The Best Basic Home Printers - Buy Side from WSJ

Oct 23, 2024

A basic printer is an essential piece of home-office equipment, and these are the models worth buying

Written By

Written by

Senior Editor, Buy Side from WSJ

Nick Guy is a senior editor for Buy Side from WSJ. He's been reviewing personal technology, accessories and myriad other products for more than a decade.

Updated October 16, 2024, 10:27 AM EDT

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A printer is one of the few pieces of home-office equipment 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 a basic black-and-white model. Great options at low prices make a home printer a practical solution, even for occasional use.

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. 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.

Brother’s HL-L2420DW is the best basic black and white printer for nearly any home thanks to its simplicity, high-resolution printing, easy setup and a lower price than most of the competition. HP’s LaserJet M209dw is a good alternative if you want a compact document printer and are willing to give up some print sharpness. For those who need a simple color printer, Canon’s Color imageClass LBP632dw is the best choice.

Buy Side Top Pick

$110 at Walmart

Our top pick, the Brother HL-L2420DW, 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-L2420DW’s print resolution of 1200 by 1200 dpi (1200 vertical dots and 1200 horizontal dots per square inch) isn’t as high as that of some printers we tested, but we were more than pleased with the quality of documents it printed, even at font sizes as small as 1 point, which is where lower-quality printers might produce smudged or blurred text.

Setup was gratifyingly seamless over both wired and wireless connections. (You do have to provide your own USB cable if you want to use one, and it’s a good investment for the easiest experience.) The wireless setup took a little more work, but was still relatively easy using the Wireless Setup Wizard from Brother’s website, which 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 AirPrint with no issues.

The HL-L2420DW has 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 $45 for 1,200 pages or $80 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.

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If you need a printer that takes up less space and you’re willing to pay a small premium, we recommend HP’s LaserJet M209dw. It’s nearly the same width as our top pick but is 3 inches shallower, meaning it’ll take up less space on your desk, shelf or wherever else you place it. The 600 by 600 dpi resolution is lower than the Brother printer’s, but text is totally readable even at small font sizes. This isn’t the printer for you if you’re a stickler for the crispest text, but if you just need to print the occasional form or essay, it’s a great choice.

HP makes wireless setup especially easy if you start off with a cable. We got a prompt when we connected the unit to a computer asking if we’d like to set it up over a wireless connection, and after just a click or two, it was all set. We were able to remove the cable and send documents over the air right away.

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While we recommend using a photo printing service for keepsake images, Canon’s Color imageClassLBP63Cdw is the best solution for printing documents in color at home. It costs significantly more than either of our monochrome picks, but at that price, it delivers good looking, 1200 by 1200 dpi images that our team preferred over any other printer we tested. It also has the features we deemed essential for all printers, including a wireless connection and double-sided printing support.

We tested a handful of lower-price, 2400 x 600 dpi color printers and found there to be obvious horizontal lines across the page that weren’t part of the original image file. The Canon, on the other hand, printed photos and other color images with less noticeable banding. Its colors were also more accurate to the source. A higher-price printer we tested showed pixelated artifacting that detracted from the overall quality. To be clear, none of these are on par with what you’d get from a photo printer, but the Canon was the best performer.

The big downside to color laser printers is rather than having to keep track of one toner cartridge, there are four: black, cyan, magenta and yellow. Even if you buy third-party, you’ll have to pay between $100 and $200 to replace the set of them.

The Brother HL-L2460DW is a variant of the HL-L2420DW that prints a little faster and adds an Ethernet port. These features aren’t a reason to pay more than our well-priced top pick, but if it is on sale or the HL-L2420DW is out of stock, it’s a good options.

We weren’t as fond of the Brother color laser printers we tested, including the HL-L3220CDW and HL-L3280CDW. Both printed at lower resolution than the Canon, and we were unable to print some specific image files despite working with Canon’s support team to try to identify the problem. For $50 to $100 more, you’ll get a much better experience with the LBP632Cdw.

HP’s Color LaserJet Pro M255dw, on the other hand, costs more than the Canon but isn’t obviously better. Despite its lower 600 x 600 dpi resolution, there wasn’t more evident banding, although we did notice spots of pixelation. The colors looked a little more accurate than what the Canon printed, but they still weren’t perfect. If this one drops in price, it’s a good buy.

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: lower price, 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 as our main category 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 a few dozen 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 14.3 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 setup software and enter commands with your keyboard rather than the printer keypad.

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.

Nick Guy is a senior editor for Buy Side from WSJ. He's been reviewing personal technology, accessories and myriad other products for more than a decade.

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