Spending more time at home, families, students, and office workers reappreciated the humble desktop printer. Check out our top picks under $200, which are backed by decades of in-depth reviews by PC Labs.

Over the years, countless experts (including the author of this article) have predicted that, sooner or later, most of the world’s workforce will work from home. dream? Fewer giant office buildings, less fossil fuel consumption, and bid farewell to annoying traffic jams. Remote work is no longer exclusive to a few professionals.

Man, we were wrong! Entering the information age for nearly 40 years, only a global pandemic finally allowed the leaders of governments and large and small companies to regain their awareness of working from home (WFH). Now, as organizations scramble to remotely manage and equip their employees, sales of technology equipment are soaring, and more and more families and newly established home office residents are aware of the need for new hardware—including printers that are often overlooked. .

Industrial and government workers can no longer use their office printers. Many students cannot print in the school library or dormitory. As the pandemic continues to spread in the community, venturing to the local Kinko's for printing and copying carries certain risks.

In fact, our printer is suddenly no longer a dust collector. Many of us still need to print, scan, copy, and sometimes send medical faxes. In the pre-COVID world, several colleagues might rely on the same high-capacity printer all day, and now our printing and copying volumes are much lower-but distributed among many cheap home and home office printers.

We see a new and substantial demand for low-cost entry-level printers that work from home. For many people, they just need a cheap, occasional model. (We categorize "cheap" as under $200; we will discuss in detail later.) Let us break down the best value of your family-it is increasingly becoming a family office. (If you find it difficult to find some printers in inventory during these COVID challenges, please review our strategy guide to track down hard-to-find technologies.)

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Although choosing the right printer for your needs is not rocket science, you still need to consider a lot when buying a printer. good news? Today, you don’t have to worry too much about paper jams, poor print quality, and other performance issues. Printer and scanner technology is mature enough that you can focus on productivity and convenience features (such as paper input capacity and convenient control panel) and save money by comparing operating costs.

Do you need color printing and copying? Do you need an all-in-one (AIO) printer that can copy and scan documents and photos, or a single-function ("just a printer") model? These are just two of the key options, so let's take a look at them and some others.

Single-function printers do only one thing—printing, of course—and all-in-one machines (AIOs, also known as multifunction devices or MFPs) can also copy, scan, and (in some cases) fax documents. In terms of design, most AIOs combine a printer with a flatbed scanner on the top.

Sometimes, you only need a device that can print, and it doesn’t make sense to pay extra for a larger printer with imaging capabilities you don’t need. In other words, most home offices will benefit from copying and scanning from time to time, so choose AIO. Even if you don't copy often, in today's climate, one of the reasons to buy a printer is to be safe (that is, to reduce the need for your family to run errands locally), and to spend a little more money to buy a meaningful model.

An important distinguishing feature of AIO is whether its flatbed scanner is equipped with an automatic document feeder (ADF). ADF is a device that can process multi-page documents without user intervention. When copying or scanning a stack of documents, the simplest and cheapest AIO does not have an ADF and requires you to place one page at a time on the scanner base (or "platen"). With the ADF, you put the paper stack in the feeder, press copy or scan, and then walk away. If you often scan or copy a bunch of pages at a time, this obviously saves time.

In order to reduce costs, many low-end AIOs lack ADF. At the same time, there are two main types of ADF itself: manual duplex printing and automatic duplex printing. For manual type, when the machine finishes scanning the first side of a stack of pages, you need to manually flip the stack and put it back into the ADF to scan the other side. Automatic two-sided printing takes care of this problem for you.

Automatic two-sided printing ADFs are not common on machines under $100. As you approach $150 and move up into the $200 range, you will not only see an automatic duplex ADF, but also a higher capacity feeder. The ADF on most low-cost machines can hold about 20 pages, while the ADF on the higher-cost AIO can hold up to 50 pages, sometimes even more.

There are two sub-types of automatic duplex ADF: one-way duplex and reverse duplex. The difference is simple. The single-pass ADF has two scanning sensors, one on each side of the paper. These allow the scanner to capture both sides of the document at the same time. Reverse duplex scanning to scan one side, pull the paper back, turn it over, and scan the other side. Although one-way duplex is faster, both methods work well. In cheaper printers, if the scanner is fully duplex printing, reverse duplex printing is more common.

