Buying a printer should be simple. In practice, it's a market full of traps for the unwary — printers priced as loss leaders, ink subscriptions, cartridges with artificially low yields, and feature lists designed to impress in a shop rather than serve you over years of use. This guide is about helping you make a decision that you'll still be satisfied with in two or three years, not just on unboxing day.
There are a few fundamental questions to answer before looking at any specific models. The answers to these questions will narrow the field considerably.
How much do you actually print?
Printer manufacturers love to talk about pages-per-minute speeds and monthly duty cycles, but the more important question is how many pages per month you realistically print. If your honest answer is fewer than 50 pages a month — which describes the majority of home users — that changes the economics of printer ownership significantly.
Printers that sit unused for weeks at a time face a specific problem: inkjet print heads clog. The ink in the nozzles dries out between uses. Some printers manage this better than others (more on this below), but it's a genuine issue for light users. A laser printer doesn't have this problem at all — toner doesn't dry out — which makes laser a genuinely better choice for people who print infrequently.
Inkjet vs laser: the honest comparison
Inkjet
Good for
Photos and colour-rich documents. Lower upfront cost. Compact sizes available. Better for occasional colour printing. Handles different paper sizes and types flexibly.
Drawbacks
Print heads clog with irregular use. Ink is expensive per page. Slower for large documents. Smears if the paper gets wet.
Laser
Good for
High-volume document printing. Toner doesn't dry out. Much faster for text documents. Lower cost per page. Output is waterproof and smear-proof.
Drawbacks
Higher upfront cost. Larger physical size. Colour laser is significantly more expensive. Not ideal for photo printing.
The ink tank revolution: Epson EcoTank and similar
One of the most significant changes in home printing in the past decade has been the rise of ink tank printers — sometimes called EcoTank (Epson), MegaTank (Canon), or SmartTank (HP). These printers replace the small, expensive ink cartridges with large refillable tanks that hold far more ink and cost much less per millilitre.
A typical ink tank printer costs £200-£300 to buy — significantly more than a standard inkjet. But the replacement ink bottles cost a fraction of what cartridges cost, and a single set of bottles typically yields 6,000-14,000 pages. For users who print regularly, the economics work out very strongly in favour of tank printers over a three to five year lifespan.
The caveats: these printers are larger than cartridge printers, and the initial investment is higher. If you only print a few dozen pages per year, you might never use enough ink to justify the price difference. But for anyone printing 100+ pages per month, ink tank printers represent genuinely good value and significantly reduce the ongoing cost of printing.
They also have a meaningful advantage for print head longevity — because the tanks maintain a steady supply of ink, the heads are less prone to drying out than in cartridge printers where the cartridge gets lighter as it empties and can introduce air into the head.
What "all-in-one" actually means — and whether you need it
Most printers sold today are marketed as all-in-one or multifunction devices, meaning they include a scanner flatbed and sometimes a document feeder. The scanner component makes these more expensive than print-only models, but for most home and small office users, the scanner is genuinely useful even if it doesn't get used daily.
Scanning directly from a physical document to PDF has become a surprisingly common task — for capturing receipts, sending signed documents, archiving paperwork — and having a built-in scanner is more convenient than a phone app for anything that needs to be on a flat bed rather than photographed. If there's any chance you'll scan documents more than a couple of times a year, the all-in-one is worth it.
Running costs: how to calculate cost per page
The most important number to know when buying a printer isn't the sale price — it's the cost per page. This is the true long-term cost of ownership, and it varies enormously between printer models.
To calculate cost per page for ink, take the price of a black cartridge and divide it by the stated page yield for that cartridge. A £14 cartridge with a stated yield of 300 pages is 4.7p per black page. A £22 cartridge with a yield of 1,000 pages is 2.2p per page — significantly cheaper to run despite costing more to buy. Manufacturers are required to publish standardised page yield figures, so these comparisons are legitimate.
For ink tank printers, a £7 black ink bottle typically yields 5,000-7,000 pages — a per-page cost of around 0.1-0.14p. This is the economic argument for tank printers made concrete.
Connectivity: what you actually need
All modern printers include Wi-Fi, and this is the most useful form of connectivity for most home users. It means anyone in the household can print from any device without the printer needing to be physically connected to anything.
AirPrint (Apple) and Mopria (Android/Windows) are standards that allow printing from phones and tablets without any additional apps or drivers. If you print from a phone or tablet regularly, check that your chosen printer supports whichever standard applies to your device. Almost all printers released in the past four years do, but it's worth checking older models.
USB connectivity is still useful as a fallback — if the Wi-Fi stops working or you're setting up in a location without Wi-Fi, a USB connection gets you printing. Most inkjet and laser printers include USB alongside Wi-Fi.
Ethernet — a wired network connection — is primarily useful in office environments where printers are shared across many computers. For home use, Wi-Fi is almost always sufficient.
Duplex printing: essential for office use, nice to have at home
Duplex (double-sided) printing is a feature that automatically prints on both sides of the paper. Some printers can only do this manually — you print one side, flip the paper, feed it again. Automatic duplex printing handles this mechanically.
For home use, this is a convenience feature that reduces paper use. For office use where double-sided printing is expected as standard, automatic duplex is worth specifying. Check the product listing carefully — "duplex printing" sometimes means manual duplex only.
A few brands worth noting
This isn't a specific model recommendation — models change frequently — but it's worth knowing the general landscape. Epson's EcoTank range has been genuinely transformative for home printing economics, and the reliability of these printers over several years has been good. Brother has a strong reputation in the laser printer space, particularly for reliability and reasonable consumable costs. HP's Instant Ink subscription service is worth evaluating carefully — it can be good value for certain usage patterns, but the contract elements deserve careful reading. Canon's PIXMA range offers excellent photo quality for home users willing to use genuine inks.
The best printer for you is the one that matches your actual usage pattern, not the one with the most features or the lowest shelf price. Spending ten minutes before purchase thinking through how you actually use a printer will save you years of annoyance with a machine that wasn't really right for the job.