Best all in one printer
Best All In One Printer
The Best All-In-One Printer
Most people don’t really need an all-in-one printer a good scanning app and a cheap, print-only laser machine can handle occasional jobs. But if you have a school-age kid or do work that needs a lot of copying and scanning, an all-in-one could make sense and several months’ worth of testing has persuaded us that the
Why You Should Trust Us
Wirecutter has been testing all-in-one printers since 2012, and I’ve personally been covering the beat for the better part of four years. Collectively, we’ve spent a ridiculous amount of hours studying templates, squinting at test papers, eyeing stopwatches, and fiddling with menus.
In addition to our own research, we’ve polled readers and collected input from comment pages. In short, we’ve done a lot of legwork to learn exactly what people want in a printer.
How We Picked
We set out to find a printer with all the necessary features for home and home-office use that won’t cost you an arm and a leg. Here’s what we looked at to find the best of the best. The best AIO is probably an inkjet, as laser printers are still too costly for most people.
However, we did test color laser all-in-ones so that we could suggest a machine for more demanding small-business owners and home users who just don’t want to deal with the frustrations that can come with inkjet ownership. A great AIO should feature an automated document feeder (ADF), so it can automate major scanning and copying jobs to save you time.
Duplex Printing
Two-sided (duplex) printing is a must-have, and if an AIO can print both sides in a single pass, all the better. Printers that deliver single-pass duplex print, scan, and copy are the holy grail. Ink or toner for black-and-white prints shouldn’t cost more than a few cents per page, and color prints shouldn’t be more than three or four times as expensive. If manufacturers have a subscription ink package, we take that into account as well.
Scanning
Although we think most modern printers produce good-quality performance, some generate slightly clearer text, more precise colors, or better-looking images. All things being equal, we’ll take the printer with the highest print quality. And the same goes for scanners, where we consider both overall scan efficiency and how straight the ADFs manage to hold bulk scanning jobs.
And Copying:
Any printer being offered today should support mobile and tablet printing protocols like Google Cloud Print, Apple AirPrint, and Mopria. The best printers offer full-featured apps that make it easy to print from and scan to just about any type of screen, including smartphones and tablets.
Excellent Print And Scan Quality:
Although printer makers like to trumpet their models’ blazing-fast print speeds, we think speed is one of the least relevant traits for home use. That’s not to say that pace isn’t important it’s just not as crucial as the stuff we’ve mentioned above.
This may sound ridiculous on the surface, but we prefer nice-looking printers. Obviously, purpose matters way more than type for office machines, but unless you’re squirreling your printer away under your desk, you’re going to be looking at it every day for years to come. It may as well be fun to see. Inkjet all-in-ones The HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e works pretty much like the OfficeJet Pro 9015e just a little quicker in most measures. The only thing that sets it apart is that it has two paper trays, which means you don’t have to change out your stock if you want to go back and forth between, say, office papers and glossy pictures.
That’s certainly good to have but not worth an additional $100, in our view. We also found the HP OfficeJet Pro 8025e , a budget rival to the Brother MFC-J805DW. We eventually dismissed it because it costs considerably more to run, at 3.6¢ per page for printing with black ink or 12¢ for color, using the largest ink tanks. It also contains a paltry 265 pages of ink in the package, compared with the MFC-2,250 J805DW’s pages. Finally, we saw some print performance problems in our research, with the 8025 leaving banding in solid-colored areas of images.
The HP Envy Photo 7855 is in the same price range as the Brother MFC-J805DW and HP 8025e but is more photo-oriented and less dependent on efficiency. It’s smaller and lighter, too, but its cost per page is much higher, its print and copy speeds are slower, and its paper handling is less advanced.
The Canon Maxify MB5120 is well-liked by skilled reviewers, has a decent customer ranking on the major e-commerce sites, and on paper, at least has the specs to take the battle to HP’s 9015e. In reality, however, the MB5120 didn’t do much to win us over.
Setup was a comparatively grueling affair, and scan quality was relatively poor. It can do single-pass duplex scanning and print PDFs and Word files via the front USB port. But we think that for most people, the HP machine’s superior versatility would far overshadow this Canon model’s few advantages.
Support For Mobile Print Standards:
The Canon Pixma G7020 printer lives up to its MegaTank billing. It offers a whopping 18,000 black and 7,700 color pages in the box for a standard price of $330, and its refills are a little cheaper than the Epson ET-4760’s at just $55 or so per set.
But the low up-front cost and impressively cheap prints aren’t worth dealing with the interminably slow print and scan speeds or the fiddly, button-driven user interface. Like the MFC-J805DW we suggest, the Brother MFC-J6545DW is one of the company’s INKvestment Tank printers. That means it comes with an exceptionally large amount of ink for a cartridge-based inkjet we estimate 2,160 pages of black ink and 1,440 pages of color, based on Brother’s formula .
However, that’s still much less ink than what you get in the bottles that come with the other ink-tank versions we checked, and Brother’s refills (which include 6,000 pages of black ink and 5,000 pages of color) cost almost five times as much as Canon’s and Epson’s. Even if it’s not the highest value, it’s much cheaper on a per-page basis than the HP 9015e, and it’s a decent printer overall.
We liked its wide touchscreen display, its ability to print and scan 11-by-17-inch documents, and its fast printing and scanning. The print and scan quality is really good, too, but like other ink-tank printers we’ve checked it can’t scan or copy two-sided pages. The Brother MFC-J995DW , another INKvestment Tank model, comes with 1,080 pages’ worth of black ink and 720 pages’ worth of color ink in the pack, and the cost per page for refills is pretty low at 1.1¢ for monochrome and 5.6¢ for color.
In testing, we liked the MFC-performance J995DW’s but found that its print speed was too slow, its paper tray and ADF were too thin, and its duplexing capabilities were too limited for it to compete with similarly priced models.
High Printing And Scanning Speed:
Canon’s Color ImageClass MF743Cdw and the company’s slightly less powerful MF644Cdw printed and scanned beautifully and easily, but we found them far more challenging to work with than the HP M479fdw due to their clunky UI, resistive touchscreen, and obsolete PC and Mac apps.
We also had problems getting the printers to accept a correctly formatted USB thumb drive, which seems like a thing that shouldn’t be hard to get correct. The Brother MFC-L3770CDW is a color LED all-in-one, which means it’s identical to a conventional color laser printer that uses a strip of LEDs rather than a rotating laser beam to light up the drum.
In theory, that makes it more reliable, because it has less moving parts. But when we tested it, the MFC-L3770CDW couldn’t keep up with our laser AIO pick at the time, the HP M477fdw, in either usability or raw efficiency. Its resistive touchscreen wasn’t as sensitive, we had issues with the iPrint&Scan program freezing on our MacBook during multipage scan jobs, and it took nearly twice as long to print two-sided papers. We don’t see any reason it will do better against our new upgrade choice, the HP M479fdw.
Ink-Tank-Style Inkjet All-In-Ones
Multifunction printers (MFPs), also known as all-in-ones or AIOs, offer users a variety of features beyond printing. All can also copy and scan, and many particularly business MFPs add faxing to the mix. Our favorites range from small versions appropriate for home or home-office use and costing about $100 to behemoths able to anchor a busy workgroup, with service cycles of tens of thousands of pages a month.
Printer manufacturers offer a wide range of MFPs, both inkjet-based and laser-based. Given the combination of print technologies and brands, finding a model with the right set of features may not be a simple job. But here are the main items to remember while shopping for an AIO printer.
Color Laser All-In-Ones
The best all-in-one printers manage your printing, scanning and copying needs in a single unit. Some also offer fax capability. If you need to print off a form, scan an old picture or copy a homework assignment from a textbook, the best all-in-one printers offer a lot of versatility beyond merely printing.
Our favorite printers not only offer quick, high-quality document printing, but also have excellent features, straightforward setup and support, and a low cost per page. We’ve checked and evaluated hundreds of printers, devoting more than 150 hours of research to find the best all-in-one printers available, from inkjets and laser printers to compact printers that scan and copy.
Compare Specsthe Best All-In-One Printers For 2021
Best All-In-One Printers In 2021
There are some main details to remember while searching for a new printer. Obviously, you want a printer that works well, so all of our reviews address a printer’s production quality and speed, but there’s more to an all-in-one printer than just churning out documents. First, consider the price.
All-in-one printers sell for as little as $60 (£45/AU$90) for inkjet models, and $150 (£170/AU$200) for laser printers, with high-end models costing hundreds of dollars, but offering improved print quality, longevity and features. And don’t forget ink and toner, which can range from 1 to 5 cents per page for simple documents (photos would cost more) (photos will cost more).
First, it helps to decide the type of printer you need. Inkjet printers are usually best suited to creating the maximum spectrum of colors, making them better suited to printing graphics and images. Laser printers, on the other hand, will rapidly generate professional looking text documents often at a lower cost per page.
Home and office printers vary significantly in their handling of large print volumes. Some printers are designed to provide great quality and value for the home user who prints a few pages a week, while others are built for busy offices where several users print dozens or hundreds of pages a day. Find the one that’s perfect for you to stop paying for features you don’t need.
Additional use-cases, such as picture printing are addressed in our choices above, while unique features are discussed in every printer analysis we do. Finally, consider the cost per page. If it’s using ink cartridges or toner, printers cost money over time. Check our reviews for a rundown of the costs to print individual pages as a fair estimate of how expensive operating costs can be over the life of the printer.