There is no doubt that color pages are more interesting, more attractive, and more influential than black and white pages. When making your own brochures, flyers, and other promotional materials at home, or if printing photos is your personal printing habit, color is almost essential.

But certain types of documents cannot benefit from color, and sometimes, using color inks in these situations is just an unnecessary expense. Depending on what you are printing and the printer model, the cost of each color page can easily be three to five times or more than that of a monochrome page.

However, when we discuss further, in the past few years, some printer manufacturers have introduced machines that can print both black and white and color documents at a much lower cost per page (CPP). Some people do this by letting you buy ink in bulk in advance; some people sign up for an ink subscription for you.

Regardless of the solution, you need to know exactly what output you need when buying a printer, not what you may need or want. If you are printing just a lot of text, a monochrome laser may make more sense; if photo printing or color workbook sheets are on the agenda, color inkjet is your main choice.

Once upon a time, laser printers were considered faster, more reliable, and cheaper to use, and laser printers were almost universally praised for better output quality than inkjet printers. Although many users and even some experts still tout these traditional "wisdoms", they are far from universally applicable today. Depending on the content and quantity you print, today's inkjets can surpass their laser competitors. We broke some printer myths, and broke down the advantages and disadvantages in our inkjet vs. laser comparison.

For many years, printer manufacturers have relied on selling printers at low prices, hoping to make profits by selling consumables (ink or toner). Most entry-level inkjet printers today still follow this plan, especially those under $100. However, in the past few years, some printer manufacturers have introduced products with the opposite selling point: saving users on operating costs.

These technologies (HP's Smart Tank Plus and Instant Ink, Canon's MegaTank, Brother's INKvestment Tank, and Epson's EcoTank) provide cost-per-page figures that are only a small part of the traditional replacement consumable model. This design will also be used in laser printers: In early 2021, HP launched the Neverstop brand monochrome laser printer, which does not provide replacement toner in expensive ink cartridges, but refillable ink stored in the printer. In the toner box-refill each time for 16 US dollars or 0.6 cents per page.

Large-capacity ink and large-capacity toner printers are not only suitable for enterprises; home users can also enjoy their benefits. We have all the information you need to save money with ink subscriptions and bulk inks.

Some home offices not only print a lot, but also print on different types and sizes of paper. What if you print on plain paper or letterhead most of the time, but suddenly need to output spreadsheets on Legal size paper? Or a label, or a check? What if you are printing all the time and need a machine with a deep paper tray that does not require constant reloading?

Although most inexpensive printers do not provide large-capacity paper trays and multiple input sources, please pay attention to the input configuration options of the machine. In addition to the main paper input source, many printers are also equipped with a simple single-page overlay tray for printing disposable envelopes, forms or labels, or there may be a 10-page or 20-page replacement tray for Print on photo paper or envelopes.

Please note that the input capacity of a printer tends to vary with its rated "print volume", which is usually expressed by manufacturers as the number of pages the machine can print per month. The two most common such measurements are the duty cycle (the absolute maximum number of pages that the printer should print each month) and the maximum recommended print volume (a more reasonable goal to avoid excessive wear on the mechanism). Some manufacturers of cheap printers do not comment on their models.

However, where they do, these volume measurements are usually thousands of pages apart. For example, when the monthly duty cycle of a machine is 20,000 pages, the recommended monthly print volume is usually 10% or less of this value. When buying small-batch printers, it’s best to let the recommended print volume be your "real" guide. Although the printer can run month by month in its duty cycle, if you run it near the recommended capacity rating, it will require less attention and last longer.

Nowadays, most printers, especially cheap printers, can connect wirelessly to most handheld mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). The standard wired interface of a computer includes two main types of connections: RJ-45 jacks for Ethernet networks and/or USB ports for connection to a single PC. However, Ethernet is more like a business-centric protocol than a protocol on low-cost printers.

In the list of wireless standards, only Wi-Fi and AirPrint are actual local area network (LAN) protocols. Others (Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth, Mopria, and NFC) are mainly point-to-point protocols that allow you to connect handheld devices or other devices directly to the printer without any device being part of the LAN. NFC is unique in that it allows you to connect to the printer by simply tapping an NFC-enabled device on a hotspot on the printer (usually located on or near the control panel). In addition to all these, most printers and AIOs today also support connections through several popular cloud sites, such as Google Cloud Print, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, and Evernote.

