Best Printer for Your Home or Office in 2025: Tested by Our Experts

Editor's Note:With Amazon's October Prime Day" target="_self coming fast, there are going to be many chances to get to save money on printers. Most of the biggest companies, like Epson, HP and Canon, all have sales around the same time, and you can always find savings on Amazon itself.

Whether you're working from a home office , doing schoolwork or running an Etsy store, you might require a printer to turn digital documents into physical ones or print images. The best printers also let you scan, opening up a more paperless world. After testing more than 30 models in the past two years, I can tell you that while most printers do the same thing, some do it much better and more efficiently than others.

What is the best printer overall?

For a home office with just one or two people using it, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e is the best overall choice. The print speed was excellent and all the printed words were crisp and clear. This isn't a photo printer, and it shows, but it works well enough for daily imagery tasks. If you're using it to print brochures or Word documents, this is an almost perfect printer for you.

What we updated:September 2025

Updated to bring talk about Prime Day and what you need to know about it in terms of printers.

Best printers of 2025

Other printers we've tested

Not all of the printers we test make it to the top table. Some of them are good but don't quite make the top of our list, some we replaced with a new version and some are so bad that we omitted them entirely. Here are some of the home printers that nearly made it or have been on the best list but replaced by different models.

Munbyn thermal printer

The Munbyn is good -- for a thermal printer. It printed quickly and its labels were crisp and sharp, with no issues reading barcodes. However, it fell when trying to connect to the app. I found the app needed a lot of work, and it failed to connect more times than it connected. It's also a hundred dollars more than its peers and not worth the extra money.

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Factors to consider when buying a printer

Know what you want your printer to do

What you intend to print will determine the best printer for you. If you're mostly working with shopping lists, concert tickets, or travel itineraries, excellent print quality is arguably less important than print speed and price. If you're using your printer for professional materials or photo printing, then color accuracy, printing quality, and features like borderless printing will be primary considerations when choosing the right home printer.

Inkjet versus Laser or other types

The two main types of home printers are Inkjet and laser. Both have different benefits and pitfalls. There also other choices if you have specific needs.

• Inkjet:Inkjet printers spray tiny droplets of colored ink onto a page to produce images and words. They use multiple pots of wet ink that shoot from multiple jets to create a wide gamut of colors. If you use the right glossy paper, the picture quality is excellent. If you're printing a mix of images and words in your home office, you should use an inkjet printer. Brochures and webpages look best on an inkjet printer.

• Laser:Laser printers use a dry toner and heat to print pages. The toner is attracted to a charged area -- shot by lasers, hence the name -- then heated onto the page to make it stick. They are especially good at printing high-volume documents that contain little imagery. That being said, more and more laser printers can print decent images, and in color, so they are becoming more versatile. Use a laser printer if you're printing large documents or need a lot of volume. Toner can be expensive, but it lasts much longer than Inkjet ink.

• Other:Plenty of other ink types on this list are helpful in special niches.

  • Thermal printers use heat on special paper to print sticky labels. Perfect for people who send a lot of packages.

  • DTF printers print onto special film that can then be heat-transferred onto material like t-shirts and jackets. Great for small creative businesses

  • Sublimation printers use special ink to allow you to print on paper, then heat press onto mugs, tumblers, and other merchandise. Also great for small creative businesses.

  • UV printers spray special inky resin onto materials and use UV to cure it. Great for medium-sized businesses that want something very special.

Print only versus all-in-one

All-in-one printers are almost ubiquitous at this point, and if you're looking for something for a small home office, there's no reason not to get one. Scanning and copying built-in alongside printing just makes sense for a small business.

However, if your printing needs are just photography-based, or one of the other niche types on this list -- like sublimation or thermal printing -- then an all-in-one may not be worthwhile. You want a printer that does one job very well, rather than a jack of all trades.

