The Best All-in-One Printers

Senior staff writer Kaitlyn Wells has covered everything from standing desks and dictation software to pet cameras and pet GPS trackers, and has been testing and writing about printers for Wirecutter for over two years.

Ben Keough is a supervising editor at Wirecutter who has written guides to printers, scanners, cameras, lenses, and more. He conducted much of the testing for previous versions of this guide, along with Wirecutter’s other printer guides.

For this guide:

• We’ve spent hundreds of hours researching and testing more than 30 all-in-one printers—squinting at test documents, eyeing stopwatches, and fiddling with menus—since we published our first guide to AIOs in 2012.
• We’ve tested related products, such as third-party ink.
• We’ve long-term tested our top picks for the better part of a decade to confirm that each manufacturer whose models we recommend is reliable and provides good support.
• We’ve kept an eye on our comment section to understand what issues our readers are having with our picks.
• We’ve stayed up-to-date with news in the printer field, including manufacturers’ attempts to lock down ink sources via DRM, as well as security breaches in which malicious actors could hijack printers.
• Like all Wirecutter journalists, we review and test products with complete editorial independence. We’re never made aware of any business implications of our editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

All-in-one (AIO) inkjet printers are a one-stop shop for home document-production needs. But they may not be right for everyone. Inkjets have been known to dry out and clog if they sit idle for too long between uses, and to get them going again you need to run cleaning cycles that waste ink and drive up your operating costs.

All-in-one laser printers can sit unused for weeks or even months on end with no printing downside. But they can cost twice as much as inkjets, and they take up more desk space because of their large toner cartridges.

To figure out if an all-in-one is right for you, ask yourself a few questions:

• Do you need to print a lot but not all day, every day? Something like 100 to 500 pages per month? If so, the inkjet AIOs in this guide should be perfect. If you print all the time, scroll down to our upgrade pick. If you don’t print much, choose a monochrome laser printer and a good scanning app instead. (Or just use a printer at work, the library, or your local FedEx Office store.)
• How often do you scan? If you both print and scan more than a few times a month or routinely need to scan both sides of a page, an AIO is probably worth the investment. Otherwise, look for a cheap print-only machine and a good scanning app.
• Do you frequently print in color or want to print the occasional glossy photo? If so, one of the picks below will work best. But if you don’t, a black-and-white laser AIO might save you some money.
• Are photo and scan quality critically important to you? An AIO printer won’t cut it. We have recommendations for photo printers and document scanners if you need better performance for those specific tasks.

Our criteria have remained largely unchanged since we first began reviewing all-in-ones in 2012. We consider both inkjet and laser all-in-one printers, including monochrome and color models. We favor models with reportedly excellent print and scan quality, automatic document feeders (ADF), fast operating speeds, low operating and printing costs, and duplex printing, scanning, and copying capabilities. We also look for strong third-party reviews.

Over the years, we’ve reviewed more than 30 AIOs. We test our contenders with both Windows and Mac computers, as well as with Android and iOS phones. We place them in homes and offices with varying Wi-Fi strength and reliability.

We note which machines have complex installation packages, connectivity issues, and convoluted mobile apps.

We tackle a variety of text- and graphics-heavy documents to assess print quality and speed. With the inkjets, we also print several colorful glossy shots to evaluate photo quality. And we scan the documents we print to test each machine’s ability to capture the fine details of each kind of print.

We also run large print and scan jobs to check for jams and slowdowns caused by overtaxed onboard memory.

Finally, we calculate the cost of each printer’s replacement ink or toner cartridges to see how they stack up.

Top pick

HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e

The best inkjet all-in-one printer

Easy-to-use software, affordable ink, a long warranty, and thoughtful touches make this inkjet all-in-one less annoying than the competition. Results look sharp, too. But consider carefully before opting in to HP+ or Instant Ink.

Buying Options

$220 from HP

$210 from Amazon

$210 from Walmart

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e is remarkably easy to set up and use, hitting the sweet spot of print quality, speed, and reliability in a way that other printers can’t match. Its sleek design also helps it stand out from stodgy-looking competitors, which is almost enough to make us forgive its tiny touchscreen and flimsy output tray.

