year one than a $200 tank printer.
Print rarely? Buy laser. Toner is dry powder that cannot clog. An inkjet that sits idle for weeks wastes ink on cleaning cycles and eventually clogs a printhead outright.
Separate color documents from color photos. Color laser is fast and sharp for charts and logos. Only an inkjet or a dye-sub printer does photographs properly.
An automatic document feeder is the upgrade people regret skipping. If you ever scan more than two pages at once, it pays for itself in a week of irritation avoided.
Watch for subscription lock-in. HP+ and Instant Ink can restrict third-party cartridges and disable printing if a plan lapses. Enrollment is a decision, not a formality.
Check the duty cycle against your volume. A printer rated for a few hundred pages a month will not survive a few thousand, whatever its speed rating says.
Confirm the connection you actually use. Dual-band Wi-Fi matters if your router runs 5 GHz only; Ethernet matters for a fixed desk; some cheap models still omit both.
Tank printers pay back over roughly two years. Below about 500 pages a year the higher upfront price may never be recovered, and a budget cartridge model is genuinely the cheaper choice.