Despite everyone’s move to digital paper, digital photos, and the cloud, we still all need to print a few things once in a while, and some of us need to print a whole lot all the time! To help you find your way through the maze of printer options available, we’ve compiled this Home and Small-Business Printer Buyer’s Guide, which profiles the best inkjet and laser models. As a rule of thumb, inkjets are great for small-volume printing that requires color, and are the only printers to consider for album-worthy photographs. Meanwhile, laser printers are vastly superior for large-volume printing, with color laser models suitable for business presentations.

For Winter 2021, we’ve updated this guide with a number of new models from Brother, Canon, and HP, which replace models we previously recommended. While printer tech doesn’t change all that often, every brand regularly refreshes its lineups with new features and designs. We really like what Canon has done with its Megatank line, shown here. It’s a breath of fresh air in the printer business, with honest printing, no tricks or scams. It holds enough ink to print at least 6,000 pages, and replacement ink costs next to nothing. Yes, Megatank printers are more expensive than comparable standard inkjets, but we believe transparency in pricing is important for consumers, and the high introductory price of this printer is offset by running costs of about half a cent per page, rather than the 25 cents most inkjets cost. In fact, the entire inkjet business has been turned on its head, and all those “cheap” inkjets under $100 that cost well more than $100 to run each year are gone. We think that’s great news, because the pricing of these products was simply deceptive.

With that said, anyone needing ultra-fast or high-volume printing should absolutely go with a laser printer. Based on our extremely-positive experience with every Brother model we’ve tested, we recommend Brother laser models to most users, although due to the large demand for these printers in an era of working remotely, we also list an HP model for business-class users.

We provide links to Amazon throughout this guide, and these links will auto-convert for readers in Canada, the UK, and parts of Europe, with regional substitutions made automatically where necessary.