We independently review everything we recommend. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more›

We’ve added a sustainability section to highlight how to responsibly dispose of, donate, or recycle unwanted printers.

Printers are annoying. All of them. But if you want to keep your annoyance to a minimum, we recommend a laser printer: Not only do laser models print sharp text and crisp graphics, but they also run more reliably than inkjets and won’t clog if they sit unused for weeks between jobs. The best laser printer is the powerful, versatile HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw. It’s easy to set up and simple to use, and it produces great-looking results, both in color and in black and white.

Global supply chain issues have made it more difficult to find some of our printer picks, and have caused the price of others to jump. As of this writing, our budget pick is out of stock, but all Brother L2300-series models will get you similar print performance with slight speed or feature differences. The HL-L2370DW is a particularly close relative that seems to be more readily available at the moment. If you’re considering other printers in this series, just be aware that the letters after the number indicate key features: D for duplex printing and W for wireless. Some models drop one or the other, so be sure to check before buying.

The printer should be easy to use, so we took notes on everything from unboxing the printer to setting it up on Wi-Fi.

We printed instructions for 1099 tax forms, star charts designed for lens sharpness testing, and an office report with each printer.

We ran four copies of a four-page document, timing from our hitting the print button to the last sheet coming out of the feeder.

We slightly overstuffed printers with paper to see if they’d jam and fed them single sheets to see if they could pick each one up.

The HP M255dw has an intuitive touchscreen interface, great apps, and a low cost of operation. It produces great results, too: crisp black text and vibrant color graphics. A fall 2020 software update locked out non-HP toner, so be prepared to have to pay full price when you need to replace the cartridges.

manufacturer's warranty w/purchase

May be out of stock

*At the time of publishing, the price was $300.

If you’re looking for a laser printer that can handle everything from book reports to corporate reports without driving you crazy in the process, the HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw is the one to get. It stands out from the competition with an easy-to-use, smartphone-style touch interface and 21st-century mobile and PC software that makes daily use far less frustrating than on other printers we’ve tried. In our tests, it produced sharp black text, vibrant full-color graphics, and even photos good enough for a school report. It’s fast, topping out at around 17 pages per minute, and it can print on envelopes, labels, and other odd-size media thanks to a handy bypass slot.

With low operating costs, quick operation, and useful features, the HL-L2350DW is the best laser printer you can get for around $100.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $110.

Some people just need a cheap laser printer for occasional black-and-white print jobs. For them, we recommend the Brother HL-L2350DW. Setup is painless, and the machine is compatible with all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Its cost per page is a reasonable 3.3¢, it sticks to Wi-Fi like glue, and its price generally hovers around $100. Its print quality is merely adequate right out of the box, but you can improve that with a simple tweak to the toner density setting. Just be aware that the HL-L2350DW can’t scan or copy; if you need that functionality, look to our monochrome all-in-one pick.

This multifunction printer adds a flatbed scanner and an automatic document feeder to the HL-L2350DW, significantly upping its home-office utility.

May be out of stock

*At the time of publishing, the price was $200.

If you like the sound of our budget pick but want the ability to scan and copy documents and photos too, the Brother MFC-L2750DW should fit the bill. At its core it’s a very similar printer—and it’s just as easy to set up—but it also has a flatbed scanner and a fast, single-pass duplexing automatic document feeder on top. Its print quality is slightly better out of the box, and you get the same operating costs, the same print speed, and the same connectivity options as you do with the HL-L2350DW. For home offices this model is a great do-it-all option—as long as you don’t need color.

This business-class machine checks all the boxes for a home office or small business: It’s faster, sharper, more durable, and more secure than our other picks. Like our top pick, it requires you to use official HP toner.

manufacturer's warranty w/purchase

*At the time of publishing, the price was $450.

For a small business with more serious productivity needs, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw is a worthwhile upgrade over our other picks. It prints and scans more quickly and more reliably than inkjet alternatives, produces sharper results, and includes robust admin and security settings designed for situations that may involve sensitive data. All-in-one color lasers like the M479fdw cost more and are more expensive to operate than inkjet printers with comparable features, but they deliver high-quality color prints, copies, and scans at a quicker pace than cheaper models. They’re also sturdier and more reliable than inkjets.

The HP M255dw has an intuitive touchscreen interface, great apps, and a low cost of operation. It produces great results, too: crisp black text and vibrant color graphics. A fall 2020 software update locked out non-HP toner, so be prepared to have to pay full price when you need to replace the cartridges.

manufacturer's warranty w/purchase

May be out of stock

*At the time of publishing, the price was $300.

With low operating costs, quick operation, and useful features, the HL-L2350DW is the best laser printer you can get for around $100.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $110.

This multifunction printer adds a flatbed scanner and an automatic document feeder to the HL-L2350DW, significantly upping its home-office utility.

May be out of stock

*At the time of publishing, the price was $200.

