The 4 Best Laser Printers of 2022 Reviews by Wirecutter
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We also tweaked the scoring for print speed, given that today’s printers are faster than ever. The bright and high-resolution color touchscreen display makes navigating the printer’s many settings menus easy. All of the other printers we tested for this guide use old-school resistive touchscreens that aren’t nearly as accurate or easy to use as the capacitive touchscreens on most smartphones. Finally, we stress-tested all of the paper-feeding parts of each printer, including not just the main paper tray but also the bypass tray and document feeder, if the printer had them. We overstuffed them with paper to see if they’d jam, and we also fed them single sheets to see if they could pick each one up.
The Brother HL-L2370DW’s comparatively low price and small size doesn’t mean you’re sacrificing on performance. Measuring practically 14-inches square, this printer outputs pages at a brisk 36 ppm, comes with an enclosed 250-sheet paper tray. And it does so at 2,400 x 600 dpi, a digitally enhanced resolution for even sharper text and more detailed grayscale images. The HP LaserJet Tank 2504dw is another of HP’s refillable toner laser printers.
Brother MFC-L2750DW
The performance is fantastic, with duplex printing at 22 pages per minute. The print quality is excellent, with sharp text and vibrant color toning. And there’s an automatic document feeder for improved efficiency. The Canon ImageClass LBP622Cdw is one of the smaller machines on the list.
To make sure the model you buy is no different from the one we test, we purchase every product that enters our labs from a retailer, just like you would. Although the Brother MFC-L2710DW is similar to the MFC-L2750DW model we like, it lacks that machine’s touchscreen interface and auto-duplex scanning and copying. It also has just 25 percent as much onboard memory and runs a little slower. The HP LaserJet Pro M203dw has a low cost per page and a reasonable asking price, but owner reviews are poor, complaining of difficult setup, unreliable Internet connections, and breakdowns. Several manufacturers offer buy-back programs for their branded products, but guidelines can often vary by state. For example, both Brother and Canon provide a list of state laws regarding how to handle e-waste and printer rebates.
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For us, the solution was to access the printer’s Web control panel, navigate to the Networking tab, and disable IPv6. With that done, the printer was able to get on Cloud Print right away and worked flawlessly for the remainder of our testing. It’s a mystery why Brother ships the HL-L2350DW with this setting enabled, considering that it’s a known fact that Cloud Print doesn’t work with IPv6. HP claims the M255dw can print as fast as 22 pages per minute in black and white. In our testing, it maxed out around 17 pages per minute when printing a PDF consisting of mixed text and graphics. That’s an impressive result—on a par with what we got from the Canon Color ImageClass LBP622Cdw we tested it against, and certainly fast enough for most home and home-office purposes.
You can put the printer through its paces if you are a single professional. That’s also enough for a small business, with scope for increased output if your business grows. The color cartridges aren’t so fruitful, only delivering 5000 sheets. You don’t need to fiddle with the settings when you want double-sided prints. And it’s a fast printer, giving you a rate of 22 pages per minute.
HP Color LaserJet Professional CP5225n Printer
Most inkjet printers offer a range of 300 to 720 DPI while most laser printers, which use toner for ink, create sharper pictures with DPI in the range of 600 to 2,400 DPI. It’s important to understand that although laser jet printers have higher DPI, inkjet printers excel with full-color photography, whereas laser printers produce the cleanest-looking text. The 2504dw does just one thing—print—and it does it rather well.
The app also allows the user to print photos from the phone directly to the printer, eliminating the need to transfer the photos to a computer first. Likewise, it will also send scanned images directly to the app. The list below takes into account the above factors to narrow the field to some of the best small printers by class. Any of these models will capably handle the printing duties in a small home office. Printing quality is delineated by DPI, which is the number of dots per inch that a printer uses to reproduce text or images onto paper.
Unfortunately, this printer lacks a USB port, so you can’t save your scans directly to a thumb drive. For professional-looking brochures or presentations, you’d probably want to use a printer like our upgrade pick, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw, or punt the job to a pro print shop instead. We couldn’t get the M255dw to jam, no matter how hard we tried. When we crammed the main paper tray with as many as 50 extra sheets, a warning popped up on the control panel saying the tray was overstuffed, and the machine refused to print. (In this situation, other printers would try, fail, and jam.) When we put exactly 250 pages in, it printed normally; same with just a single sheet in the tray. If you ever do run into a jam, however, the printer’s back has a convenient access hatch for you to remove it.
For them, we recommend the Brother HL-L2350DW. Setup is painless, and the machine is compatible with all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Its cost per page is a reasonable 3.3¢, it sticks to Wi-Fi like glue, and its price generally hovers around $100. Its print quality is merely adequate right out of the box, but you can improve that with a simple tweak to the toner density setting. Just be aware that the HL-L2350DW can’t scan or copy; if you need that functionality, look to our monochrome all-in-one pick. If high-quality, stable text printing matters most, lasers are also a good choice. Indeed, certain types of businesses, such as medical and law offices, may mandate laser printing for archival tasks and record keeping.
It recognizes when your cartridges go below 10% and order new ones automatically. Plus, you can activate this service on the printer with no subscription fee. The black toner gives you up to 5500 pages from a full cartridge. And the color cartridges produce less, at approximately 4500 pages. The color touchscreen is intuitive to use when you’re at the machine.
That translates into a per-page cost for inkjet printers that is more than twice that of a laser printer. Control panels vary widely from one laser printer to the next. Make sure you get one with the walk-up features you need.Support for Wi-Fi Direct is also common, though sometimes that feature comes under a different name. It lets you establish a direct peer-to-peer connection between the printer and a computer or mobile device. However, you don't actually need Wi-Fi Direct to print wirelessly. If the printer is attached to a network, using either a wired or wireless connection, and you can connect to the network by Wi-Fi from a computer, phone, or tablet, you can print over the network.
It automatically updates drivers, has an app to print from and it includes Instant Ink. This automatically replenishes ink cartridges so you never run out. For printers with additional functions, such as scanning, copying, or phone-to-printer connectivity, additional documents were scanned, copied, or printed. Each time, our testers recorded the time that it took to print as well as the quality of the output. They also went through the steps to replace the ink or toner, noting how easy it was to do so. All of their observations were recorded, and each printer was scored accordingly.
It can print up to 29 pages per minute, making it one of the fastest printers on the market. Additionally, it has an automatic document feeder that can hold up to 50 pages at a time, making it perfect for businesses that need to print large documents quickly. Once each printer was connected and available for work, our testers printed out black and white single-page documents as well as color single-page documents. They timed the print job and compared the quality of the documents.
Brother HL-L2390DW
It prints and scans more quickly and more reliably than inkjet alternatives, produces sharper results, and includes robust admin and security settings designed for situations that may involve sensitive data. While color laser printers are still more expensive than inkjets, it’s not just the initial retail price you need to look at. But the lower running costs will save you money in the long term.
In most cases, the result is a higher page yield and a faster print time. Although laser printers are generally expensive to start, they tend to be more economical in the long term as their cartridges need replacing less often. But they give you far more prints from one cartridge than the ink alternatives. And laser printers have a much better cost-per-page efficiency than inkjets. An inkjet printer sprays small drops of ink onto the paper through a nozzle as the paper moves past the printer head. This method produces vivid images, making these printers ideal for printing high-resolution graphics, photos, and other images.
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