Budget

Another factor to consider is the cost of ink and ensuring you have enough ink to print everything you need. (There's nothing more frustrating than having a printer but no ink in the tank.) Inkjet printers use liquid ink to print, whereas laser printers use toner cartridges containing powder. Even if you're getting a great printer deal, be sure to research how to refill the ink, so you can choose the best printer for your overall budget. Some new printers include an ink subscription in their original price tag, so that may be something to consider.

How we test printers

For a long time, CNET's methodology for testing printers didn't change. Our original testing was designed in the days when Wi-Fi printers were rare and faxing was an important consideration when choosing a device. These days, Wi-Fi is standard, app-controlled printers are everywhere, and what and how we print has changed considerably. I designed a new set of printing parameters in 2022 that I hope will mesh with how we use printers nowadays.

• Print and copy speed: The speed at which things print and copy is important in our daily lives. Printing a quick theater ticket or copying a document needs to be done speedily and accurately. Testing this is easy; I simply used a stopwatch and printed 10 pages of text of varying sizes and typefaces. I used Fillerama to generate random text from Star Wars and Monty Python and changed the font size randomly across the page. I also used different fonts, like Arial and Times New Roman, to see how they'd print. I even added Comic Sans to the mix, because some people still think it's a good idea to use it (for middle managers mostly). I use Amazon Basics Multipurpose printer paper on all my testing except the imagery tests to keep everything fair and even.

• Brochure and webpage test: When asked, people told me they use their home printer for printing online tickets from webpages as well as their resumes for job interviews. With that in mind, I used the standard brochure template from Google Docs, which I changed a little -- I made the font size smaller and larger and changed the font too -- to give that modern resume look. I also saved my article about becoming a Star Wars action figure into a PDF -- I needed to keep the ads the same on every test, so the live article wouldn't do. Sometimes we're in too much of a rush to select just the ticket, so printing the entire webpage is easier. This test simulates that.

• Receipt test: When you work from home, you often have to submit your receipts for travel and incidentals. One of the most common ways to do that, if you aren't lucky enough to have an app, is to tape receipts to a piece of paper and scan them into your computer. That way you can email them wherever they need to go quickly and easily. To re-create that, I taped my receipts from my food shopping to create a scan. I used a mixture of new receipts and ones that had faded in my wallet, then I checked the scan for legibility. Most scanners will enhance the image you're scanning, and that certainly helps with receipts.

• Picture quality test: As in previous CNET photo tests, I used the  PhotoDisc Target file for my image tests. I printed images on the same Canon glossy paper and studied them according to the guidelines associated with this industry standard. I took special note of the skin tones at the bottom to make sure they were replicated correctly and also checked for chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration is a purple hue that often surrounds images and can make even the best picture look cheap and tacky. I also checked for stippling, an image error that occurs on poorly calibrated inkjet printers. 

Printer FAQs

When is the best time of year to buy a printer?

The sale season is here and it is the best time to buy a printer. Amazon Prime Day 2025 sale is scheduled to take place July 8 to 11, and some early July 4 deals are already live. Now is the perfect time to take advantage of discounts on printers if you're considering purchasing one.

Should you buy a printer with an ink subscription?

Ink subscriptions are becoming more common, with several printers on this list offering them as part of the original cost. Are they any good? It all depends on how much ink you use. If you're printing more than 100 pages a month, then yes, it likely is a good deal. Less than that and you may find you don't need it.

Most ink subscriptions offer you a certain number of months free, so it's worth trying it to see if it can fulfill your needs, but remember to cancel it before you're supposed to start paying if you don't want it.

What are the different types of printer?

The most common printer types are:

• Laser: Uses light, heat, and toner to create text and images (best for text).

• Inkjet: Uses small dots of ink to create an overall shape (best for images).

• Sublimation: Same as an inkjet, but the ink sticks to materials like mugs or T-shirts.

• Thermal: Uses heat and thermal paper to produce text and images (best for labels).

How much should a home printer cost?

Printer prices can vary from $100 for simple budget printers, to $700 or more for complex printers that can seem like magic. The best home printers, especially the all-in-one printers that scan and copy as well, tend to sit at the $200 to $300 mark. If you need something only for text, you can get a good one for $150.