When you’re shopping for a new printer, you can save time and help ensure you get a high-quality, long-lasting printer by researching the best printer brands. The best printers invariably come from the top brands, and offer reliable customer service, good warranties, and the supplies you need to keep printing.
That doesn’t mean printers from unknown brands are unworthy of consideration. A newcomer could appear with innovative features and print technology to shake up the status quo. However, the biggest brands have research and development teams that are always looking for ways to improve quality and performance at an affordable cost.
That means well-known printer brands are usually the best choice. These are the brands you can rely on to offer the best printers in every category.
HP
Hewlett-Packard is almost synonymous with printers. Of course, the tech giant also makes computers, laptops, calculators, and more. HP stands out most as the manufacturer of the incredibly durable LaserJet Pro series of monochrome and color laser printers.
The HP Color LaserJet Pro 4301fdw is a perfect example. This lightning-fast color laser printer earned our Editor’s Choice award as one of the best options for small businesses and busy home offices. It’s an all-in-one with 35 pages per minute (ppm) print and copy speed to maximize your productivity.
HP also makes some of the best inkjet printers available. HP’s latest printers span from home-office inkjets to office lasers. The OfficeJet Pro 9125e is a quick, versatile all-in-one inkjet that impressed me with its sharp text, vibrant color prints, and reliable duplexing. HP printers are always easy to set up, and the HP Smart app makes managing tasks a breeze.
HP printers come with great customer support, starting with an online support portal where you can download drivers and apps, get help with setup, look up troubleshooting guides, chat with the user community, and sign in to get direct support from HP.
HP’s Instant Ink subscription service makes sure you can keep printing with automatic shipments of ink or toner before you run out. Big brands can offer integrated services like this to add more value and make it easier to use your printer.
Canon
Canon is best known as a camera manufacturer, but pictures are often shared on paper, so it makes sense for Canon to guide images along the path to your photo album, from high-quality single-lens-reflex cameras to high-quality printers.
Inkjets are best for color prints, and Canon’s MegaTank PIXMA G3270 delivers great image quality while keeping running costs low. It ships with four full bottles of ink, enough to print for more than a year. With a minor tweak, covered in my review, photos look great even on plain paper.
Canon also makes laser printers, and the imageCLASS MF753Cdw color laser all-in-one stood out as a top performer. It’s very fast (35 ppm), and excels at everyday color printing with duplex copying and scanning. If you don’t need color but like laser speed and reliability, the imageCLASS MF275dw won praise as an inexpensive monochrome all-in-one laser printer with solid output quality.
Taking care of its customers is a high priority for Canon, and it’s easy to find drivers and manuals and get support from the company website. Canon’s Auto Replenishment Service detects low ink or toner and ships you supplies to keep your printer working. Rather than subscribing, you pay only for what you use.
Epson
Epson has a long history as a printer manufacturer, beginning with some of the most popular dot matrix printers of the 1970s. The company continued to innovate low-cost, high-quality solutions for personal computers.
As a leader in photographic-quality printing, Epson’s six- and 10-color inkjet printers are among the best available. I was impressed with Epson’s EcoTank ET-8500, giving it a nine out of ten rating in my review. This six-color printer finds a nice balance for photo enthusiasts, delivering excellent results at an affordable price.
However, you don’t have to buy a premium photo printer to output great-looking pictures. The Epson Expression Photo XP-8800 is a cartridge-based, six-color inkjet printer at a budget price that challenges more expensive models.
If you’re a professional photographer, Epson’s SureColor P900 is a lab-quality, 10-color photo printer that creates stunning, poster-size prints. It prints on a variety of media, including specialty art paper, at sizes up to 19 by 22 inches.
Epson is eliminating laser printers, citing the greater sustainability of inkjet printing due to lower power use, so you can expect Epson to focus on improving the speed and durability of inkjet all-in-ones to compete with work-centric laser printers.
Brother
Brother began as a sewing machine manufacturer, but soon expanded to typewriters and printers. Now, it’s one of the leading inkjet and laser printer brands, with an excellent reputation for reliability and quality.
Brother’s color and monochrome laser printers are known for their great value and reliability. The Brother HL-L3295CDW is a quick, compact color laser printer that’s ideal for small offices, offering very low running costs thanks to super-high yield cartridges.
For black-and-white documents, the Brother HL-L2460DW is a super-fast monochrome laser with low operating costs. Brother has a wide range of laser printers but also makes inkjets.
The Brother MFC-J1205W INKvestment Tank is a tiny all-in-one inkjet that offers extra-large cartridges as an alternative to tank printers. You’ll pay less upfront but still enjoy long-term supply savings with this versatile home printer.
Like all the manufacturers mentioned here, Brother makes online support simple with plenty of resources on the website and several options to contact the company for more help.
Brother’s Refresh EZ Print Subscription is similar to HP’s. You select the page count you anticipate using, but can always upgrade or downgrade as needed.
Other printer manufacturers
There are plenty of other trustworthy printer manufacturers, and you can find excellent printers with unique capabilities by digging deeper. If you have a need to print on T-shirts, rigid materials, or rolls, or in a larger size, you might find the exact solution by shopping around and checking what’s new.
However, if your printing needs are fairly standard, it’s hard to go wrong when you order from the most established and well-known printer brands in the world. Epson, Brother, Canon, and HP are more likely to offer good value and reliable performance at reasonable prices.
Commercial printers
Brother, Canon, Epson, and HP are the most popular and trusted brands for consumer printers. Enterprise customers have different needs, and there are other printer manufacturers that cater almost exclusively to medium and large businesses and organizations.
These are often more robust machines with multiple paper trays, rugged paper handling, and high speed for processing a heavy workload. The trade-off is a much more expensive machine that’s large enough to require a wheeled cart for movement.
For big offices that share printers, businesses need printers that can print reams of paper with no slowdown and keep running. At this level, names like Xerox, Kyocera, and Zebra compete with the enterprise divisions of the leading consumer brands.
By integrating hardware, software, and service plans, these productivity-focused printer companies and divisions meet the demands of large corporations and organizations.
