For most of the Information Age, pundits predicted that sooner or later, much of the world's workforce would be working from home. The promise of fewer office skyscrapers, lower energy needs, and fewer nasty traffic snarls would inevitably lead to remote work no longer being just for a select few. As it happened, it took a global pandemic to bring governments and companies to their work-from-home senses—and to revitalize interest in affordable home-office hardware, including the oft-neglected printer.
Today, even as the work world returns to a semblance of normalcy, venturing out to Kinko's or Staples to make prints and copies doesn't have the appeal it once did. Part-time home-based workers—not to mention families and students—need to print, scan, and make copies, and maybe even send and receive the occasional fax. And while coworkers in a corporate office might share the same high-volume printer, smaller settings and smaller budgets call for diverse desktop printers. We've outlined below our under-$200 favorites from PC Labs' recent reviews. Check them out, then keep reading to learn what to look for as you shop for your next affordable printer.
Getting hard copy shouldn't be hard. A low-priced printer won't be as fast as an enterprise machine designed for even a medium-size workgroup, nor will it be able to handle as high a volume of pages per month. But you don't have to compromise on output quality or convenience. Today's printer and scanner technology lets you focus on productivity features, handy control panels, and saving money by comparing running costs.
Some of the questions to ask when printer shopping haven't changed in years; others are new. Let's start with the big ones: print-only or multifunction, and monochrome or color—and indeed whether cheap printers are worth considering at all.
First Question: Are Cheap Printers Worth It?
Depending on what you do, the answer can be a resounding "yes" or a firm "no." To start figuring where your print needs stand relative to the cheap models on the market, you first need to think about whether you need a single-function or a multifunction printer.
Single-function models do just one thing—print, naturally—while all-in-ones (AIOs, also known as multifunction printers or MFPs) can also copy, scan, and sometimes send and receive faxes. In terms of design, most AIOs are printers with a flatbed scanner sitting on top.
Sometimes all you need is a device that prints, either because you don't need to copy or scan or because your scanning needs are heavy-duty enough that you need a dedicated scanner that can do the job better than any inexpensive AIO. That said, most home offices will benefit from at least occasional copying and scanning, making an AIO the better bet. Even if you don't make a lot of copies, spending a little extra for a part-time copier can reduce the need to run local errands.
An important distinguishing characteristic of an AIO is whether its flatbed scanner is teamed with an automatic document feeder (ADF) for handling multipage documents without user intervention. When copying or scanning a stack of pages, the simplest and cheapest AIOs oblige you to place each page on the scanning glass or platen one at a time. With an ADF, you put the stack in the feeder, press Copy or Scan, and walk away. That's an obvious time-saver if you work with lengthy documents more than occasionally.
Besides having different capacities (30 versus 50 sheets, for instance), automatic document feeders come in two main varieties: strictly simplex (one-sided) and duplex-capable (two-sided scanning, either manually or automatically). You'll ideally want a higher capacity than the longest documents you scan, but most AIOs will pause after scanning a batch to let you add another stack. Duplexing is an absolute must if you need to scan two-sided originals.
Manual duplexing lets you duplex using a simplex ADF by scanning one side, then flipping the stack over to scan the other, and letting software or firmware interfile the pages in the right order. Auto duplexing scans both sides automatically; you just load the stack, give the command, and wait for the scanning to finish. There are two types of auto-duplexing ADFs, one of which is faster and more expensive than the other, but few AIOs that qualify as cheap offer either kind, aside from models that are heavily discounted or discontinued. If you find one in the sub-$200 price range, it will almost certainly have the slower, less expensive version of auto duplexing.
Do You Need a Monochrome or a Color Printer?
Without question, color pages are more eye-catching than their black-and-white counterparts, and they carry more impact. For many purposes, color is all but essential when producing your own brochures, flyers, and other promotional materials. And it is essential for printing almost any photos other than new copies of your grandparent's old black and white prints.
But some kinds of documents don't benefit from color, and sometimes using color ink is an unnecessary expense. Depending on your printer and the pages you print, a color page can easily cost you three to five times as much as a monochrome one or more. Note also that color inkjets will eat through their color inks, and force you to buy more, even if you rarely print in color, just in housekeeping tasks that keep the nozzles from clogging. Many color printers also add color inks to black when printing graphics and photos in monochrome, and we've even seen some that add dots of color ink to monochrome text. So if you don't need color, you're better off getting a monochrome printer.
Paper Handling and Print Volume: What You Need to Know
Some home offices not only print a lot, but print on different types and sizes of paper. What if you print mostly on plain paper or letterhead, but occasionally need to output a legal-size spreadsheet? Or a sheet of labels or a check? What if you print so many pages that you need a machine with deep paper trays that don't demand frequent refilling?
While most cheap printers lack high-volume trays and multiple input sources, you should still pay attention to a machine's input options. An open, easily accessible tray that lets you simply slip more pages on top of the current stack can make refilling paper or changing to different stock a lot easier than having to pull a drawer out of the printer to load paper. Beyond the main tray, many printers offer a single-sheet override slot or tray for printing one-off envelopes, forms, or labels, or sometimes a 10- or 20-sheet second tray for photo paper or envelopes. Others offer a 50- or 100-sheet second tray on the rear of the printer.
