The Best Printers, According to the CNET Staff Who Use Them

The Best Printers, According to the CNET Staff Who Use Them

Despite the modern reliance on the cloud, many of us still need to make physical copies of our paperwork. Important documents need copies, physical pictures need to be scanned and labels need to be created. The only way to do those things is to have a printer you have easy access to.

While CNET Labs test a whole new range of printers, we've put together a list of printers the CNET staff use at home and at the office and the reasons why they chose that particular model. These have not been formally tested to destruction, but are used in the way most people do.

Epson

A printer is one of those things that I don't use often, and when I do need to use it, I hope that it works. I've gone through several printers in recent years, because every time I want to use it the ink is dried out or something else needs to be fixed. I was looking for a low-maintenance option that had affordable ink replacements, and that's where I came across this Epson model.

It's an all-in-one unit, so I can still scan documents to my PC when needed, but the best part is that I've yet to find the ink dried up when I wanted to use it. It also prints reliably for small and medium jobs. The ink isn't expensive, and you can buy an XL version of the cartridge which offers 2.5x the capacity for a little extra money. Overall, it's a great printer if you don't need to print tons of pages in a short period of time (because it's a little slow) but still want something that won't make you go broke when you need new color or black ink.

-- Jared DiPane

Epson

The big selling point of the EcoTank line is that it does away with cartridges. Even if you only print a couple of times a week, it's worth the extra cost. My family prints more than that and we're still on the original ink refills that came with the printer after years of use. The 3750 model was replaced by the 3850 in September 2021 but they're essentially the same printer.

Because it's a lower-end model in the line, the printer isn't a speed demon with color prints and its tray holds only 250 sheets. It doesn't have a touchscreen, just a small display and navigation buttons that aren't backlit. But it has all the other features I'd expect from a compact all-in-one for a small office or home office: You get wired and wireless connections with mobile printing, an auto-document feeder and automatic two-sided printing. Print quality is respectable, too. It excels on black-and-white documents but it's OK for photos as well.

-- Josh Goldman

Brother

I've had this printer for at least five years and it's been solid. Unlike some other printers I've had, it rarely gets disconnected from the Wi-Fi network so my whole family can easily print stuff from their various computers and phones without me having to troubleshoot the connection. Printing is fast and since its laser ink isn't expensive per sheet. I'm fine with black and white and the few times I need color I'll print at the local drugstore.

The one downside is that double-sided printing always jams the feed so I have to take it apart, pull out the paper and restart the job. Sometimes the software seems to select double-sided on its own and I discover the hard way, but once I change back to single-sided (which is what we use most of the time) it's all good.

-- David Katzmaier

My wife loves to make stickers using our HP Envy and the Cricut Explore 3. The Envy has excellent color saturation, especially on the glossy sticker paper she uses. It also has the added bonus of being a scanner, which is especially helpful to scan all our mortgage documents while we move house.

The biggest selling point though is the two-year supply of new inks. Running out of ink is the worst part of using a printer at home, but HP's replacement service takes away that hassle. It's worth the money just for that.

-- James Bricknell

Brother

I have to make an absurd amount of labels for our son's Tupperware, school items, folders, cooking products, and so on. This makes it so easy. There are different fonts, sizes and styles to choose from.

The keyboard is dreamy and a far cry from the old-school turnstile. I also love the built-in cutting function. Gone are the days of needing scissors when you're done.

-- Danielle Ramirez

Full disclosure: I was the guy who proudly kept his home printer-free while using the office printer for those once- or twice-a-month necessities. Then came the pandemic, and I found myself in need of shipping labels and other documents at home. This tiny HP LaserJet fits perfectly on the bookshelf in my equally tiny Brooklyn apartment, and it reliably prints from PCs, Macs, Chromebooks and smartphones, all over Wi-Fi.

The 2022 model (M110w) is nearly identical to my 2020-era unit (M15w), but take note: The "cheaper" M110we seems to require a subscription to HP's cloud-ink solution, so go with the pricier model if you want to avoid an always-on connection. Also, this laser printer is black-and-white only, but that's a feature for me, not a bug.

