Have a busy home office, or a couple of creative kids? The humble desktop printer is your friend. See our top printer picks under $200, backed by PC Labs’ dozens of hands-on reviews of the latest models.
While co-workers in a corporate office might share the same high-volume printer, smaller workspaces and even smaller budgets call for diverse, lower-cost desktop printers. How to pick one? Start by relying on our extensive research and testing. I’m PCMag’s printer expert, and I’ve been developing printer test methodology—measuring print speeds, assessing print quality, and evaluating ease of setup—for going on four decades. In this guide, I narrow down the dozens of printers we review each year into a select group of under-$200 favorites. Our current best budget-printer pick is the Canon Pixma G3270 Wireless MegaTank All-In-One. Read on about it and the rest of our vetted selections, and why each one deserves a slice of your tech budget. You’ll also find a detailed buying guide to help you choose the best cheap printer for your needs.Why We Picked It
Most low-priced multifunction inkjets have high running costs. In other words, they’re cheap to buy, but you can wind up spending a pretty penny on ink. The Canon Pixma G3270 is an exception: It’s reasonably affordable and also cheap to operate. Its ink comes in bottles and is rated for nearly 6,000 mono-text pages and 7,700 color pages for the starter set of cyan, yellow, magenta, and black ink you receive. For any ink you buy beyond that, the cost per page works out to 0.3 cent per mono text page and 0.8 cent per color page. Add impressive-looking output, given the price, plus a flatbed for light-duty copying and scanning, and you get a lot of high-quality output for very little money.Who It’s For
Homes and home offices: The G3270’s low purchase price and low running costs make it a solid choice for light-to-medium printing homes and home offices that aren’t daunted by frequently filling it with paper to reap the savings.
Newcomers to ink tank printing: The starter set of ink bottles that comes with the printer includes everything you need to print thousands of pages—no extra purchases or confusing compatibility checks required.
People looking for low-cost printing: At less than a penny per page, whether color or monochrome, the cost per page for the ink is clearly the big draw here. Why We Picked It
If you’re on a rock-bottom budget and don’t print enough for a bulk-ink or tank-based printer’s low running costs to pay off in the long run, Canon’s cartridge-based Pixma TS7720 may be the printer you’re looking for. This four-function AIO (print, copy, scan, and fax) uses black and tricolor ink cartridges. It offers a 200-sheet paper capacity and connects to mobile devices as well as to PCs via Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, or USB. Unless you’re exceptionally picky, its output, while sluggish, is of suitably high quality. Who It’s For
People who print occasionally: The TS7720 is a strong contender for households that print only occasionally. It’s a bit slow, but it delivers good output quality (particularly for text and photos), and its two paper trays provide above-average paper handling for a printer in its price class.
Budget buyers: The TS7720 can be found for not much more than $100 when it’s on sale, making it an exceptionally budget-friendly option.Why We Picked It
The HP LaserJet M209d lacks Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, so it’s best suited to single-user duty, but its price, output quality, and solid performance are enough to earn it our Editors’ Choice award for a budget laser for light duty. Physical setup for the M209d is notably easy, and paper handling is robust, with a 150-sheet input tray and automatic duplexing. Plus, the M209d offers better print quality than most lasers in its price range. Who It’s For
Users who connect their printer directly using USB: If you don’t need a Wi-Fi connection, don’t print a lot, and never print in color, the HP LaserJet M209d is the reasonably priced printer for you.
People who need automatic duplexing: The 150-sheet tray can handle up to legal-size paper, and the printer supports automatic two-sided printing.
People who want laser-quality output on a budget: The M209d is one of the most affordable laser printers we’ve reviewed, yet its text quality is comparable to the best we expect from mono lasers that cost significantly more.Why We Picked It
The HP LaserJet M209dw is essentially the same printer as the HP LaserJet M209d, but with a slight price increase and the addition of Wi-Fi support (denoted by the «w» in the name). It also adds Ethernet and both mobile and remote printing. Paper handling is suitable for light to moderate-duty use in homes and small offices. The M209dw’s text quality is close to the top tier for a mono laser. Most fonts we tested, including those suitable for business documents, were easily legible at small font sizes. Who It’s For
Users who plan to connect their printers via Wi-Fi or Ethernet: If you need a network connection or its other extras, the M209dw is worth considering, especially since it’s sometimes discounted to the same price as, or a lower price than, its M209d sibling.
Shoppers on a tight budget: At less than $200, the M209dw is an exceptional value for a laser printer that delivers this level of text quality.Why We Picked It
Most fully portable photo printers today offer wallet-size or slightly larger prints, so if you want a 4-by-6-inch picture size, which the Canon Selphy CP1500 offers, you have limited choices. But that doesn’t mean you have to make compromises. The latest in the long-running Selphy line of portables, the CP1500 in particular delivers a solid feature set, drugstore-grade photo quality (courtesy of its dye-sub technology), and a reasonably low running cost, at a bit above or below 30 cents per 4-by-6-inch photo. (The cost covers both the paper and required dye rolls.)
The CP1500 weighs 2.5 pounds with the paper cassette and its dye roll inserted, but not the optional battery, which can print up to 54 photos per charge. This model can print from an SD or microSD card, a USB thumb drive (you get a Type-C, not Type-A, port for that), an iOS or Android phone or tablet, or a macOS or Windows PC, and it can connect via USB cable or Wi-Fi. In our tests, the CP1500 printed each sample photo in just under a minute, complete with a protective coating. And the dye-sub picture comes out fully waterproof, without needing drying time, and with a long promised lifetime, rated at 100 years.Who It’s For
Scrapbookers and photo album organizers: The CP1500’s 4-by-6-inch picture size and long rated life for its prints make it suitable for photos likely to be displayed in a frame or saved in an album. The image quality is easily suitable for that.
People who don’t mind cutting photos to size: If you’re looking for a low-cost printer exclusively for wallet-size photos or sticking to various objects, you can use the CP1500 for those as well, but you’ll have to cut the photos down to size after printing, and depend on refrigerator magnets, glue, and push pins to make them stick.Why We Picked It
The «Retro» part of the name of Kodak’s Mini 3 Retro pocket-size photo printer refers to its ability to print 3-inch-square images that are either borderless or have narrow white borders, similar to old-time drugstore prints. We think the former option looks sharper, but both kinds look great thanks to Kodak’s four-pass dye-sublimation technology, which delivers far better output quality than the zero-ink (Zink) output of many compact photo printers.