Note that a printer's input capacity tends to scale with its rated print volume, which manufacturers usually express as the number of pages the machine is good to print per month or "duty cycle." There are two kinds of monthly duty cycles, maximum (the absolute most pages a printer is rated to crank out per month without shortening its overall lifespan) and recommended maximum (a much smaller number, based largely on print speed, paper capacity, and how many pages the device is expected to print over its projected life—usually three to five years—before wearing out). Many, if not most, cheap printers don't list rated duty cycles in their specifications, but it's info worth having if you can find it.
One good rule of thumb for choosing a printer is to consider how many pages you expect to print per week or per month, then pick one with enough paper capacity so you needn't refill the trays more than once a week on average—or however often you're comfortable doing that chore. Another is that if you expect to print so much that you're concerned about the maximum duty cycle, you shouldn't buy a printer that doesn't include that number in its specs.
What Kind of Printer Connectivity Do You Need?
Most of today's lower-end machines come with Wi-Fi and USB connectivity. Ethernet, if you can find it, is the fastest and most secure option; Wi-Fi, which is more or less today's standard, is highly convenient and plenty fast enough for printing. Most modern printers also provide free downloadable apps for iOS and Android phones. What you get doesn't always correspond to the printer price, so check the individual details of any model you are looking at with care.
Most printers come ready to connect to most handheld devices (smartphones and tablets) wirelessly either via Wi-Fi Direct (a peer-to-peer protocol) or Wi-Fi (with both the printer and mobile device connected to the same network). The printing is handled through manufacturer-specific apps. The standard wired interfaces for use with desktop and laptop computers are a USB port for connection to a single PC and an RJ-45 Ethernet jack for joining an office network. The latter is more of a business-centric protocol and is relatively rare on low-cost printers, but well worth using if you have it available. Connecting a printer to a network with Ethernet is usually far easier than with Wi-Fi, rarely requiring anything beyond plugging in a cable.
What Kind of Onboard Printer Controls Should You Look For?
Typically, the cheaper the printer, the fewer the functions and features it offers, and the less need there is for an option-rich control panel. While a few of today's bargain AIOs have roomy color touch screens, most employ simple panels with a few buttons and status LEDs, and many of those with touch screens are so stingy on screen size that it can be hard to hit right spot, so you'd be better off with buttons.
That said, a suitably large touch-screen control panel can be handy—with "suitably large" defined by your finger size. In addition to making walk-up functions (such as making copies or printing from cloud sites) easier, such panels let you specify security and other configuration changes, monitor and order supplies, and generate usage and other reports for printers that offer these features. You can also control, configure, and monitor many printers via an onboard web portal that you can access from any browser, whether on a PC or phone. The cheap printers we're including here are less likely to offer this capability than printers aimed at offices, however, so if you want this feature, check to make sure the printer has it.
More generally, don't assume any printer has any of these features, regardless of price. Check reviews or the printer's spec sheet for the features you want.
So, What Are the Best Cheap Printers to Buy?
Each family or home office has its own unique needs in terms of print and copy volume. Since we're focusing on cheap single-function and AIO printers here, this roundup assumes you won't be printing or copying more than a couple of hundred pages per month. For most families and homebound office workers, this is plenty, although demand is rising as we're seeing more printing from home.
We scrutinized all of the printers PC Labs has tested in the last few years that are still on the market, focusing on home-office or business models (both laser and inkjet) and photo-centric models (all inkjets among desktop printers). Usually, you'll see significant differences in features between machines tweaked for office use and for photo printing. Low-cost office inkjets, for example, often include automatic document feeders while their photo-centric counterparts don't.
Meanwhile, photo-minded inkjets tend to offer better quality for photos, with some higher-priced models employing five or six ink colors instead of the standard four (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, often referred to as CMYK). The extra inks don't guarantee better photo quality, but they make it easier to design a printer with better color accuracy. By contrast, the cheapest inkjets sometimes use old-school dual-cartridge (black and tricolor) designs, which work fine but are more wasteful as you have to throw away the color cartridge as soon as one of its three hues runs dry.
We've also included two niche classes of printers widely available for under $200: label printers (both the kind for hobbyists and the kind for folks shipping lots of items from home) and portable photo printers (for quick snapshots from your smartphone). The very smallest of the latter use an inkless technology known as Zero Ink (Zink) that applies heat to specially treated paper, though their output quality falls short of inkjet and dye-sublimation photo printers.
Finally, we can't recommend any color laser printers for less than $200 (or anything close to it). The laser machines in this price class are monochrome.
It's important to note that you can find some very cheap printers nowadays—some under $50—at the bottom of most manufacturers' product lines. But it rarely makes sense to buy a slow printer with scanty features and replacement cartridges that typically cost as much or more than the printer. It's smarter to look for printers that will save you money in the long run and check your possible choices against reviews that assess features and cost of ownership, as PCMag's do. All of our picks below are informed by rigorous testing.
