Printers & Scanners
Unfortunately, most printers are, well, less than great. To keep you from having an Office Space–style breakdown, we've spent hundreds of hours researching and testing the best printers in every category, from cheap, black-and-white lasers to comprehensive all-in-ones. We also have options for scanning and printing your photos and documents.
The Best Mobile Scanning Apps
This may seem shocking, but unless you’re an accountant or archivist, you probably don’t need a traditional scanner—today’s smartphone scanning apps are simply that good. After spending more than 35 hours researching 20 scanning apps and testing seven of them, we’ve determined that our favorite is the lean and efficient Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS). It’s dead simple to use, capable of beautiful scan quality, and equipped with excellent text-recognition capabilities. Best of all, it’s totally free—even for iPhone owners. Virtually anyone can benefit from having a scanning app on their phone, and for most people it can completely replace a physical scanner. Don’t get us wrong—there are plenty of specific tasks for which it still makes sense to own a scanner. But if you need one, you almost certainly know already. (Hello, CPAs and tax lawyers.) If you find yourself merely wondering whether you need one, the answer is almost certainly no.
That may come as a surprise, but thanks to rapidly improving smartphone cameras, today’s scanning apps are perfectly capable of handling once-in-a-while scanning needs: receipts, business cards, legal documents, or the occasional form. And because your phone can go almost anywhere you can, scanning apps can also go places physical scanners can’t. You can, for instance, use an app to quickly scan receipts at a business lunch, to capture pages from rare books at a library, or even to send in bills of lading and trip reports from big-rig trucks on long-haul routes.
The Best Laser Printer
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: Laser printers are less frustrating to maintain. Laser toner cartridges don’t have to be replaced as often as ink tanks, and they won’t clog—as inkjet print heads sometimes do—if you go weeks or months between print jobs. They’re faster. If you have a home office or run a home business, you may be more conscious of printer speed than those who don’t. Our laser picks can pump out as many as 27 pages per minute; the fastest inkjets we’ve tested maxed out at 13 pages per minute. They print sharper text and graphics. The best inkjets do a good job, but even a mediocre laser printer will do a better job delivering crisp results, especially when it comes to fine lines and small font sizes.
The Best All-in-One Printer
Wirecutter has been testing all-in-one printers since 2012, and I’ve personally been covering the beat for the better part of four years. Collectively, we’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours researching models, squinting at test documents, eyeing stopwatches, and fiddling with menus. In addition to our own testing, we’ve polled readers and gathered feedback from comment sections. In short, we’ve done a lot of legwork to learn about what people want in a printer. As the questions above suggest, color inkjet AIOs aren’t the best choice for everyone. If you absolutely need your own printer but don’t often scan, copy, or fax and don’t need to print in color, monochrome laser printers are almost always a better choice for irregular usage. Inkjets have been known to dry out and clog if they sit idle for too long between uses, and to get them going again you need to run cleaning cycles that waste ink and drive up your operating costs. Laser printers can sit unused for weeks or even months on end with no downside. (If you do need to scan and copy and don’t mind paying a little more for laser reliability, we also have recommendations for monochrome laser and color laser AIOs.) A few years ago, we declared that all printers suck. That’s still true—even the best ones available today aren’t a joy to use. But with a few advances, printer makers have inspired some guarded hope for the future. They’ve developed cost-saving ink-subscription services that take the pain out of keeping printers topped up (and keep a steady stream of income flowing into manufacturers’ pockets). They’ve also introduced more models with large ink reservoirs that don’t need to be refilled as often. Wireless connections can still be flaky, but they’re getting better: HP and Canon have finally adopted 5 GHz Wi-Fi, and HP is advertising “self-healing” wireless connections, meaning the printers detect connection issues and attempt to resolve them automatically or provide guided troubleshooting rather than just tossing up an indecipherable error message. And mobile printing apps are improving all the time, reflecting smartphones’ increasing dominance over PCs. Despite ongoing quality concerns, AIOs remain popular because they’re a one-stop shop for home document production needs. A midrange inkjet AIO makes a lot of sense for anyone who prints or copies on a daily basis, scans documents from time to time, and maybe even needs to fax on occasion. Color laser AIOs have come down in price since we started covering them, but in general they remain far more expensive than inkjets. Though AIOs are jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none, they also represent the most economical way to address all of the document production needs a home or small business might have.
Gear for a Paperless Home Office
At Wirecutter, we work in an entirely digital environment, and many of us try to keep our home offices that way too. Here are our recommendations for keeping paper off your desk and out of your life.
I’ve been writing about imaging gear—including cameras, printers, and scanners—for more than a decade, and I know each manufacturer’s lineup inside and out. Wirecutter has been covering portable document scanners since 2013, logging more than 130 hours of research and testing in search of the best, most reliable models. We’ve kept up at every step with changes in the category, including the introduction of duplex scanning, Wi-Fi, and built-in batteries. If you already own a portable document scanner and like it well enough, you probably have little reason to upgrade. Scanner development moves at a snail’s pace, and models often stay on shelves for as many as four or five years between revisions. That said, if your current scanner doesn’t offer Wi-Fi, can’t scan both sides of a document at once, scans significantly slower than you’d like, or doesn’t reliably recognize text, give our pick a look.
If you have an all-in-one printer with a flatbed scanner and an automatic document feeder, you should think about buying a portable document scanner only if you find that you often need to scan when you’re away from home. Portable document scanners aren’t more accurate than all-in-ones and don’t produce noticeably better OCR results.
