Keeping up with printer brands and knowing which has the best recent model is tough. We've done the research to find the best printers of 2025.
CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise. inkjet tech
Know what you want your printer to do
If you want a great home printer to perform a specific task, make sure you're shopping for specifically that. Very few "all-in-one" printers are truly great at everything.
The cost of the printer isn't the only thing you need to know about upfront. Make sure you see the cost of ink as well.
We know that having a printer in your home feels unnecessary but there are a lot of good reasons to have one. Printing tickets to a show, doing your expenses or good old-fashioned kid's homework, a printer can save you time and effort. Since there are hundreds of printers available, it can be difficult to find the right one for you. Don't worry, though, because CNET is here to help. I've been testing this latest crop of printers for a while now, with dozens of printers running at the same time. It gets a little noisy, but with each printer I test, the field narrows, leading to the best overall options.
In this roundup, you'll find all sorts of printers, all capable of meeting your basic printing needs, such as mobile printing and wireless printing from a phone or any PC, Mac or Chromebook. In addition, you can also print over a cabled connection and via wireless printer connectivity. (Note that some, but not all, printers support Apple's AirPrint and Google's Cloud Print protocols, which are usually less onerous than the printer vendors' proprietary systems.) Some of the printers here go beyond the standard options. We’ve included thermal label printers, sublimation printers and even DTF printers to offer a well-rounded selection for your printing needs.
For a home office with just one or two people using it, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e is the best overall choice. The print speed was excellent, and all the printed words were crisp and clear. This isn't a photo printer, and it shows, but it works well enough for daily imagery tasks. If you're using it to print brochures or Word documents, this is an almost perfect printer for you.
If you work from home but need all the advantages of an office printer, the OfficeJet Pro is an excellent choice. In terms of sheer printing speed, the HP is ahead of most others in its price range. It printed the 10 pages in just 32 seconds and scanned and printed them in 58 seconds. Very impressive.
The last model had some issues with graphics and imagery, but this new upgrade is much better. The graphics in the brochure test were sharp and accurate, and the images, while being a little dotty, still looked great. The text was excellent, with clearly defined edges, even the Comic Sans parts. It's a bit larger than some of the printers I tested, but the deep paper tray and auto-feed for the scanner make the size worthwhile. Of the printers I've tested so far, the OfficeJet Pro is the most versatile. It also comes with three months of free ink, based on a standard usage if you sign up for HP Plus. While HP Plus does give you some extra helpful app choices for free and the ink, the downside is you can only use HP inks while subscribed to it.
First off, this isn't a typical printer machine. The bulky square shape isn't something you would want to see in a fashionable home office. Because of the extra paper tray, the Epson can hold a large amount of paper. This makes it perfect if you and another person use it daily. It prints fast -- the fastest in our test, though the scanning is a little slow. The graphics, text and webpage text were all excellent, although the image quality on glossy paper was only good. This is a workhorse designed for high-volume text, not imagery.
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 Brother MFC-J1010DW is a terrible name for a pretty good printer in this price bracket. Photos came out clear and sharp as did the graphics on the website and brochure test. Even the text was very sharp. For an all-in-one printer at this price, it did every job well. It's a good job it has Amazon dash replenishment, though, as the inks are woefully undersized for the printer.
DTF printing is a fairly new technology that combines the color choices of screen printing with the ease of heat transfer vinyl, which you might see on a Cricut vinyl cutter. To use it, you print a full-color image onto a special film, cover the back in a special powder, and cook it in a small oven to create an adhesive layer. From there, you use a heat press to seal it into an item of clothing or other surface. Procolored makes several DTF printers, with the Panda F8 being a more consumer-friendly version than their other, larger machines. It works very well to make small batches or products, so using the Panda F8 to print unique clothing items for your Etsy store is better than using a Cricut or sublimation printer, especially for shirts that are not white.
My biggest issue with the Panda F8 is the need for it to be in constant use. The Ink delivery system is unstable, so it needs constant use to keep it from getting stale. That's fine if you have a lot of orders, but if you don't, you'll need to print stuff anyway to keep it going.
The Canon Pixma TR4720 isn't going to be winning any awards in any category. In all of my testing, it came out around the middle of the pack in just about every category. While that could be seen as a negative in a printer that costs several hundred dollars, for one that is as cheap as the Pixma, it's encouraging.
pigment based inkjet printer The Pixma scored better in color reproduction when placed against other, more expensive all-in-one printers when printing on glossy paper. Some printers suffer from dimpling when printing images, but the Pixma didn't and the skin tones were far better on the Canon image than on other brands. My only real negative is the machine's volume. You can tell it was built on a budget, but as far as budget printers go, this one's pretty good.