This business-class machine checks all the boxes for a home office or small business: It’s faster, sharper, more durable, and more secure than our other picks. Like our top pick, it requires you to use official HP toner.

manufacturer's warranty w/purchase

*At the time of publishing, the price was $450.

Wirecutter has covered printers for seven years, and I’ve written about them since 2016. My editors and I have kept an eye on feedback from comment threads, email, and Twitter to better understand our readers’ real-world needs. We’ve considered reviews from other editorial sources, including CNET, Computer Shopper, and PCMag. We’ve scanned thousands of customer reviews to pick out recurring issues with specific models. And we’ve lived with many printers as long-term test units, learning how they can fail and disappoint in the long run.

For this guide to laser printers, we’ve considered 157 different printers and tested 19 of them since 2011. And for this particular update, we put in about 25 hours of research and testing, looking at 15 models and ultimately testing three.

We think laser printers are best for people who need to print a lot, such as small-business owners. They’re also great for people who don’t print often but want a machine that will work without complaint on the rare occasions when they do need to print.

To help you decide if a laser printer is right for you, take a look at this brief list of things laser printers tend to do better than inkjets:

But laser printers aren’t for everyone because they’re not great at everything. Here are a few reasons why you might want to stick to an inkjet:

If you think an inkjet would be a better choice for you than a laser, check out our recommendations for the best inkjet printers.

Laser printers come in a few distinct varieties. For this guide, we looked for the best options in each of these categories.

In the past, we considered color laser printers overkill for home use due to the high cost of color toner and the higher up-front cost of the machines themselves. However, prices have gradually dropped into a more acceptable range (between $200 and $300), and we think these printers now provide the best all-around value for people who want a trouble-free printing experience. They’re still expensive compared with inkjets and monochrome lasers—especially when it comes time to replenish toner—but the convenience and flexibility of a color laser machine can’t be overstated. Here’s what we looked for:

For our most recent update, our look at these qualifications netted us two new contenders: the Canon Color ImageClass LBP622Cdw and the HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw.

Because they’re fundamentally similar machines, for monochrome laser printers we applied most of the same criteria we used to find our color laser pick but reduced the price ceiling to $200 because mono laser printers tend to be much less expensive. After researching the category, we considered machines such as the HP LaserJet Pro M118dw and HP LaserJet Pro M203dw. But based on owner reviews and professional reviews, plus a closer examination of specs and pricing, we decided they weren’t likely to challenge the Brother HL-L2350DW—our longstanding budget pick—as the best choice for people with occasional printing needs.

Although a print-only machine is sufficient for most people, plenty of others—particularly small- and home-business owners—also want a copier and scanner. For this category we used most of the same criteria as we laid out for color print-only machines but lowered the price ceiling to $250, looked for excellent scan and copy quality, and ruled out any model without a duplexing automatic document feeder.

We found six new mono MFPs that fit those criteria in early 2020, but only one—the Canon ImageClass MF269dw—seemed like it had a shot at beating our reigning pick, the Brother MFC-L2750DW.

Finally, we looked for a high-end color laser all-in-one for people with more serious small-office or home-office needs. Like the mono MFP, it needed to be fast and flexible, offer great print and scan quality, and have a not completely outrageous price (none of these machines are cheap, but we set the cap at $500).

Filtering through the color laser AIOs from top manufacturers, we arrived at four models that checked off all our requirements: the Brother MFC-9340CDW, the Canon Color ImageClass MF644Cdw and Color ImageClass MF743Cdw, and the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw, the upgrade pick in our all-in-one printer guide.

Your first experience with a printer sets the tone for the relationship to come: If setup is a breeze, you’ll have a much more positive attitude toward the machine going forward. That’s why we paid especially close attention to the installation process, from physically unboxing the printer to wirelessly connecting each machine to a Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, and Android device. We considered setup a success when we were able to print a two-sided document from each platform over Wi-Fi, turn the machine off and back on, and do it again.

Because simply getting a job to print can be frustrating, we also tested other ways to interact wirelessly with these machines. Since Google Cloud Print is still important for Chromebook owners, we made sure each printer worked with that. (However, Chromebook owners should be aware that Google is killing Google Cloud Print at the end of 2020 and recommends transitioning to native CUPS printing.) We also checked out other mobile printing standards and proprietary systems, like Mopria and HP ePrint, where available.

You’d have to try hard to find a laser printer that doesn’t offer at least respectable print quality, but some still manage to stand out from the pack. To separate the great from the merely good, we printed several text-based reference documents that also included elements like columns, tables, or charts: instructions for the 1099 tax form (PDF), a star chart designed for lens sharpness testing, a document from the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) meant to mimic a typical office report, and a simple Word/PDF document with the same sentence repeated in descending font size from 72 points to 1 point. We printed a few high-resolution photos, too, because more data is always better, and seeing how each printer handles material that pushes against the limits of its capabilities can be instructive.

