The Best Printers and Scanners: Ranked by Running Cost

Almost everything a household actually prints is black text on white paper. Labels, forms, tickets, school work, tax paperwork. That is precisely what a mono laser does cheapest, and the Brother HL-L2460DW is the current default: fast enough that you do not wait for it, compact enough for a shelf, and cheap enough per page that printing stops feeling like a decision.

The decisive advantage over any inkjet is that toner does not dry out. A laser printer left untouched for three months prints perfectly on the fourth, while an inkjet in the same situation frequently needs a cleaning cycle that consumes ink worth more than the job. Automatic double-sided printing halves paper use, and Wi-Fi setup is refreshingly painless: How-To Geek found joining it to a network was quick and seamless, a rarity among home printers. It prints in black only, so photos and color documents need another solution: pair it with the EcoTank below, or use a photo printing service for images. High-yield replacement toner is the cartridge to buy. At $150–220, it is the cheapest printer to own that most people can buy.

The home-office machine most people actually need does three things: prints documents cheaply, scans paperwork to a PDF, and copies without a computer involved. The Brother MFC-L2820DW does all three on the same low-cost laser platform, which is what separates it from the color inkjet all-in-ones sold at similar prices and far higher running costs.

The automatic document feeder is the feature that earns its keep. Scanning a twenty-page contract by loading a stack and pressing one button, rather than lifting a lid twenty times, changes whether you digitize paperwork at all. Scan-to-email and scan-to-cloud work from the control panel without a computer, and duplex printing plus a solid paper tray mean it handles genuine office volume; Consumer Reports notes the feeder itself scans one side at a time even though printing is auto-duplex, so a two-sided original still needs a manual flip partway through. It remains black and white, it is noticeably larger than the printer above, and the flatbed scanner is fine for documents rather than photographs, so a dedicated photo scanner is a better answer for archiving old prints. At $200–280, it is the machine to buy if one device has to cover everything paper-related.

The EcoTank line exists because Epson decided to sell the printer at a profit and the ink at a sane price, and the Epson EcoTank ET-2800 is the entry point. Instead of cartridges you fill four reservoirs from bottles, and TechGearLab measured the included ink at roughly 4,500 black-and-white pages or 7,500 in color, a supply that would cost several times the printer’s price in traditional cartridges.

For households that print color, whether that is children’s projects, photographs, craft materials or color reports, this is the machine that removes the anxiety. There is no subscription, no chipped cartridge refusing to work, and no printing lockout because one color ran low. It scans and copies as well, and the tanks are visible, so you can see exactly how much ink you have rather than guessing from a warning. It is an inkjet, with everything that implies: slower than laser, and the print head can clog if the machine sits unused for months, so print something in color occasionally. Buy genuine refill bottles, because third-party ink is the main cause of clogged EcoTanks. At $180–250, it is the only sensible way to print color at home.

Every all-in-one printer can scan, and almost nobody uses it for volume because the workflow is tedious. The ScanSnap iX1400 solves the workflow rather than the scanning. Load a stack, press the single large button, and both sides of every page are captured, straightened, de-skewed, blank-page-removed and saved as a searchable PDF.

Buy this one only as run-out stock. Ricoh has marked the iX1400 discontinued on its own product page and the current model is the ScanSnap iX2400; retailers still list the iX1400 near $349, which is sell-off pricing rather than a supported line.

Speed and reliability are what justify a dedicated device. It pulls a mixed stack of receipts, letters and forms without jamming, handles duplex in one pass, and applies text recognition so the resulting archive is searchable rather than a folder of images. For anyone digitizing years of tax records, medical paperwork, or a small business’s receipts, it turns a weekend project into an afternoon. It is a wired USB device on this model, so it is anchored to one computer, and the wireless sibling costs more if that matters. It also scans documents rather than photographs, so delicate or irregular items need a flatbed scanner. At $300–400, it only makes sense if you have real paper volume, but for those people it is transformative.

The Canon imageFORMULA R40 takes a slightly different angle to the ScanSnap: similar duplex sheet-fed hardware at a lower price, with document-management software bundled in that automatically files scans into folders based on rules you set, rather than dumping everything into one directory.

Canon’s own store now shows the R40 out of stock and discontinued. What you find at retail between roughly $166 and $266 is remaining inventory, so it is a fair buy at a discount but not a product Canon is still restocking.

That software is the reason to choose it. Scanning is only half the problem, because an archive of five thousand unsorted PDFs is barely more useful than a filing cabinet. Automatic naming and routing, combined with reliable text recognition, means invoices land in the invoices folder and receipts in the receipts folder without you touching them, which is what makes a digital archive usable at tax time. The trade against the ScanSnap is a slightly less refined scanning experience and a heavier reliance on the desktop software, which is Windows-centric, so Mac-heavy households should verify current support or pick the alternative. Both need a decent external drive or cloud backup behind them. At $200–300, it is the better-value entry into serious document scanning.