The best printer for 2020

Brother MFC-J895DW

Amazon

In our search for an affordable colour printer that does everything well, the Brother MFC-J895 prevailed. It’s inexpensive, easy to set up and use – and it’s fast, delivering both documents and photos faster than the average printer. It can scan, fax and copy, and has a 2.7-inch colour touchscreen, a cassette capacity of 150 pages and an automatic document feeder.

Best of all, it’s efficient: the four included ink cartridges, each twice the size of the typical cartridge, have a longer lifespan than any other inkjet we’ve tested. As a result, the J895 still had 40% of its ink after identical workloads after the competition ran out or became dry. The MFC-J895’s thoughtful design provides access to the ink cartridges through a front panel, making them easy to replace. The cherry on top: Brother offers a two-year warranty, while the others only give you one year of insurance coverage.

Our only problem is image quality – an important consideration to be sure. Photos, in particular, looked less colourful and rich in contrast than those of similar models from Epson and Canon. For everyday use, the Brother MFC-J895 offers the best combination of price, performance and ease of use.

Canon color image CLASS LBP622Cdw

If you need to create countless documents of professional format – market research reports, business proposals or brochures – you need a laser printer. These high-end devices offer an almost professional quality that is clearly superior to the performance of an inkjet. And they are cheaper than you might expect.

The Canon LBP622Cdw is a one-trick pony, but it handles its one-trick well. There are no scan or copy functions, but this color laser printer prints vivid text and color graphics with high contrast and long range on both white and colored paper. Thanks to the powerful toner cartridge, operation is not overly expensive – a rarity among laser printer options in this price range. On average, black and white documents cost around 3 cents per page and color documents cost 3.8 cents per page. It’s about average in terms of speed.

The LBP622Cdw has a single sheet feeder that can hold envelopes and photos while leaving your normal 250-sheet paper tray undisturbed. You can also stack up to 10 envelopes in the main paper tray, which is more than twice as much as most other laser printer options.

Although this printer’s five-line LCD is not a touchscreen, it is easy to navigate and provides helpful information, including the name of the job and the person who sent it. There is also a USB port that you can use to connect and print when the network goes down.

Canon iP8720

If you’re looking for a printer that can do everything, keep looking. However, if you are looking for a photo that delivers colorful and vivid photos with natural tones, high contrast and great details, the Canon PIXMA iP8720 is a good choice.

This Canon printer measures approximately 23 x 13 x 6 inches and is large enough to hold six ink cartridges – and print 13 x 19 inch photos. This Canon printer does not have physical controls or an LCD screen. You can therefore control it from the printer dialog box on your device. Instead of a conventional paper tray, you simply stack the media of your choice in a rear document feeder, which means you can easily exchange paper of different sizes and types. (For best results, use Canon photo paper. Most printers produce the highest quality output when compared to their own paper brand.)

The Canon iP8720 ink cartridges have a longer lifespan than the photo-centered competition, even taking into account the additional ink required to produce 13 x 19-inch prints. And it’s quick: it printed an 8.5 x 11 inch photo in just over 2 minutes – 30 seconds faster than the runner-up. This Canon printer is also not an all-in-one printer. This printer does not scan or copy. If this is a deal breaker, check out our other tips below.

HP DeskJet 3755

If you are not interested in color graphics or photos, there is a very good reason to buy a black and white printer: you only need to refill a toner or ink cartridge, which keeps your cost per page low.

When Dan Ackerman reviewed this printer in 2018, he found it remarkable for its combination of low price (at least if it is available for $ 100), painless setup and operation, and almost universal customer approval. It’s a black and white laser printer – so you can’t print color images or photos – but the Brother HL-L2395DW does all the black and white jobs masterfully. (Its sibling, the HL-3170CDW, offers additional color functions, but no scanner or touchscreen.)