We also checked out each printer’s quality options, including toner-density sliders and any available print-resolution settings, to see what you can expect with toner-saving options and to learn if we could eke out better-looking text.

Experimenting with quality settings also helped us get familiar with the print menus. We spent time in the standard print box as well as in the more arcane Web-based control panels that most printers employ for more technical adjustments.

To test printing speed, we ran off four copies of the four-page ISO document in both duplex (two-sided) and simplex (one-sided) modes. We timed the whole process, from our hitting the print button to the last sheet coming out of the feeder, so it included any warm-up time required from a cold start. We also tried duplex printing at the highest quality setting for each printer. These tests gave us a feel not only for how fast a printer would be able to spit out a 10-page book report, but also whether the differences between the models were substantial enough to make a difference in day-to-day life.

For the multifunction printers, we added speed tests for copying and scanning large documents, again considering both duplex and simplex speed and checking to see whether there was a difference between scanning color and monochrome content. We also tested the flatbed scan quality of each multifunction printer using a glossy test photo printed on our inkjet all-in-one pick, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015. We scanned at all available resolutions and looked for notable qualitative differences in each machine’s output, in everything from sharpness to color rendition to contrast.

Finally, we stress-tested all of the paper-feeding parts of each printer, including not just the main paper tray but also the bypass tray and document feeder, if the printer had them. We (slightly) overstuffed them with paper to see if they’d jam, and we also fed them single sheets to see if they could pick each one up. We also fed the multifunction printers a crumpled piece of paper to see if their ADFs could handle the unexpected.

The HP M255dw has an intuitive touchscreen interface, great apps, and a low cost of operation. It produces great results, too: crisp black text and vibrant color graphics. A fall 2020 software update locked out non-HP toner, so be prepared to have to pay full price when you need to replace the cartridges.

manufacturer's warranty w/purchase

May be out of stock

*At the time of publishing, the price was $300.

The HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw is fast, powerful, flexible, and refreshingly easy to use. We love this printer’s responsive control panel, the modern design of HP’s PC and mobile software, and how easy the machine is to set up and get on Wi-Fi. Toner is affordable at just 3¢ per black-and-white page and 15¢ for each color page, and it comes in extra-large cartridges that should last most people a very long time before they need to be replaced. Print quality is excellent across the board, and all of the features you might expect from a high-end printer are here, including auto-duplexing, plenty of networking options, support for common mobile printing standards, and a bypass slot for odd-size media.

Setting up the M255dw is painless, despite a fairly cryptic installation guide that relies primarily on pictures instead of words. Even though HP includes a USB cable (a rarity these days), we think most people will use Wi-Fi, so that’s the way we chose to set up our machine. With the touchscreen display, connecting the M255dw to our Wi-Fi network was as easy as picking our router’s SSID out of a list and typing in the password. Unlike most other printers we tested, the M255dw also provides a full QWERTY keyboard, which made entering a complex Wi-Fi passphrase a lot less frustrating. Like the HP Color LaserJet Pro M254dw we used to recommend, the M255dw works with both 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz networks—also rare among printers.

The bright and high-resolution color touchscreen display makes navigating the printer’s many settings menus easy. All of the other printers we tested for this guide use old-school resistive touchscreens that aren’t nearly as accurate or easy to use as the capacitive touchscreens on most smartphones. This screen isn’t as big as the ones on larger all-in-one printers such as our upgrade pick, but it’s still a significant upgrade over the non-touch, black-and-white displays or low-res, monochrome, resistive touchscreens used in the other machines we tested.

Once the M255dw is connected to your network, you can grab the appropriate drivers and software for your Mac or Windows PC by heading to 123.hp.com/laserjet and clicking Download. That gives you the HP Easy Start installer, which walks you through getting the printer connected, registered, and working with your computer. This process should take only a few minutes, and connecting via a smartphone or tablet is even quicker: You can download the HP Smart app (Android or iOS) and add the printer with just a couple of taps.

Operating costs for the M255dw are low. Black-and-white pages cost around 3¢ each, and color pages are a little over 15¢ each. Both of these estimates assume you’re using the extra-large 206X replacement toner cartridges; if you use the smaller 206A replacement cartridges, replenishing costs less up front, but you pay more per page. In addition, these estimates may not line up with the reality of how you print.1 If you print a lot of full-page color photos, you can expect to get fewer pages out of each toner cartridge, while text-based pages with a few color graphics could stretch the cartridges beyond their expected life and lower your cost per page. HP’s toner cartridges feature an integrated drum, so you don’t have to worry about buying a new one after a couple of years.2 And the M255dw defaults to duplex printing, which will save you on paper costs, as well.

The 250-page main paper tray (which can accept everything up to legal size) is larger than many in its class, so you’ll have to fill it less often. A dedicated bypass slot for odd-size media means you also won’t have to take your regular paper out if you want to print on envelopes, labels, or card stock. The slot is motorized, so when you slide an envelope or label sheet into the slot, rollers grab it and suck it into the guts of the printer, where it sits until you send a print job.