Most low-end machines today have Wi-Fi and USB connections. Ethernet, you can find it, is the fastest and safest choice; few printers now lack Wi-Fi, it is very convenient, and fast enough for most purposes. Most printers today also provide free downloadable applications that allow you to connect smartphones and tablets to the printer over a wireless network. What you get does not always correspond to the price of the printer, so please double check the specific details of any model you are looking at.

In general, the cheaper the printer or AIO, the fewer functions and features—the less the machine does—so the smaller the need for large, option-rich control panels. Although some of today's cheap printers (mainly AIO) have spacious color touch screens, most use simple panels composed of several buttons and status LEDs.

However, the graphical control panel is very convenient. In addition to making direct functions (such as copying or printing from a cloud site) easy to perform, such panels also allow you to specify security and other configuration changes, monitor and order supplies, and generate usage and other reports. You can also control, configure, and monitor most printers through the on-board web portal accessed from a PC, mobile phone, or tablet browser.

Similarly, the comprehensive level in this regard may not match the price. Check the comments or the printer’s specification sheet for details to learn about support for such features.

Every home or home office has its own unique needs in terms of printing and copying volume. Since we are looking for the best "cheap" single-function or AIO printers here, this article assumes that your printing and copying volume is small-for example, up to a few hundred pages per month. For most families and office workers who work from home, 200 prints per month is a lot, although in today’s beautiful new world, we see that the number of prints at home is much more than a few months ago, and This demand is expected to rise.

We have carefully checked all the printers that PC Labs has tested in the past few years, and these printers are still on the market today. Our main candidate machines are divided into two pricing categories: MSRP-based "cheap" (US$100 to US$200) and "ultra-cheap" (under US$100). However, in view of the pandemic, many e-retailers have sold out their printers. Some of them, especially those with third-party markets, have models that sell for much higher than suggested retail prices, and "ultra-cheap" models have flooded into " "Cheap" category, in practice. Therefore, if you see that the price is too high compared to the suggested retail price we quoted for our selection, you will definitely want to shop around. Usually, with some smart search, you can find some of our options at prices significantly lower than the suggested retail price.

Please pay attention to three things about our choice. First: The three main printer types we see here are lasers, business-oriented models (laser and inkjet), and photo-centric models (all inkjets). Often, you will see significant differences between machines adjusted for office use and photo printing. For example, commercial-oriented low-cost inkjet printers are usually equipped with ADFs, while photo-centric inkjet printers are usually not. At the same time, by definition, photo-conscious inkjet printers can print photos better, and sometimes use more than the standard four printing color inks (cyan, magenta, yellow and black or CMYK).

Second: We also included two niche types of printers in our selection. They are good models and priced at less than $200, so they meet the "cheap" standard: label printers (suitable for transporting large quantities of items from home People) and a dedicated portable photo printer (for quick output of mini-snapshots). Click on the link to get more information about these, but be aware that the latter is not necessarily an inkjet printer. The smallest uses an inkless technology called ZINK, which embeds coloring materials in specially processed paper stocks.

Third: We cannot recommend any "cheap" color laser printers under $200. All the top lasers here are monochromatic, and given the typical high cost of replacing toner cartridges with four color lasers, it seems appropriate to exclude color lasers from this review given their budget price targets.

It is also important to note that now you can find some very cheap printers at the bottom of most inkjet manufacturers' production lines-some of which are well under $50. But remember, "the cheapest" is usually not the best value. It is best to look for authoritative reviews of the evaluation value and all hardware factors, just like PC Labs' own evaluation. All of our choices below have undergone rigorous and repeatable testing.

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William Harrel is a contributing editor specializing in printer and scanner technology and reviews. He had been writing articles about computer technology long before the Internet appeared. He has authored or co-authored 20 books-including the popular "Bible", "Secret" and "Fools" series-on digital design and desktop publishing software applications such as Acrobat, Photoshop and QuarkXPress, and prepress imaging technology. His latest work is HTML, CSS and JavaScript Mobile Development for Dummies (a manual for creating websites for smartphones and tablets). In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years, he has also contributed to several other computer and business publications, including Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter and Windows Magazine, and he has served as Printer and scanner specialist on About.com (now Livewire).

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