With the 9125e, you can opt in to HP’s Instant Ink subscription service and a “free” HP+ membership, which extends your warranty and can reduce your printing costs. But it also limits how you can use your printer, so we recommend weighing your options carefully before deciding to join. More on that below.

It offers a seamless setup process. An on-screen keyboard makes it trivially easy to connect the 9125e to Wi-Fi to complete the install process. During testing, we were up and running in less than 10 minutes, including the ink-cartridge install. The process is smooth and modern enough that it makes other printer makers’ comparably clunky installers feel decidedly last-generation.

From your smartphone, you can download the HP Smart app (Android, iOS) and add the printer in just a couple of steps.

One downside to the app-guided installation is that it barrages you with “exclusive” offers to join HP+ and Instant Ink. Refuse, and it’ll offer again—with increasing intensity. If you know going in that you want to sign up (or don’t), it’s easy to tap the right button. But if you’re not prepared, you can quickly get sucked into a decision that turns out to be irreversible.

Instant Ink can make financial sense. The tiered program is based on how much you expect to print each month, from 10 to 700 pages. (A three-month trial is included with your printer purchase, provided that you sign up for HP+.)

With Instant Ink, the cost per page is 14.9¢ at worst and 4¢ at best—but one nice thing about the program is that printing color pages costs the same as printing in black. When your ink runs low, the service automatically ships new cartridges at no added cost. Unused pages roll over, up to three times your plan amount, and if you burn through your allotted pages (and your rollover) in a given month, extra “sets” of 10 to 15 pages cost $1 each.

Plus, enrolling in the Instant Ink program extends the machine’s warranty to two years.

But weigh your options before committing to Instant Ink or HP+. To get the three-month free trial of Instant Ink, you have to sign up for HP+, an optional service that adds a number of features to the 9125e. These include a more advanced HP Smart app, cloud-based connectivity and security, and the aforementioned extended two-year warranty.

However, HP+ also permanently locks your printer into using original HP ink cartridges. This means you cannot ever use third-party ink or remanufactured cartridges, which limits your choices and leaves you at the mercy of HP’s pricing.

HP+ also requires your printer to be connected to the internet at all times, or it may cease to function until it reconnects. For people with a less than perfectly stable internet connection, this restriction could be very frustrating. When the printer is not connected to the internet, it stops printing and displays an error message.

Finally, if you opt to use Instant Ink and later cancel your subscription, you will not be able to use any ink remaining in the current cartridges.

There’s no need to second-guess maintenance levels. The HP Smart software suite (available for both computers and mobile devices) allows you to check ink levels, order replacement ink, adjust settings remotely, and access the printer’s Embedded Web Server, a control panel designed for power users. In HP’s all-in-one approach, few functions are more than a click or two away.

It’s cost-effective, though not as cheap as its predecessor. The 9125e comes with enough ink in the box for roughly 800 black-and-white pages or 420 color pages. A full set of high-yield HP 936e EvoMore cartridges runs about $240 and lasts for approximately 2,500 monochrome pages or 1,650 color pages. That works out to a reasonable 3.2¢ per page for printing in black or 12.8¢ for color.

The OfficeJet Pro 9015e, the model we used to recommend, was a little less expensive on a per-page basis, but the 9125e is still a bargain in comparison with most other non-ink-tank all-in-ones, with the exception of our budget pick.

Its print prowess is on point. In our tests, text from the 9125e came out dark and was sharp and readable down to about 4 points in most fonts. Graphics were crisp and vibrant on default settings, and we saw minimal banding when printing full-page graphics on copy paper.

Glossies popped under the Best quality setting. This optional print setting helped our borderless 8.5-by-11-inch glossies look fantastic on the fridge despite having colors that skewed slightly bluer and had more contrast than the source photos.

It’s plenty fast. HP says that this model can print up to 22 monochrome pages per minute or 18 color pages per minute. In our testing with a grayscale IRS 1099-MISC instruction sheet and a color office doc (both PDFs), the 9125e printed at 12 ppm and 8.1 ppm, respectively. Duplex printing wasn’t much slower, at about 8 pages per minute in both grayscale and color.