We couldn’t get the M255dw to jam, no matter how hard we tried. When we crammed the main paper tray with as many as 50 extra sheets, a warning popped up on the control panel saying the tray was overstuffed, and the machine refused to print. (In this situation, other printers would try, fail, and jam.) When we put exactly 250 pages in, it printed normally; same with just a single sheet in the tray. If you ever do run into a jam, however, the printer’s back has a convenient access hatch for you to remove it.

In our tests, at default settings, text documents from the M255dw looked crisp, with dark black text that was readable down to 2 points. Results were also very good when we printed business-style graphics and household miscellany like comics, coloring book pages, and crosswords. We didn’t observe any jagged lines or banding in solid-color areas—two problems that often plague cheaper models. Although the M255dw can’t print on photo paper, we ran a few high-resolution test photos through the HP on plain paper and came away generally pleased with the results. The prints were a touch washed out, but we got accurate colors, lots of detail, and relatively low noise. These aren’t photos you’d want to hang on a wall, or even display on your fridge, but they’re more than adequate for the cover of a business presentation or a school paper.

HP claims the M255dw can print as fast as 22 pages per minute in black and white. In our testing, it maxed out around 17 pages per minute when printing a PDF consisting of mixed text and graphics. That’s an impressive result—on a par with what we got from the Canon Color ImageClass LBP622Cdw we tested it against, and certainly fast enough for most home and home-office purposes. Duplexing dropped the speed further, to 11 pages per minute. Again, that was roughly equal to the rate we saw from the closest competition.

Compared with the other laser printers we tested for this update—and most models we’ve tested over the past few years—the HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw had an unusually long first-print-out time. When printing via Wi-Fi, it took around 24 seconds from our pressing the print button to the first sheet coming out of the feeder. To put that in context, the Brother MFC-L2750DW spit out its first sheet in 12 seconds, the Canon Color ImageClass LBP622Cdw produced its first print in 11 seconds, and the ImageClass MF269dw was even faster at 7 seconds. We don’t think 24 seconds will feel like too long for most people, but this model is still slower than the competition.

The M255dw comes with a skimpy set of “starter” toner cartridges good for 800 black-and-white and 700 color pages. High-capacity replacements (HP 206X) are rated for 3,150 monochrome and 2,450 color pages, but a full set will cost you around $400, at least a hundred bucks more than the printer itself. This isn’t a problem limited to the M255dw—almost all home laser printers (including alternatives we considered and tested) come with corner-cutting starter cartridges—but it’s annoying nonetheless. Most buyers should be prepared to shell out for replacement toner within the first year or so, but the replacement point could come a lot sooner for people using their printer in a home office. Third-party toner is available for around half the price of the genuine HP toner, but we can’t guarantee it’ll work for you; explore that option at your own risk.3

Color laser printers are bigger and heavier than their monochrome counterparts because they use four toner cartridges rather than just one. The Color LaserJet Pro M255dw is no exception: It’s more than twice as heavy as our budget pick (the Brother HL-L2350DW) but still far smaller and lighter than a color all-in-one like our upgrade pick (the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw). It takes up significant space on a desk, but it doesn’t colonize a desk the way an all-in-one does. It probably won’t fit on a bookshelf, due to its 19-inch depth.

In October 2020, HP released a firmware update (version 20201021) that prevents the printer from working with non-HP toner cartridges. If your printer was set to automatically update, this change happened in the background and may have broken compatibility with third-party toner. HP vaguely acknowledged the issue in a statement the next month, and has published a guide on how to turn off automatic updates. You may be able to revert to older firmware, but do so at your own risk. We make our calculations and recommendations based on buying replacement toner from the printer company, so while this doesn’t change our findings, it’s still annoying and upsetting for those who prefer to save money with cheaper toner. We’ll take this factor into account in further updates to this guide.

With low operating costs, quick operation, and useful features, the HL-L2350DW is the best laser printer you can get for around $100.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $110.

The Brother HL-L2350DW is a simple, affordable, and dependable monochrome laser printer. For people with basic needs—printing taxes, recipes, boarding passes, and so on—its automatic duplex capability, large 250-sheet paper tray, reliable paper handling, speedy printing, and low per-page costs make it an excellent choice despite a few quirks.

With a machine this straightforward, physical setup is quick. You have only to remove the packing tape, insert the toner cartridge, adjust the paper-tray guides, and load some paper. Getting the printer on Wi-Fi is a little more complicated with this model than with some other printers because the HL-L2350DW employs a decidedly old-school user interface that consists of a one-line monochrome LED display and an array of rubber buttons, but there are a few options to get it done. If you have a WPS-enabled router, you can use it to set up the L2350DW’s wireless connection without having to type in a password. If not, you can painstakingly enter your Wi-Fi passkey using the printer’s up/down buttons to select each character. Or, you can bypass the control panel entirely and complete the process with the help of a PC.

