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    Best Laser Printers for Your Home Office

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

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    Person using a laser printer with a touchscreen.
    Black-and-white laser printers tend to be reliable, inexpensive to operate, and capable of quickly printing sharp, clear text documents.
    Photo: iStock

    Laser printers might seem like a better fit for a corporate office than your home, but in fact, they excel at the nitty-gritty tasks that people perform regularly, like quickly printing out black-and-white documents.

    These printers churn out pages of text faster and with higher quality than inkjets. And, based on our exclusive surveys of CR members, they’re significantly more reliable, too. Black-and-white laser printers are also much cheaper to operate than most inkjet models.

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    While laser printers have a lot to offer, though, they’re not perfect. They tend to be bigger than inkjet models and often cost more up front. Color laser printers are particularly pricey, and they cost much more to operate than black-and-white models. In general, they also don’t perform as well when printing graphics and photos.

    The models in the roundup below get high scores in Consumer Reports’ labs. Each works wirelessly, holds a large supply of paper, and prints on both sides of a page to save paper. Most importantly, all of these laser printers churn out crisp, clean text with exceptional speed.

    Consumer Reports is a nonprofit member organization devoted to building a fairer, safer marketplace. Our test samples are purchased through regular retail channels, so we evaluate the same printer you could buy, rather than one handpicked by the manufacturer.

    Best Compact Laser Printer

    Best Multifunction Black-and-White Laser Printer

    Best Single-Function Color Laser Printer

    Best Do-It-All Color Laser Printer

    How CR Tests Printers

    We buy all of our test samples through regular retail channels. No freebies for us. We then rigorously test every printer we evaluate on more than 250 data points, churning out hundreds of pages of text and images. We combine those test results from our labs with brand reliability and owner satisfaction ratings from our member surveys to arrive at an Overall Score that lets you compare every model on the same scale.

    The printers in this roundup of top models print text with impressive quality and speed. Some models include a document feeder and scan and copy features, and those models get extra credit for that. A few excel at graphics. And most won’t incur high ongoing toner costs.


    Courtney Lindwall

    Courtney Lindwall is a writer at Consumer Reports. Since joining CR in 2023, she’s covered the latest on cell phones, smartwatches, and fitness trackers as part of the tech team. Previously, Courtney reported on environmental and climate issues for the Natural Resources Defense Council. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.