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The printer comes with six months of toner in the box, so you won't be hunting for a refill the week you start using it. But it's not just affordable at purchase; operating costs are low, too, with a cost per page of 3.7 cents using standard-capacity toner cartridges and just 2.7 cents with high-capacity toner. Finally, note that some models of both single- and multi-function printers support office-centric security and convenience features that may or may not be useful for any given office. Support for Wi-Fi Direct is also common, though sometimes that feature comes under a different name.
But if you compare the cost per page, rather than the price per cartridge, you'll find the running cost for cartridge-based lasers is actually less than for comparable cartridge-based inkjets. In addition, most lasers are designed to last longer than most inkjets, so you can amortize the initial cost of the printer over more pages as well. If you don’t print very often, you can buy a cheap inkjet printer — some are as low as $30 or so — and it may take a long time before its higher operational costs catch up to the higher initial cost of a laser printer. For smaller print jobs, the faster pages-per-minute rate of a laser printer also won’t be much of an advantage. If you’re looking to save money in the long term and need a compelling alternative to laser printers, consider inkjet solutions that rely on tanks for ink rather than cartridges, like Epson’s EcoTank series.
Best black-and-white printer
When you work from home you often have to submit your receipts for traveling and incidentals. One of the most common ways to do that, if you aren't lucky enough to have an app, is to tape receipts to a piece of paper and scan them into your computer. To recreate that, I taped my receipts from my food shopping to create a scan. I used a mixture of new receipts and ones that had faded in my wallet, then I checked the scan for legibility. Most scanners will enhance the image you are scanning and that certainly helps with receipts.
The Brother MFC-L2750DW is a monochrome laser printer that delivers pretty much everything you want in an all-in-one printer. Made for small office use, this unit has a monthly duty cycle of 15,000 pages that handles pages quickly and affordably, with some of the best print speeds we've seen and printing costs as low as 2.7 cents per page. This fast (55-page-per-minute) mono laser is reasonably priced and churns out excellent-looking text, graphics, and grayscale photos and other halftones. Out of the box, the HL-L6400DW's paper capacity is 570 sheets, split between a 520-sheet cassette and a 50-sheet override tray.
Do PCL and PostScript Matter in a Laser Printer?
The best inkjets do a good job, but even a mediocre laser printer will do a better job delivering crisp results, especially when it comes to fine lines and small font sizes. Wirecutter has covered printers for seven years, and I’ve written about them since 2016. My editors and I have kept an eye on feedback from comment threads, email, and Twitter to better understand our readers’ real-world needs. We’ve considered reviews from other editorial sources, including CNET, Computer Shopper, and PCMag. We’ve scanned thousands of customer reviews to pick out recurring issues with specific models. And we’ve lived with many printers as long-term test units, learning how they can fail and disappoint in the long run.
Role-based access control for multiuser environments allows you to choose who can access which printer features. If your work involves sensitive material, these are legitimately helpful additions—and features you can’t get from other manufacturers. You have only to remove the packing tape, insert the toner cartridge, adjust the paper-tray guides, and load some paper.
So, What Is the Best Laser Printer to Buy?
Finally, we looked for a high-end color laser all-in-one for people with more serious small-office or home-office needs. Like the mono MFP, it needed to be fast and flexible, offer great print and scan quality, and have a not completely outrageous price (none of these machines are cheap, but we set the cap at $500). Although a print-only machine is sufficient for most people, plenty of others—particularly small- and home-business owners—also want a copier and scanner. Some inkjets have a lower cost per page than home laser printers, but they also waste more ink on cleaning. That waste isn’t reflected in the estimates manufacturers provide for how many pages you can get out of a tank.
It printed out a 5-page black-and-white text document in a super-speedy 14.6 seconds, or 20.8 ppm. That is substantially faster than the OfficeJet Pro 9015e, which completed the same task in 22.4 seconds, or 13.4 ppm. Using the duplexer to create two-sided prints, the LaserJet MFP M234dwe managed 12 ppm, which is predictably faster than the OfficeJet Pro 9015e’s 10 ppm, though not by much.