This is all a bit of a headache compared to models with touchscreen displays, but even so , we were able to connect this printer to our network within a few minutes, and we only had to do it once. The L2350DW reliably maintained a connection throughout testing—even several rooms away and a floor below our router. Some owners have reported issues with this printer’s predecessor, the HL-L2340DW, refusing to wake up from Deep Sleep mode, so we were happy to find that the new model didn’t give us any problems of the sort during our testing. You can operate this printer over USB if you prefer, but in that case you have to supply your own cable. If you want an Ethernet port for wired Internet, you can upgrade to the otherwise nearly identical HL-L2370DW.

The HL-L2350DW works with Windows PCs, Macs, and even Linux systems. It’s also compatible with all major mobile printing standards, including Google Cloud Print, which means it’s a solid pick for Chromebook owners. However, you may have problems getting the printer to complete Cloud Print registration; we certainly did. For us, the solution was to access the printer’s Web control panel, navigate to the Networking tab, and disable IPv6. With that done, the printer was able to get on Cloud Print right away and worked flawlessly for the remainder of our testing. It’s a mystery why Brother ships the HL-L2350DW with this setting enabled, considering that it’s a known fact that Cloud Print doesn’t work with IPv6. At least it’s an easy fix.

You don’t really need to install any extra software for the HL-L2350DW because it has native Windows and Mac drivers. It also works automatically with AirPrint on iOS, and you can add it with the Brother Print Service on Android. Brother’s iPrint&Scan app is available for all four platforms. It’s perfectly functional, if not as well-designed as HP’s software. Unfortunately, in our testing, printing from iPrint&Scan resulted in horrendous quality, regardless of the quality setting we selected. We reached out to Brother for comment, but the company wasn’t able to provide any explanation for the print-quality discrepancy. In general, we recommend that you avoid the app and print through your operating system’s native print dialog, which works just great.

Right out of the box, the HL-L2350DW produced good-looking text in our tests. Tax forms and other documents with tiny fonts (all the way down to 2 points) were perfectly readable, and larger headers came out with crisp edges and dark centers. All in all, this printer should be more than adequate for printing text-heavy documents. Test graphics and photos, on the other hand, were merely mediocre at default settings, as some light banding was visible in solid-color areas, and graphics appeared a little grainy. The output is good enough for personal use or internal business documents, and you can improve it with adjustments to toner density and resolution settings (at the expense of toner longevity) if you need to hand out documents to clients.

Brother claims the HL-L2350DW can print at up to 32 pages per minute, 5 pages per minute faster than the machine it replaces. It wasn’t quite that fast for us, but it still seemed speedy enough for just about any home or home-office use we could imagine. We clocked it at 25 pages per minute while printing single-sided PDFs and 12 pages per minute while using duplexing—faster than our color top pick, the HP M255dw, in both cases. Test print jobs reliably started up within a couple of seconds, too, so you won’t be left waiting long in any case.

As with its now-discontinued predecessor (our top pick for the past two years), one of the best things about the HL-L2350DW is its low cost of ownership. It shouldn’t cost you much more than $100 for the printer itself, and we’ve seen it on sale for far less than that. Operating costs are low, too: Even accounting for drum wear, each print will run you about 3.3¢, which is right in line with the per-page cost of other models we recommend. And the optional 3,000-page high-yield cartridges mean you won’t need to replace your toner too often. (However, like most other laser printers, the HL-L2350DW comes with a puny starter cartridge good for just 700 pages.)

This printer is extremely small and light. At just 15.9 pounds, it’s more than 10 pounds lighter than our next-smallest pick, and its footprint is significantly smaller as well. It’s especially short at 7.2 inches tall, which should help you fit it on a bookshelf. But it’ll just as easily find a space on your desk or anywhere else you might want to shove it.

However, don’t expect great build quality from a cheap printer like the HL-L2350DW. Our test unit came in a very banged-up box (thanks, FedEx) that released a confetti of shattered styrofoam when we opened it. After getting the printer up and running, we immediately noticed that duplex printing wasn’t working; every time we printed a two-sided document, it jammed in exactly the same place. We hopped on the phone, and a Brother customer support agent quickly diagnosed the problem: a plastic guide in the paper path that had gotten knocked out of place in transit. Popping the piece back in where it was supposed to go was simple enough, but it speaks to the HL-L2350DW’s flimsiness (and shoddy packaging) that the problem happened in the first place.

This multifunction printer adds a flatbed scanner and an automatic document feeder to the HL-L2350DW, significantly upping its home-office utility.

May be out of stock

*At the time of publishing, the price was $200.

If you work from home, run a home business, or simply want the flexibility of a laser printer that can also scan and copy, we recommend the Brother MFC-L2750DW. This powerful machine marries the basic utility and reliability of our Brother HL-L2350DW budget pick with the versatility of a flatbed scanner and a single-pass duplexing automatic document feeder. It’s dependable, quick, cost-effective, and reasonably compact, and it can handle everything except color print jobs. (Yes, including faxing.)