But printing a text-only Google Docs file put the 9125e’s speed much closer to HP’s estimate, as we clocked it at a respectable 21.4 pages per minute.

Scanning was similarly brisk in our tests, averaging 9.2 pages per minute in grayscale and 6.5 pages per minute in color. Those numbers dropped to 4.5 ppm and 3.9 ppm, respectively, when we did two-sided scanning. If you have more demanding needs, consider a printer that can handle single-pass duplex scanning, such as our laser upgrade pick.

If you don’t regularly have big print jobs, the delay in duplex output may not matter. “I usually print double-sided, and I have never been bothered by the pause between sides,” says Wirecutter senior editor Marguerite Preston, who has owned the very similar, previous-generation 9015e for three years. “It’s plenty fast for me.”

It’s less likely to malfunction. In our testing, the 9125e’s paper handling was nearly flawless. It dealt with both full and nearly empty trays, it didn’t balk at scanning crumpled paper, and it never grabbed two pages when it was supposed to grab one. And our scans from the automatic document feeder came out almost completely straight, a rarity among printers we’ve tested (including some other HP models).

It’s an attractive addition to a workstation. We prefer the clean, sharp, and modern look of the OfficeJet Pro 9125e to the bulbous design of previous-generation OfficeJet machines. Aesthetics are less than a tertiary concern when it comes to office equipment, but if your printer is going to live in your home office for at least a couple of years, why not pick one that’s easier on the eyes?

Flaws but not dealbreakers

• The HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e’s biggest shortcoming is its single 250-sheet paper tray. Since the machine has only one tray, you need to manually swap out your plain letter paper whenever you need to print on something else—whether it’s legal, labels, glossy photo stock, or résumé paper.
• The touchscreen is on the small side at just 2.7 inches. The touchscreen works fine, but the limited real estate makes it hard to hit the smallest on-screen buttons, such as the gear icon that takes you to the Settings menu. Be prepared for a few frustrating mis-taps.
• The 9125e’s colors aren’t perfectly accurate. In our test prints, glossy photos skewed slightly blue and magenta and displayed overaggressive contrast. Photographers should opt for a dedicated photo printer instead.
• As mentioned above, if you enroll in HP+ for the discounted printing fees and extended warranty, you’re locked into using HP ink exclusively, and your printer must remain online at all times or it simply won’t print. HP ink is reasonably priced in general, but this kind of anti-consumer behavior is disappointing to see.

Top pick

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw

The best laser all-in-one printer

This model produces crisp text and vibrant graphics, and it has a low operating cost. But you can use only HP toner with it, so be prepared to pay full price come replacement time.

Buying Options

$530 $430 from Amazon

You save $100 (19%)

$530 $430 from Walmart

You save $100 (19%)

$530 $430 from HP

You save $100 (19%)

The HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw offers an easy setup process, reasonable operating costs, and great print quality and speed for your home-office or small-business needs. Plus, it won’t clog the way an inkjet does if you let it sit idle for too long.

The setup process is seamless. During our tests, we had this laser printer up and running in no time thanks to an intuitive touchscreen that walked us through the process in under 10 minutes.

The control panel is big and easy to use. The Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw has the same touch interface as our top pick inkjet all-in-one, the OfficeJet Pro 9125e, but its touchscreen is substantially bigger at 4.3 inches on the diagonal, in contrast to 2.7 inches for the 9125e’s screen. That translates into fewer mis-taps and less overall frustration.

This printer is expensive, but its per-print costs are low. The usual $530 price tag is a lot to swallow, but for a small business the 3301fdw is the most reliable multifunction laser printer we’ve found.

Upgrading to the high-yield toner ensures that printing costs remain low, at just 3.1¢ per black page and 17¢ per color print—but a full set of replacement toner costs a bit under $450 at this writing.

You’re locked in to HP toner. Because of HP’s new firmware measures, only genuine HP toner works in this printer, so don’t expect to save money by buying knockoff cartridges. (But if you do try to get it to print with generic ink, keep in mind that doing so voids the warranty.) That said, you may be able to use remanufactured or refilled HP toner cartridges, provided they have an original HP chip or circuitry.

