Best cheap printer of 2025: My top 10 cost-cutting picks

The best cheap printer should, in my experience, still offer great print quality, speedy print-outs, and plenty of features while remaining affordable from initial outlay to on-going print costs.

I’ve reviewed over 200 of the best home printers and best small business printers and these are my top ten budget printers for home and office printing. I’ve run extensive tests and each one stands out for their low cost and high performance.

For a basic color laser model, I recommend checking out the HP LaserJet Pro M15w. And for those looking to cut on-going print costs, I really like the Epson EcoTank ET-2800 (known as the ET-2850 outside the US) with its refillable ink tanks. Both impressed me during review for their balance of price and performance.

When we tested it, this was the smallest laser printer and likely to remain so. The two trays fold away neatly so that the footprint is only a little larger than a sheet of A4, and it stands no taller than the average smartphone.

Being as small and inexpensive as an inkjet, yet with all the speed, economy, and consistency of a laser, the LaserJet Pro M15w is, in many ways, the ideal cheap printer. The LaserJet Pro M15w can print a thousand documents consistently and quickly on a single toner cartridge. It manages to hold one hundred sheets of paper and print on them at the respectable rate of 19ppm. Sadly, there’s no duplex mode and no display, but at this price, it’s hard to argue.

The Epson EcoTank ET-2850 is a relatively affordable ink tank all-in-one aimed at the home worker or small office. It’s a pared back machine that won’t take up too much desk space and with Epson’s bottled ink costing around 90% less than cartridges, it’s also one of the cheapest printers to run.

Epson has held back a few features in order to keep the price competitive, so there’s no frontal paper tray, just a 100-sheet rear tray, and no touchscreen or NFC. It does carry the essentials, such as auto duplex printing, high-res scanning and Wi-Fi with AirPrint compatibility and it can print on any kind of paper up to A4 in size. The print quality is a pass rather than a distinction due to a more modest Micro Piezo nozzle array than you find inside other EcoTanks, but it’s good enough for the average business user. The real selling point though, is the wildly generous amount of inbox ink. The five bundled bottles should yield up to 20,000 pages before you need to buy more.