The MFC-L2750DW is even simpler to set up than its little sibling because it has a  color touchscreen control panel. This makes getting connected to Wi-Fi slightly less annoying, and t he interface is easy to navigate overall, if not quite as user-friendly as the one on our top pick, the HP M255dw. It comes with a number of handy built-in apps, including Dropbox and Google Drive, so you can walk up and print directly from your cloud accounts. It also has a scan-to-email app that’s refreshingly simple to configure; the app timed out on us a few times when we were trying to scan very large jobs, but otherwise it worked quickly.

In our tests, we found the default print quality from the MFC-L2750DW to be good enough for home and internal business use—a small step ahead of the results from our budget pick, the Brother HL-L2350DW, with sharper text at small font sizes and marginally better graphics performance. For professional-looking brochures or presentations, you’d probably want to use a printer like our upgrade pick, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw, or punt the job to a pro print shop instead.

Scans from the automatic document feeder looked just fine in our tests, though they could come out a bit crooked if you don’t micromanage the paper guides on the ADF tray (a fault shared by many all-in-ones). Flatbed scans, which sidestep this issue, had excellent sharpness in our tests due to the 1,200 dpi maximum resolution (double what some competing machines offer). You can scan to email, a network computer or drive, an FTP server, or cloud apps like Dropbox and Google Drive. Unfortunately, this printer lacks a USB port, so you can’t save your scans directly to a thumb drive.

Thanks to its single-pass duplexing automatic document feeder, scanning is really quick even with two-sided documents—24 pages per minute in black and white and 8 pages per minute in color. The Canon ImageClass MF249dw we tested in 2018 was just as fast with single-sided documents but 66 percent slower at duplexing because it took two passes to scan a two-sided sheet. (The newer Canon ImageClass MF269dw we tested in 2020, which also does two-pass duplexing, had strangely slow scanning performance over Wi-Fi at just 2 pages per minute single- or double-sided.)

The MFC-L2750DW shares a couple of annoying but easily fixable faults with its print-only stablemate. As with the HL-L2350DW, print quality degrades on this machine when you initiate jobs from Brother’s iPrint&Scan app, so you should use your operating system’s native print dialog instead. Google Cloud Print doesn’t work from the get-go—or didn’t for us, anyway—but you can fix that by disabling IPv6 in the Web control panel’s networking options.

This machine feels pretty flimsy, but the upside is that it’s light and compact for its class, which makes it easier to fit into your space. When you first set it up, just be sure to check for any plastic pieces that might have jumped out of place, and run a few print and scan jobs to make sure everything is working properly. If it’s not, give Brother’s customer support a call before returning the machine; the fix might be really simple.

This business-class machine checks all the boxes for a home office or small business: It’s faster, sharper, more durable, and more secure than our other picks. Like our top pick, it requires you to use official HP toner.

manufacturer's warranty w/purchase

*At the time of publishing, the price was $450.

If you need (or just want) a more serious printer than our other picks, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw is expensive, but it’s one of the most affordable color laser printers that offer all the same productivity features as our favorite inkjet model. It’s fast and reliable, and whether you’re printing in color or black and white, the M479fdw produces beautiful documents. In our testing, it cranked out a single-sided Word document at around 24.1 pages per minute, slowing only to 21.8 ppm with duplex documents. Single-sided scan jobs flew by at 19.5 ppm, more than 6 ppm faster than on any other printer we tested, while duplex jobs emerged at a rate of 16.7 ppm per sheet (which works out to 32.5 ppm per page).

The M479fdw also produced sharp text at small font sizes, better than any inkjet we tried. If you’re printing a lot of legal documents, this is important. Graphics were crisper—if a touch less saturated—than what we got out of a printer like the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015. The M479fdw spools up faster than most inkjets, too, and its recommended duty cycle of 4,000 pages per month—nearly triple the OfficeJet Pro 9015’s 1,500 pages—should be plenty for even the busiest home office and could satisfy many small businesses with multiple employees.

It has other features that businesses will appreciate, too, such as duplex printing and a fold-out bypass paper tray for one-off print jobs on different paper sizes. Although the slide-off scanner glass is large enough only for letter paper, the automatic document feeder can handle legal-size documents. Thanks to its USB port, this machine is capable of printing JPEGs, PDFs, and Word files, and it can also save scans as PDFs, JPEGs, or TIFF files.

The M479fdw has better security features than other printers we tested, inkjet and laser alike. It features secure boot, firmware integrity, and runtime code integrity to ensure that the printer is drastically less likely to be hijacked by bad actors. (It sounds absurd, but such hacks have happened.) It also allows for PIN-encrypted print jobs, so you can make sure no one else is intercepting your documents. Role-based access control for multiuser environments allows you to choose who can access which printer features. If your work involves sensitive material, these are legitimately helpful additions—and features you can’t get from other manufacturers.

