Best Laser Printers for Your Home Office

These cost-efficient models outperform inkjet printers on text quality, speed, and reliability

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laser printer Photo: iStock

When you’re shopping for a new printer for your home office, it’s easy to dismiss a laser printer as a relic from the past. But you might be overlooking a device that could suit your needs.

Laser printers are really good at the nitty-gritty tasks we ask of them, according to CR’s testers. They often churn out pages of text much faster than inkjets, which is why they’re staples of classrooms and work environments.

And they’re significantly more reliable than inkjets, based on our exclusive survey research. They don’t have ink nozzles, which means clogs aren’t a problem, and unlike inkjets, which use ink just to keep those nozzles clean, laser printers don’t waste toner on maintenance. A black-and-white printer can be significantly cheaper to operate, too.

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There are a few disadvantages, though. Laser printers tend to be bigger than the inkjet models for home use. They often cost more up front. And they don’t perform as well when it comes to printing photos.

The models below get high scores in Consumer Reports’ labs and have features that make them useful for office work. Each machine works wirelessly; accepts heavy paper stock; features auto-duplexing, meaning it prints on both sides of a page; and is compatible with OCR (optical character recognition) software, useful for making scanned documents editable in a word processor.

All print out crisp, clean text with exceptional speed.

We recently revised our ratings to better reflect the ways real people use their printers. We now place much more emphasis on the print quality for text than for graphics and photos. And because printers are faster than ever, we also tweaked the way we score print speed.

We haven’t changed our rigorous lab testing, just the weighting of certain performance parameters. As always, our test samples were purchased through regular retail channels, so we end up with the same models as you instead of models hand-picked by the manufacturer.

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