The cherry on this sundae? HP’s ink costs are reasonable, meaning no regrets later. Most notably, it posted average or better speeds in our printing, scanning, and copying tests and it includes an ADF, a feature that’s rare at this price level.Īmong other standard equipment are a 125-sheet input tray and a 20-sheet photo tray (for media up to 5 by 7 inches in size) and the unit’s automatic duplexing applies to both the printer and the scanner. Though it’s billed as a photo-oriented home machine, it can handle far more than that. Our top pick is a multifunction inkjet, the HP Photosmart 7510 e-All-in-One Printer. Monochrome lasers are also available, but we can’t wholeheartedly recommend any such models in this price range, as their toner costs tend to be very high.
If this is your budget range, keep in mind that these machines are designed for fairly low-volume use: around 15 to 20 pages per day, at most.
BEST COLOR LASER PRINTERS FOR HOME OFFICE PLUS
You’ll find a crowded field of models, most of them offering at least decent features and performance for home and home-office users, plus students. HP Photosmart 7510 e-All-in-One PrinterThe sweet spot for consumer inkjets is about $150. Occasional highlights such as printing on CDs and DVDs or Wi-Fi connectivity.Basic monochrome lasers with pricey toner.Ink costs ranging from reasonable to expensive.Single- and multifunction inkjets good for light-volume home or home-office use.The intended advice is that high-priced inks, while not recommended, might be tolerable for people who don’t print much. (Editor’s note: This paragraph was corrected from the version that appeared in the PCWorld March 2012 print issue. If you print a dozen or more pages per day, however, or if you want to print colorful pages or photos, you’ll be better off with a printer whose inks are economical. The exception is if you print very little-just short text documents, for instance, with little or no color, and no more than a dozen pages per week-because your high ink costs will be spread out over a longer period of time.
Printers costing less than $100 are rarely worth recommending, as they tend to be slow performers with pricey ink cartridges. It makes surprisingly few compromises for the price. If your budget is really tight, check out our favorite bargain, the $100 Canon Pixma iP4920 Inkjet Photo Printer, in “Cheap and Good,” below. Another consideration to keep in mind: If you have a long-term need to scan hundreds or even thousands of pages of documents, a dedicated document scanner that has its own automatic document feeder will simplify that job considerably.