HP’s one-year warranty for the M479fdw is shorter than what some rivals offer—Canon in particular provides three years of coverage on its machines—but it may actually be better than competing policies. That’s because it provides on-site service within one business day, while other warranties require you to ship your printer to a service center, sometimes at your own cost.

Like our top pick, the M479fdw requires official HP toner cartridges.

Selecting which printer to buy can bring you one step closer to paperwork bliss. Now, you might also need to figure out what to do with an old printer that jams, sucks down ink like it’s constantly dehydrated, or can never seem to connect to the Wi-Fi. Yet responsibly disposing of old electronics, known as e-waste, requires more work than walking to a trash bin. Some electronics contain hazardous materials, like cadmium, lead, or mercury, that can contaminate soil and groundwater. Printers can also take thousands of years to decompose, and have the potential to catch on fire when improperly dumped. Here are your options if you want to dispose of your printer the right way.

City or county drop-off locations City or county-sponsored electronic waste recycling programs make it easy to drop-off unwanted printers, tablets, VCRs, and more. Check with your local sanitation department for where you can turn in these hazardous products safely. A quick internet search with “[city] e-waste disposal” should bring up relevant information in your town. For example, New York City offers SAFE Disposal Events (Solvents, Automotive, Flammables, and Electronics) throughout the year, and also lists permanent drop-off locations across the city.

Retailer recycling programs While sanitation departments often limit e-waste disposal events to certain times of year, retailer recycling programs offer more flexibility on where and when you can dispose of used printers—usually for free. Best Buy accepts up to three e-waste items per household each day as part of their recycling program. The program at Staples takes up to seven items per customer per day. Epson lets you mail in up to 10 Epson products sans fee. And HP will recycle an old desktop printer when you buy a new one from them. You can also find recycling options with MRM, a trade organization dedicated to running recycling compliance programs.

Donation and buy-back programs You can hand over any printer for e-waste disposal, but it’s important to donate only used printers that still work.

Through Dell’s Reconnect program, you can donate an old laser printer to Goodwill. The Salvation Army accepts printers and other electronics via both its pick-up service and drop-off locations nationwide. And eBay allows private sellers to donate a portion of their printer sale proceeds—10 percent or more—to their preferred charity.

Several manufacturers offer buy-back programs for their branded products, but guidelines can often vary by state. For example, both Brother and Canon provide a list of state laws regarding how to handle e-waste and printer rebates.

What about ink and toner cartridge disposal? Many retailers offer ways to recycle used ink and toner cartridges. Best Buy, Brother, Dell, HP, Office Depot, and Xerox are a few companies recycling ink and toner cartridges for free.

Alternatively, you may be able to refill cartridges that are compatible with the new printer. HP says their inkjet cartridges are refillable, but doesn’t recommend the process, citing performance issues. Still, Walmart and other third-party retailers offer ink and toner refill kits.

We tested the Brother HL-L3270CDW and found that it came up short against our top pick due to its lack of single-pass duplex printing, a bypass printing slot for odd-size media, and a USB port for printing from a thumb drive. Print quality was mediocre overall, and colors had a distinctly greenish hue.

We also tested the Canon Color ImageClass LBP622Cdw but came away disappointed with its user interface, its apps, and its occasionally slow printing. It’s a good machine—its prints are actually a little nicer than the HP M255dw’s straight out of the box—but the HP is simply much more pleasant to use.

The HP Color LaserJet Pro M454dw is the big sibling to our main pick, the M255dw, with marginally faster printing, more paper-handling options, and a slightly lower cost per page. But it usually costs a lot more up front, as well. If you can find the M454dw on sale, go for it, but at normal prices we think the M255dw strikes a better balance between price and performance for most people.

The Xerox Phaser 6510/DNI is a powerful color laser machine, and both owner and editorial reviews report very good print quality. However, they also mention networking issues with some routers, along with parts failures.

The Brother HL-L2315DW isn’t that much cheaper than our budget pick, the Brother HL-L2350DW, but it’s much slower and has only 25 percent as much memory, so it may struggle with larger print jobs.

The Canon ImageClass LBP6230dw is cheap and small, and it offers automatic duplexing and Wi-Fi connectivity. But the cost per page is too high, and it doesn’t support AirPrint or Google Cloud Print, which is a problem if you own a Chromebook or want to print from a mobile device.

The affordable HP LaserJet Pro M118dw can print really fast and has positive owner reviews. Unfortunately, its cost per page is relatively high, and we saw multiple reports of iffy graphics and photo quality.

The HP LaserJet Pro M203dw has a low cost per page and a reasonable asking price, but owner reviews are poor, complaining of difficult setup, unreliable Internet connections, and breakdowns.

The Brother HL-L2390DW and HL-L2395DW are essentially the same machine as our budget pick, the Brother HL-L2350DW, but with a flatbed scanner bolted to the top, plus or minus some extra software features. We like these models, but over time reader feedback has led us to favor multifunction printers with automatic document feeders. If you don’t need to scan multi-page documents very often, they’re still worth a look.