It produces crisp text and vibrant graphics. In our tests the 3301fdw printed clear, crisp text down to a font size of 3 points; this means that even the tiniest of subscripts in legal documents and footer text in charts will remain legible.

It printed high-quality, vibrant graphics, essentially mirroring the print quality of our upgrade pick, the Brother MFC-L3780CDW. We observed no visible banding or pixelation in graphics or photos.

Selecting the Best print quality boosted saturation of colors but sometimes to an unrealistic degree. In most cases, we found that the Normal print mode produced more realistic color with no obvious hit to text clarity.

It offers versatile printing support. No need to take your standard printer paper out of the main tray if you want to address an envelope or print labels—this model features a bypass slot for odd-size items.

Plus, mobile Wi-Fi printing and the optional HP Smart app make printing sans computer a breeze.

You can print directly from a USB drive. A USB-A port below the touchscreen allows you to print documents and photos from a thumb drive or an external SSD. Supported formats include DOC and DOCX, JPEG, PDF, PNG, PPT and PPTX, and more. Browsing files—especially images—can be a pain since there are no image previews, but files print quickly and in the expected quality.

You can also scan directly to a USB drive and save the files as JPEG, PDF, PDF/A, or TIFF.

It prints and scans quickly. HP rates the 3301fdw for up to 26 pages per minute in black and white or color. Manufacturer claimed speeds are often tough to replicate in real life, and in our testing, we managed to hit around 22.2 ppm using both plain text Google Docs files and heavier PDFs with mixed text and images. Unlike with our inkjet picks, on this laser model our color prints were just as quick as our monochrome pages.

When we used the automatic document feeder, the 3301fdw pumped out scans at up to 27.3 pages per minute in grayscale duplex mode. Simplex grayscale scans were slower at 19.4 ppm, and scanning in color dropped duplex speed to 14.3 ppm and simplex output to 9.4 ppm.

Scans look good but are often slightly crooked. It’s entirely possible that this is just a quirk of the machine we tested, but the majority of the scans from the 3301fdw’s automatic document feeder exhibited some degree of skew. In most cases the effect wasn’t too distracting for us, but you may need to keep a close eye on the paper guides if you find that it’s bothering you.

It takes up a lot of room. The 3301fdw is more than twice as heavy as our budget all-in-one pick, the Brother MFC-J4335DW. It also needs significant space on a desk, and its 18-inch maximum depth prevents it from fitting on most bookshelves.

Budget pick

Brother MFC-J4335DW

An affordable all-in-one printer

If you don’t print often, or if you need a basic color printer that can also scan, this inkjet printer is a relatively inexpensive model that handles a variety of print jobs.

Buying Options

$180 $150 from Amazon

You save $30 (17%)

$180 from Walmart

$180 from Best Buy

May be out of stock

The Brother MFC-J4335DW doesn’t cost a lot and has cheap running costs. Its strong print quality compensates well for its slower performance, middling scan quality, and clunky button-based interface.

It’s ideal for low-print-volume households. Priced at $180 at this writing, the MFC-J4335DW is one of the cheapest all-in-one models we’ve tested, and it doesn’t ratchet up the printing costs in exchange. This model comes with 1,080 pages’ worth of black ink and 720 pages’ worth of color ink in the box, which should last you about a year by Brother’s estimates.

It won’t blow your budget if you suddenly have high printing demands. An upgrade to high-yield print cartridges that can print up to 6,000 black-and-white pages and 5,000 color pages costs roughly 1¢ per page for monochrome and 5.2¢ per page for color. So it’s cost-effective to print the occasional book report or even a full manuscript draft at home rather than schlepping your print jobs to your local office-supply store.

Despite the low per-page cost, however, keep in mind that a full set of high-yield ink for the MFC-J4335DW costs a not insignificant $270 at this writing.

It outshines many competitors in print quality. Astonishingly, during our tests this model reliably printed crisp text down to 3 points. That’s important when you’re dealing with complex legal documents that include tiny superscript or footnotes. In contrast, our former budget pick, the Brother MFC-J805DW, could clearly print text only down to a font size of 6 points.

