The Best Printers and Scanners: Ranked by Running Cost

Almost everything a household 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 trouble-free, 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 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 sits a step above Epson’s entry ET-2400, and both take the same 522 bottles. Instead of cartridges you fill four reservoirs from bottles, and Epson rates each replacement bottle set 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.