HP’s LaserJet MFP M234dw and LaserJet MFP M234dwe are the same model with the same specs. The “e” version sells for $50 less because it’s part of HP+, which requires you to create an account, keep your printer connected to the internet, and use only first-party toner cartridges, while offering an extended warranty and a six-month trial of HP’s printing subscription program. We didn’t test either because they have flatbed scanners rather than automatic document feeders.

The Canon imageCLASS MF113w is limited by its flatbed scanner; we prefer models with automatic document feeders.

The Brother DCP-L2550DW is a good bargain option if you don’t need some of the features that our monochrome multifunction pick offers. Specifically, this model lacks duplex copy and scan, fax capability, and a touchscreen interface.

Although the Brother MFC-L2710DW is similar to the MFC-L2750DW model we like, it lacks that machine’s touchscreen interface and auto-duplex scanning and copying. It also has just 25 percent as much onboard memory (which means it might balk at large print jobs) and runs a little slower.

Similarly, the Brother MFC-L2690DW and MFC-L2730DW—both available exclusively at Walmart—resemble the MFC-L2750DW but with downgraded specs. The former has a button-driven, non-touch interface and slower print speeds, while the latter generally performs much like our pick but has half the memory and can’t do single-pass duplexing. If the extras the L2750DW offers don’t matter to you, these junior siblings are a cheaper way to get similar print and scan quality.

We tested the Canon ImageClass MF269dw and found that although it printed quickly and produced good-looking results, it was much less enjoyable to use than our mono MFP pick, the Brother MFC-L2750DW, with a frustrating touchscreen interface, annoying software, and ludicrously slow scanning over Wi-Fi.

The Canon ImageClass MF264dw and MF267dw are very similar to the MF269dw we tested, but both have a smaller ADF capacity and neither offers duplex scanning and copying. The MF264dw also lacks fax capability.

The HP LaserJet Pro MFP M227fdw has an attractive cost per page and a nice touchscreen interface, but owner reviews are deeply mediocre.

We tested the Brother MFC-L3770CDW but found that it couldn’t keep up with our laser AIO pick in usability or raw performance. Its resistive touchscreen wasn’t as responsive as the HP M479fdw’s capacitive panel, and the Brother iPrint&Scan software froze repeatedly on our MacBook during multi-page scan jobs. In addition, since its duplex printing isn’t single-pass, it took nearly twice as long to print two-sided documents as the HP.

The older Brother MFC-9340CDW looks to be a good deal with its all-mode duplexing, affordable toner, and relatively low up-front cost, but it’s slower than our color AIO pick and has had a rash of one-star owner reviews complaining about fused toner rollers and Wi-Fi connectivity problems.

On paper, the Canon Color ImageClass MF644Cdw and MF743Cdw compete well with our color laser all-in-one pick. Unfortunately, although they produced excellent speed and output in our tests, we found them much more difficult to work with than the HP M479fdw due to their clunky UI, resistive touchscreen, and outdated PC and Mac software. We also had issues getting the printers to accept a properly formatted USB thumb drive, which seems like a thing that shouldn’t be hard to get right.

Laser printers use non-liquid-based toner instead of the ink tanks used by inkjet printers. As a result, laser printers have faster print speeds, print sharper text, and prints don’t smear when wet. Laser printers cost more to refill than inkjets, though, and can’t print on glossy paper.

Yes! Laser printers can print in monochrome or full color. Just keep in mind that color laser printers will be more expensive because you’ll need new toner cartridges for each color as opposed to just a black toner cartridge for monochrome laser printers.

The short answer is: No. Laser printers use toner, a fine dye powder. The benefit of toner over ink is that toner doesn’t smudge and, because toner isn’t liquid, it doesn’t dry up if it sits unused for a long time.

Ben Keough is an editor covering powering, home office, and hobbies at Wirecutter. He previously spent more than a decade writing about cameras, printers, and other office equipment for Wirecutter, Reviewed, USA Today, and Digital Camera HQ. After four years testing printers, he has confirmed that they all suck, but some suck less than others.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9015e is our favorite all-in-one for most people thanks to its ease of use, great print quality, and low cost of operation.

Run a home business? Have a student in the house? Depending on your needs, we have a few recommendations for the best printer for you.

by Arriana Vasquez and Ben Keough

If you’re looking for an inexpensive printer, the Brother MFC-J805DW and the Brother HL-L2350DW are your best options.

Printers frustrate us all. Networking failures, sky-high ink costs, and interfaces out of the ’80s plague even the best ones. But we’ve got a few helpful hints.

Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing to save people time, energy and money when making buying decisions. Whether it's finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we'll help you get it right (the first time). Subscribe now for unlimited access.

© 2022 Wirecutter, Inc., A New York Times Company