Color print-only printers
The Salvation Army accepts printers and other electronics via both its pick-up service and drop-off locations nationwide. And eBay allows private sellers to donate a portion of their printer sale proceeds—10 percent or more—to their preferred charity. While sanitation departments often limit e-waste disposal events to certain times of year, retailer recycling programs offer more flexibility on where and when you can dispose of used printers—usually for free. Best Buy accepts up to three e-waste items per household each day as part of their recycling program. And HP will recycle an old desktop printer when you buy a new one from them. You can also find recycling options with MRM, a trade organization dedicated to running recycling compliance programs.
If the extras the L2750DW offers don’t matter to you, these junior siblings are a cheaper way to get similar print and scan quality. The Brother DCP-L2550DW is a good bargain option if you don’t need some of the features that our monochrome multifunction pick offers. Specifically, this model lacks duplex copy and scan, fax capability, and a touchscreen interface. The Canon ImageClass LBP6230dw is cheap and small, and it offers automatic duplexing and Wi-Fi connectivity. But the cost per page is too high, and it doesn’t support AirPrint or Google Cloud Print, which is a problem if you own a Chromebook or want to print from a mobile device. Because simply getting a job to print can be frustrating, we also tested other ways to interact wirelessly with these machines.
If you're okay with spending a little more, you can go with the higher-end Brother HL-L2370DW, which has Ethernet connectivity and slightly faster printing speed. You can also find bundles with a high-yield and super high-yield toner cartridge in the box, like the Brother HL-L2370DW XL. The printer supports connectivity options like high-speed USB, and other mobile printing solutions, like Google Cloud Print, Apple AirPrint, and KYOCERA Mobile Print.
If youdon'tneed them, you can often find an identical or similar model for less from the same manufacturer, minus only the PCL or PostScript support. "Duty cycle" is a specification for the monthly page count a printer is rated for. Some printers don't offer one, which is not an issue if you don't print much. If you print enough to wonder if you might overtax the printer, however, don't buy one that doesn't offer the spec. At the other extreme, you may scan so little that you can take care of the occasional capture with a scan app on your phone or just take photos.
A dedicated bypass slot for odd-size media means you also won’t have to take your regular paper out if you want to print on envelopes, labels, or card stock. The slot is motorized, so when you slide an envelope or label sheet into the slot, rollers grab it and suck it into the guts of the printer, where it sits until you send a print job. We also calculate running costs, compare functionality and consider each product’s versatility, design and build quality. The overall score reflects all of these parameters and overall value for money.
Check our picks for thebest wireless printers, thebest all-in-one printers, and thebest home printers. To compare print quality, we print out the same set of test documents on every machine. These twelve test pages include text of varying font sizes and colors, mixed image and text pages, a set of photos and a series of test patterns designed to assess sharpness, color fidelity, contrast and grey scale. This inexpensive all-in-one lacks an auto-duplex mode, but for basic monochrome printing and copying duties, this machine is hard to beat on total cost of ownership. There’s enough black toner in the box for 5,000 pages and refuelling is as simple as injecting the toner from syringe-type canister into the printer.
Unfortunately, in our testing, printing from iPrint&Scan resulted in horrendous quality, regardless of the quality setting we selected. We reached out to Brother for comment, but the company wasn’t able to provide any explanation for the print-quality discrepancy. In general, we recommend that you avoid the app and print through your operating system’s native print dialog, which works just great. You can use the M255dw’s top USB port to print photos, PDFs, and Word documents. If you would like to do the work of choosing yourself, here's the list of all our laser printer reviews. While no printer is perfect for every use, most are good enough to please almost everyone, and the differences are often not noticeable unless you really look for them.
If you're printing more than 100 pages a month, then yes, it likely is a good deal. My only real issue with the Workforce Pro was the size of the ink cartridges. It's great that you have two large paper trays to hold a lot of paper, but if the amount of ink you have doesn't match, then you are going to have a problem. The bulky square shape is not something you would want to see in a fashionable home office. It is solidly constructed, though, and unlike some of the other products in this price range, it doesn't have any creaky plastic pieces.
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