If you are a home user and are absolutely certain that you are not going to be printing at all in color, go with a cheap monochrome Brother printer, such as the Brother HL-L2300D. While color laser printers have become a lot better at handling photos, if you are looking to produce detailed, color-accurate photo prints for hanging on the wall, showing at galleries, or selling to clients, then a high-end inkjet photo printer is still your best option (or just outsourcing the job to a photography lab).
Business professionals and home office users alike know that the best laser printers offer the ideal balance between speed, capability, and printing costs. Our favorite laser printer overall is the Brother MFC-L2750DW, a monochrome laser printer with all-in-one capabilities designed to meet all of your small office printing needs quickly and efficiently.
Our favorite overall laser printer might be a little expensive up front, but the Brother MFC-L2750DW has the best mix of print quality, speed, and cost that we have seen from a laser printer, so it is our Editors Choice. With up to 19 pages per minute, the HP LaserJet Pro M15w Compact Laser Printer is among the fastest in its class, making it a perfect choice for home or school use.
Like its laser printer competitor from Canon, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP m479fdw also supports double-sided printing and scanning. HP Color LaserJet Pro M454dw The best color walk-up color printer for small-to-medium businesses from HP This HP LaserJet printer takes the walk-up design and makes it into a printer-only machine.
HP Color LaserJet Enterprise Flow MFP M880z Best business-optimized departments printer HP At between 5,000 and 25,000 pages a month, this HP printer has a somewhat lower recommended volume than the Lexmark we just showed you, though you can go as high as 200,000 printed pages.
Made for smaller office uses, our favorite overall laser printer has a monthly capacity of 15,000 pages, handling pages fast and cheaply, with some of the best print speeds we have seen, and printing costs as low as 2.7 cents per page.
This machine offers lower running costs for a home or office user who only needs to print black, and as with all laser printers mentioned on this page, toner cartridges do not run dry if your printer sits idle for long periods.
Laser printers, and the toners they use, come with hefty up-front costs; if you do not print much, you could get away with a cheaper inkjet printer–some are only $30 or so–and it might be a long time before its higher operating costs match up with the higher up-front costs of the laser printer.
This should, in theory, at least, attract the smaller office that uses its printer often (meaning less frequent purchases of accessories) as well as one that prints only occasionally (because there is less waste in the consumables between uses).
HP Color LaserJet Enterprise M856x The best business-only printer for printing HPs 856 supports absolutely tons of connectivity, via gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi.