A printer is one of the few home-office devices that hasn’t been at least partially replaced by a smartphone app. When you need the occasional hard copy of a form, return label or letter, you need at least a basic black-and-white model. Your printer should work wirelessly, to keep your workspace free from a tangle of cords and let you print from multiple devices. It should be a laser printer to remove the hassle of your ink cartridge running out or drying up in between uses. And most important, it should produce professional-looking documents. There are countless printers on the market, and vague or impenetrable product descriptions can make it difficult to compare apples to apples. To cut through the clutter, we sorted out the most important criteria, filtered the available options and came up with the best monochrome printers to outfit your home office.
If you’d like to read how we vetted and tested these printers, scroll down for all the details.
Our top pick, the Brother HL-L2325DW, produced high quality text and images, is easy to set up over a wired or wireless connection, has a relatively small footprint and costs less per page than most comparable models. That’s everything you can ask for from a printer, and the Brother is nicely priced, as well.
The HL-L2325DW’s print resolution of 2400 by 600 dpi (2400 vertical dots and 600 horizontal dots per square inch) falls in the middle of the pack—some models were as low as 600 by 600 dpi. When we viewed the documents it printed, we were more than pleased with their quality, even at font sizes as small as 1 point, which is where lower-quality printers might produce smudged or blurred text.
Setup, over both wired and wireless connections, was gratifyingly seamless, though we did have to provide the necessary USB cable, since it isn’t included. The wireless setup took a little more work, but was still relatively easy. You have to download the Wireless Setup Wizard from Brother’s website, but once that’s accomplished, the program takes care of all the hard work. It took us just a few minutes to successfully pair the printer and our home wireless network. We were able to print from other computers and iOS devices using AirPlay with no issues.
The HL-L2325DW had nearly the smallest footprint of our test set at 14 inches wide and 14.2 inches deep. Its included toner is advertised to produce up to 700 pages, which puts the price per page at a little under 16 cents. First-party replacement toner is fairly affordable at about $43 for 1,200 pages or $77 for 3,000 pages as of publication. You can likely get a much better rate on third-party toner cartridges that will work just as well.
If you demand the sharpest text and don’t mind paying about $100 more, we recommend the HP LaserJet Pro M203dw. It prints at 1200 by 1200 dpi, the highest resolution of any printer we got our hands on and double the number of horizontal dots as the Brother HL-L2325DW. But will most people notice this difference? We don’t think so. Only when we put printouts from both printers next to each other was there was a discernible contrast in sharpness.
Setup was relatively painless. We had read reports of people having issues getting the M203dw to connect to their wireless networks, but we were able to use the HP Smart for Desktop app to get connected without issue. A small quibble: The free-to-download software (also available for Windows, iOS, and Android) harvests your information by default. To avoid that, toggle the data collection feature off before you begin. Unlike the Brother printer, the HP comes with a USB cable for easier setup, but we needed a USB-A-to-USB-C adapter to connect it to the computer we used.
The M203dw is wider than our top pick by 0.6 inches, and 1.8 inches deeper. Those dimensions may not make a big difference in your office, but if you’re tight on space, every inch counts. The M203dw also loses out to our preferred Brother model in terms of cost. 1) Its upfront price is a tad steeper. 2) It will cost you more for each page you print—at 21 cents, 5 cents more than the Brother. 3) First-party replacement toner is more expensive at about $70 for the standard 1,600 page cartridge and $106 for a high-yield 3,500 page model.
The Brother HL-L2370DW and HL-L2350DW are variants of the HL-L2325DW that print a little faster and can hold more paper in their input trays; the HL-L2370DW also adds an Ethernet port. None of these features are a reason to pay more for one of these models over our well-priced top pick, but if either is on sale or the L2325DW is out of stock, these are good options.
The Canon imageCLASS LBP6230dw was the smallest printer we tested with the lowest cost per page, but its print quality was a deal breaker: It left behind a noticeable cloud of toner on the page.
The Canon imageCLASS LBP162dw tied for the lowest print resolution among the printers we tested at 600 by 600 dots per inch. That was evident in the printed text, which looked muddy compared with pages from the other printers. It was also the largest printer we tested, with a 14.9 inch by 16.2 inch footprint.
Canon’s imageCLASS LBP236dw also offers that unsatisfactory 600 x 600 dpi, and it was the least attractive of our tested models. Nothing justified its approximately $300 price, which is almost three times the cost of our top pick.
I’ve reviewed consumer technology for leading product-reviews sites for more than a decade and have spent hundreds of hours assessing office equipment ranging from filing cabinets to laptop chargers and, of course, printers. We chose not to rely on the few acknowledged printer-technology experts we could identify, as they are almost universally affiliated with one of the major manufacturers. Instead, we supplemented our own tests and observations with the comments (and complaints) of typical consumers who use printers in their own home office setups.
We focused on a specific category of printer: monochrome (black and white), single function (they print but don’t scan, copy or fax) and laser rather than inkjet. While inkjet printers are popular, laser printers use toner, which has a couple of advantages: It doesn’t dry out between uses as the ink used in inkjet printers can. And toner cartridges usually last for many more pages than ink cartridges do. We zeroed in on monochrome models because our team agreed that the bulk of office printing is black and white. To print photos, you would need color ink, of course, but in truth, an online photo printing service (or sending your jpeg files to a local supermarket or drugstore with a commercial printer) will almost always be a better value and supply far better image quality. We also eliminated multifunction printers that scan, copy, and fax. Why pay more and take up more desk space when your iPhone or Android phone can scan documents, and services such as FaxZero let you send faxes free? (And hey, how often are you actually faxing, anyway?)
The home-printer landscape is dominated by Brother, Canon and HP, and at the time of this review those brands produced 21 printers that met our specifications. There are a handful of other manufacturers with smaller selections, but none of their printers offered features, specs or price tags that made them comparable to our finalists. We further narrowed the field by including only printers that can wirelessly print over Wi-Fi (a capability usually denoted by the letter “W” at the end of the model name) and those designated “duplex capable”—in other words, they could handle two-sided printing (look for model names ending in “D”). We excluded models that lock you into using first-party toner cartridges rather than allowing more affordable third-party toner. The result: seven printers to run through hands-on testing. Here’s what we were looking for:
We also measured how quickly each printer could finish a 10-page document (both single-sided and double-sided) and determined that speed wasn’t a compelling differentiator. The slowest printer we tested completed the jobs within 10 seconds of the fastest.
We installed each printer’s software on a 2020 MacBook Air running macOS 12.3 using a USB cable. (Based on our research, the results will likely be similar for PC users.) Though it may sound counterintuitive to use a physical connection for a wireless set up, in our experience, it’s a shortcut that saves considerable time and frustration. Setting up a printer entirely wirelessly entails working through the printer’s built-in control panel—which is typically pretty rudimentary—to identify your Wi-Fi network and pair the printer with your devices. Connecting your computer and printer with a physical cable lets you efficiently access the printer’s set-up software and enter commands with your keyboard rather than the printer keypad.
The caveat: Most printers don’t come with a cable, and those that do often use a USB-A connector, which is becoming less common. If you’re connecting to a fairly new computer that only has USB-C ports, we think it’s well worth it to add a USB-C printer cable to your purchase.
We printed single- and double-sided pages with various fonts and type sizes. We examined all the documents for print that was crisp and sharp, with well-defined edges to letters and lines and no “dust” or shadows from drifting ink.
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