This printer is easy to connect to a Wi-Fi network and supports Google Cloud Print and network printing whether you are using a PC or Mac. And it’s quick: Printing 10 pages from a MacBook took 27 seconds. A seven-page website of the Edge browser on a Windows laptop took 36 seconds. It took 9 seconds to copy a single sheet of paper.

According to Brother, the black “starter” toner that came with the system should be suitable for 700 printed pages and a replacement for 1,200 pages costs $ 44 from Amazon. Like a number of other models we have tested, this printer supports “Amazon Dash Auto Replenishment”. This means that it will automatically order new toner for you when it runs out (unless you disable the feature in your Amazon settings).

Even if you almost never need a printer, you need a printer when you need a printer. This HP DeskJet – cheap, tiny, and modest – is the perfect solution. It doesn’t have a flatbed scanner or copier bed, so it folds into a compact 16x7x5.5 inch – about the size of a large bread. There’s a foldable rear paper tray, a top-mounted scanner, and an output bin – but it’s so small that you can easily store it on a desktop or shelf.

Quality is not the point. It is not a workhorse. The print quality is not exceptional. However, the HP DeskJet 3755 is cheap, unobtrusive, and ready for basic tasks when you need it.

As for the problems of the first world, waiting for a printer to spit out your document is very important. The HP OfficeJet Pro 8025 solves this problem by processing documents and photo prints two to three times faster than the competition.

It only took the OfficeJet Pro 8025 8 minutes to print a 30-page report with graphics and photos on plain paper in the “best” quality setting – less than half the time of other comparable price inkjet printers. It scanned photos in just 8 seconds compared to 13 to 14 seconds with other printers. And it printed an 8.5 x 11 inch photo in just about 2 minutes, while the contest consistently went closer to 8 minutes.

This printer doesn’t sacrifice speed for quality – at least as far as the text is concerned. But photos are a different story; Although most of the colors looked fine with a reasonably high contrast, the reds were too sharp. And since there is no rear paper feed, you need to replace your plain paper with special paper.

HP offers customers a subscription service for ink that they say is 50 cheaper than buying a la carte ink. There are four monthly plans – 50, 100, 300, or 700 pages – that are said to ensure that you have new cartridges before your old ones run out.

The Epson XP-970 is more of a traditional all-in-one than our favorite photo printer, the Canon PIXMA iP8720. In terms of print quality, it can’t quite keep up with the Canon – photos are darker and sometimes excessively blue. But it is much rounder with the ability to scan and copy, and it comes with a traditional front paper tray and a single sheet rear feeder.

The Epson Workforce Pro WF-3730 has all the features to meet the needs of a home office, but it’s not as easy to use as others. It is also a large printer that is equipped with two 250-sheet paper trays. That means you can load it with a ton of paper or dedicate a compartment to envelopes or labels.

For the price, this printer delivers solid print quality. You get bright, surprisingly colorful and subtle images, photos on plain paper and photo paper – and especially on Epson’s own inventory. The workforce is also fast: they printed an 8.5 x 11 photo faster than any printer we tested with a comparable price. And it costs less than a lot of competitors.

Canon

The Pixma TS830 from Canon is pretty and elegant – available in glossy black, red or white instead of the usual matt black or mealy office beige. It has a large and bright 4.3-inch colour LCD touchscreen that simplifies use – and keeps an eye on the ink levels that are displayed in real-time.

The TS8320 has six ink cartridge slots – most all-in-one printers only have four – which gives it more capacity, but also means that two additional cartridges need to be replaced, increasing the total cost of ownership. However, if you are looking for very high-quality photos and an appealing overall aesthetic, the Pixma is a good choice.

It’s average in terms of speed. Thanks to an additional “photo blue” colour cartridge that complements the ink packs in cyan, magenta, yellow and black, the Pixma delivers photos of the highest quality with vivid contrast and bright colours. With the rear paper feeder, you can load special papers such as photos, labels or envelopes without disturbing the paper in the front tray with a capacity of 100 sheets. The TS8320 can automatically turn off after a customizable time and then turn on again when you send it a job.

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