-- John P. Falcone

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Anycubic Kobra Review: The Everybody 3D Printer

My love for 3D printing and my desire to maintain a 3D printer are immediately at odds with one another. If I spend more time diagnosing why a print failed or what I need to achieve optimal printer performance than I spend creating things to put in the printer, I'm not interested. So despite my having been a 3D printer owner and fan since around 2015, my time spent actually printing things is fairly low. When Anycubic announced the Kobra as a starter printer and generally smaller companion to the Kobra Max (reviewed by my colleague James Bricknell), I was curious to see how far less expensive machines had come in the last seven years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found my biggest issues in 3D printers of yore had evaporated with this new model.

Short of shipping it fully assembled, the Kobra couldn't be much easier to put together by yourself. The step-by-step instructions in the box have you well on your way inside of 20 minutes, leaving you plenty of time to fire up the machine and follow the prompts on its touch display.

In theory all you need to do after assembly and setup is a quick one-time bed leveling, heat test and the initial filament insertion before attempting the included test print to ensure everything is OK. Reality did not line up with this theory, as my test print failed twice without any clear indicator as to why.

The Anycubic Kobra, fully assembled.
Russell Holly

After a little poking around online, I found the culprit: The instructions Anycubic provides for initial configuration ask you to lower the print head to a sheet of paper until it doesn't glide smoothly. These instructions are not for a standard sheet of paper you'd get at Staples, so my print head was slightly too high and causing problems. A small tweak lowered the print head to the correct position and immediately yielded a little plastic owl (the standard test print for Anycubic machines).

With the standard done, it was time to fire up the Cura interface and slice a file for this printer. Anycubic included Cura on the microSD card in the box as well as a USB reader for it, making it easy to push files from my laptop to the printer without needing to directly connect. Unfortunately, the provided version of Cura did not come with instructions for this Anycubic printer; I had to follow a different set of instructions for manually building this. Later in my review period, Anycubic provided a config file for Prusa Slicer, which also worked great for prepping files for printing. Whichever software you use, once ready you pop the microUSB card into the the printer's front, tap the file you want and you're good to go.

My frustration with the software and general lack of support at this stage is immediately balanced by how great this printer is when it works. Once I was able to get support from Anycubic, things were great. But if you're going to market this as a printer for beginners, there needs to be some consideration for the beginner experience beyond the printer's assembly and maintenance. Anycubic is far from alone in this, as most 3D printers are put on shelves for people to figure out on their own. While that is good enough for many already in this space, it's not the best path if your goal is to grow consumer excitement for 3D printers in general.

A look at the CNET test file, which helps us determine the performance of any 3D printer.

Russell Holly

Once the software is actually set up and running, the Kobra is spectacularly consistent in the quality of its prints. More than 100 hours of active printing in the last week has shown I can set a print and walk away confident that I will return to a nice, finished print a few hours later.

In all of my tests, the only real issue I found was with the prints' output temperature. Because the cooling fan at the extruder isn't quite powerful enough, the extruded filament doesn't cool as fast as it probably should, which leads to issues with thin or narrow sections of a print. It's a small thing you can work around in a lot of cases with some small changes to the default output temperature of the extruder, but if your goal is to print something delicate or extra thin you may encounter some inconsistency at the edges.

Once a print is complete and the build plate underneath has cooled, you can grab the build plate's spring steel surface and give it a quick bend: The entire thing comes off and flexes easily, so you can pop anything off of it with ease. Having spent many hours with glues and sprays on 3D printers from older generations, having a simple flexible plate I can rely on and easily clean is fantastic.

For $300, the Anycubic Kobra is the best starter 3D printer I have used in a long time. It's easily $100 better than any of the bargain $200 printers you'll find anywhere, both in overall print quality and how fast it completes simple tasks like heating up to the correct temperatures. And if Anycubic puts just a little more energy into supporting its users through the software side of things, instead of leaving it all up to the 3D printer community, this little printer could help get a lot of new people into this hobby.

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The Best Printers On The Market