Images popped, but less so than those from our top inkjet pick, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e. Still, the MFC-J4335DW printed glossy photos with a sharpness and a realistic saturation and contrast level that rivaled results from printers twice the price. But it fell flat at producing seamless image prints on copy paper, and it often created banding, or horizontal lines across the page, which is a common defect among inkjet printers.

Its scans are sluggish and flat. This all-in-one model posted some of the slowest scan speeds in our tests, averaging 7 seconds in contrast to the 3 to 5 seconds that we got from half the printers in our test group. In isolation that’s a small difference in speed, but it can feel like an eternity when you’re working against a deadline and have dozens of pages to scan.

And don’t expect the MFC-J4335DW to produce a carbon copy of your favorite photos. In our testing, this printer overcompensated in its scans by adding too much contrast, destroying detail in darker areas.

The installation process is outdated. Brother’s unintuitive website-based installers are difficult to navigate, and the archaic design of the MFC-J4335DW’s tiny display screen and navigation buttons adds to the setup stress. Overall, in our tests this printer’s setup took about 25 minutes, a sharp contrast to the HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e’s 10-minute install process.

Brother backs this printer with a two-year limited warranty.

Upgrade pick

Brother MFC-L3780CDW

Speed and features for small businesses and home offices

This business-class machine checks all the boxes for a home office or small business: It’s faster, sharper, more durable, and more secure than our other picks.

Buying Options

$500 from Amazon

$500 from Best Buy

Small-business owners who print frequently should opt for a great color laser all-in-one like the Brother MFC-L3780CDW.

The MFC-L3780CDW is expensive, but it’s faster and capable of printing clearer text and graphics than our other picks. It still ranks among the most affordable color laser printers that offer all the same productivity features as our favorite inkjet model, the HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e.

It prints well—but it can fall short on reproducing scans. The MFC-L3780CDW can crank out up to 31 pages per minute, according to Brother, versus the 9125e’s average of 12 pages per minute.

This color laser model also prints sharper text at small font sizes than any inkjet we’ve tested, which may be important if you need to print a lot of legal documents. We could clearly read text down to 3.5 points, in contrast to the 9125e’s legibility down to 4 points.

Its graphics are crisper, with minimal banding, than what you can get from a printer like the 9125e, but its prints can look a little flat; in particular, they lack saturation compared with inkjet prints. We recommend saving your toner and printing only the occasional chart or cover sheet in color rather than, say, a photo book. (If you frequently print photos, opt for a dedicated photo printer instead.)

This laser printer also struggled to reproduce beautiful-looking prints from scan jobs, as graphics often came out duller than the source files. For this kind of material, inkjets such as the 9125e do a better job.

It can go the distance with minimal wear and tear. The MFC-L3780CDW spools up faster than most inkjets, and its recommended duty cycle of 4,000 pages per month—nearly triple the 9125e’s 1,500 pages—should be plenty for even the busiest home office and could satisfy many small businesses with multiple employees. Thanks to that higher duty cycle, you can print thousands of pages come audit season without burning out the machine.

It doesn’t need a computer or a mobile device to print. When you’re in too big a rush to fire up a laptop for a print job, you can use the printer’s USB port. It’s capable of printing JPEGs, PDFs, and TIFFs, and it can save scans too.

It easily handles odd-size print jobs. The foldout bypass paper tray prints letter-, legal-, executive-, and postcard-size media. The automatic document feeder can also handle legal-size documents.

It’s more secure than other printers we’ve tested, inkjet and laser alike. The MFC-L3780CDW features firmware integrity and encryption protocols to ensure that the printer is less likely to be hijacked by bad actors. (That sounds absurd, but it has happened.)

It also allows for directory authentication and can hold faxes until you enter your credentials so that you can make sure no one else is intercepting your documents. And role-based access control for multiuser environments allows you to choose who can access which printer features. If your work involves sensitive material, these are legitimately helpful additions.

It has an integrated NFC card reader that you can optionally use for badge authentication to better protect sensitive business information. This feature allows you to print from an NFC-compatible badge by touching it against the printer, similar to a wireless mobile payment or company-assigned printer code. So sensitive print jobs come through only when you’re ready to collect them from the print tray.

