Best home printers & all-in-ones

We put six all-round home models through their printing paces

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These days, when it comes to buying tech, we're usually spoiled for choice.

There are all sorts of devices from dozens of companies. With home printers, though, there's only a handful of manufacturers to choose from, most notably HP, Canon and Epson. Kodak stopped making home printers in 2012, and Lexmark only makes business machines nowadays.

Despite the paucity of competing manufacturers, those that do make home printers keep each other on their toes with regular new releases and wide product ranges. Here we're looking at half a dozen generalist home inkjet printers. Not high-volume office machines that almost instantly print and organise your documents, or studio-quality photo printers that do poster-sized prints. Rather, we're looking at the sort of printer you have next to your Mac for running off a letter to your bank manager, a flyer for a small meeting you're having and, of course, the occasional photo.

We're covering both standalone printers, which just print, and all-in-one devices that print, scan and photocopy. We're looking at inkjets, because this is the most popular format for home printing.

How we tested

We tested the printers using both picture and text files. Our text tests looked at how fast a printer could output 20 pages and also how clearly it could reproduce text at a variety of print sizes. A stock image was printed on photo paper to see how well the colours and images were reproduced, and we printed a flyer in duplex mode (where available) to check for banding, bleed-through and other irritations that sometimes creep in when printing leaflets.

Things to consider...

1 Build quality

A printer isn't much use if it shakes like a jelly on a washing machine in operation, and falls to pieces after a few months. We take the tested printers to task if they're not well built.

2 Print speed