It’s cheap to operate over time. Per-page prices for the MFC-L3780CDW hover around 2.6¢ for printing in black and 12.9¢ for color, provided that you use the highest-capacity, XXL toner cartridges. That’s cheaper than the costs of the 9125e for grayscale, ever so slightly more expensive for color, and broadly similar to the costs for many of the other laser printers we’ve tested.

The up-front cost to replace all of the toner cartridges in XXL size comes to an eye-popping $530. XL cartridges bring the total down to a little more than $400, and standard cartridges lower it to $290, but each page costs more as a result, and you need to replace the cartridges more often.

Still, the real-world costs between a business-class laser printer like this and our top-pick inkjet might not be so different. Laser printers waste only a bit of toner, while inkjets can squander a lot of ink depending on how many cleaning cycles they have to run. Thus, whereas the advertised cost is the maximum you’re likely to pay with a laser printer, the stated cost per page for an inkjet is the bare minimum you have to pay.

The interface is easy to use. The color touchscreen is simple to operate and less frustrating than what you get on some competing models.

But it has one potentially significant flaw: Unlike the monochrome Brother MFC-L2750DW, a model that we recommend in our laser printer guide, the MFC-L3780CDW has a touchscreen with a black-background footer. Our testers with limited vision couldn’t see this part of the menu because the black bar behind it made that portion of the touchscreen disappear from their view.

The warranty is short. Brother’s one-year warranty for the MFC-L3780CDW isn’t as good as what some rivals offer for printers in this class. Canon, in particular, covers its home-office machines with a three-year warranty. HP offers just a one-year warranty but plusses it up by providing on-site service within one business day. Brother, in contrast, requires you to ship your printer to a service center, potentially at your own cost if you damage the printer.

Still, Brother offers several extended-warranty options starting at a little more than $100 for the MFC-L3780CDW, including free repairs at authorized locations or next-day business shipping of a refurbished replacement model.

Ink-tank printers usually come with bottles that you must inject into reservoirs inside the machine. These printers tend to cost $50 to $100 more than non-ink-tank models, and they also provide fewer features.

But the print cost per page is unmatched. They print at fractions of a cent for both black-and-white and color pages, compared with 2¢ to 10¢ per page for typical inkjets.

Still, we can’t recommend any of these machines. During our testing, ink-tank-style printers were much slower than the HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e in both printing and scanning. None of the ink-tank models we tested could scan two-sided documents, either. The machines’ build quality was flimsy in comparison with most other inkjets. And although ink-tank models are cheaper to operate in the long run than our inkjet picks, we think many people wouldn’t use enough of the included ink to make the higher up-front price worth paying.

We’re currently testing the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301fdw as a possible replacement for the discontinued Color LaserJet Pro MFP M283fdw, and the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4301fdw as a rival to the Brother MFC-L3780CDW. We’ll report back soon with all the details.

This list does not include discontinued printer models.

Inkjet all-in-ones

The Brother MFC-J1170DW and the Brother MFC-J5855DW both offered relatively poor print and scan quality.

Setup of the Canon Maxify MB5120 was a grueling affair, and its scan quality was relatively poor.

In our tests, the HP Envy Inspire 7955e was painfully slow at printing images, though it produced some of the richest photos among all the printers we tried. It couldn’t print text-heavy documents with much sharpness, and it failed to consistently print clean documents when we sent print jobs from a computer or a mobile device.

The HP OfficeJet Pro 8025e and the HP Envy Photo 7855 are expensive to operate, and we experienced performance issues with both models during our tests.

Ink-tank-style inkjet all-in-ones

The Canon Pixma G7020 suffered from slow print and scan speeds and a fiddly user interface.

The Epson EcoTank ET-2850 lacks an automatic document feeder and fax capabilities.

Color laser all-in-ones

The Brother MFC-L3770CDW had a clunky interface, finicky touchscreens, and problematic software.

The HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 4301fdn had a clunky interface and problematic software. In our tests, it printed full-page graphics at a glacial pace, and it distorted prints of complex images with shadows and gradients.

This article was edited by Phil Ryan and Erica Ogg.