Best Printer/Scanner Combo

Best Printer/Scanner Combo

Choosing The Best Printer/Scanner Combo

Here's the bottom line with printers: avoid inkjets.

Laser printers have been the way to go for decades, being much cheaper to operate, not having endless problems with drying out ink and clogged printer heads. But until reecntly, they cost far more up front than inkjets, leaving them to be used mostly in offices.

That's no longer the case, laser printers are now very affordable and the smart choice, whether you're buying for casual use, your home office home or small business office.

With that in mind, we've decided to only focus on the best laser printer/scanner combos under $250, perfect for home or small business use of under around 2000 printed pages per month.

Why are laser printers better?

  • Per page, laser printers are far chepaer to operate than inkjets,
  • Laser printers can print a lot more pages before needing a refill. You won't be dealing with your printer refusing to print that document you need right now until you go buy a refill.
  • No more wasting ink on printer head cleaning and alignments. It seems like inkjets constantly need re-alignment and cleaning, sometimes needing you to run them multiple times to get things back in order. Each time, wasting more and more very expensive ink.
  • If you sometimes go weeks or months between printing something, ink jet cargriages will tend to dry out, costing you precious ink and the inkjet heads will tend to clog, requiring you to waste more ink cleaning them and sometimes, they won't clean and you'll have to replace a cartrage that still has ink left.

    Laser printers use a dry, powedered toner so there's no drying out and no pritner heads to get clogged. You can go months, even a year between printing something and have no problems on your next print job.

Our Top Pick

Lexmark MC3224dwe Color Multifunction Laser Printer

This Lexmark is our top pick color laser printer/scanner under $250 because it makes excellent, high resolution color prints, is fairly compact, prints quickly and is super easy to use with the built-in color touchscreen.

Highlights

Print and copy up to 24 pages per minute with a 250 page paper drawer which handles legal and letter sizes.

Print envelopes, card stock and other sized paper through the manual feed for added printing flexibility.

802.11 A/B WiFi, ethernet and USB 2.0, AirPrint and Google Cloud Print connectivity for printing from your network, a thumbdrive or your Android or Apple mobile device.

Standard toner cartridges will print around 1,500 pages.

Duplex printing will let you automatically print on both sides of a page to save paper.

Comes with a smaller, starter cartridge which will give you around 750 black and white or 500 color prints.

Color touch screen makes setup and configuration easy.

Operating costs

Replacement toner costs $65 from Lexmark return program (send in your used cartridges), $75 per cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges. Each color can be purchased and replaced independently.

Cost per page of black only is around $0.043 and $0.048 for color.
Lexmark MC3224dwe Color Multifunction Laser Printer
$240.48 Amazon Prime Shipping

Best Low Cost Option

Brother HLL2395DW Monochrome Laser Printer

If you don't need color printing or extras like a color touch screen, you can't beat this Brother monochrome laser printer/scanner/copier. In fact, this is the printer I personally own and use and I couldn't be happier with it, especially for the amazing price.

Highlights

Print and copy up to 32 pages per minute with a 250 page paper drawer which handles legal and letter sizes.

Print envelopes, card stock and other sized paper through the manual feed for added printing flexibility.

802.11 A/B WiFi, ethernet and USB 2.0, AirPrint and Google Cloud Print connectivity for printing from your network, a thumbdrive or your Android or Apple mobile device.

Standard toner cartridge will print around 1,200 pages and the high-yeild one will print around 3,000.

Duplex printing will let you automatically print on both sides of a page to save paper.

Comes with a smaller, starter cartridge which will give you around 500-700 prints.

1200 DPI scanning resolution is more than enough for crisp document scanning.

Color touch screen makes setup and configuration easy.

Operating costs

Replacement toner costs $25-$75 depending on whether you go with a 1200 page or 3,000 page cartridge and whether or not you use a 3rd party or official Brother toner.

Cost per page with a 3rd party standard toner cartridge is around $0.02 and $0.017 with a 3rd party high-yield cartridge.
Brother HLL2395DW Monochrome Laser Printer
$189.99 Amazon Prime Shipping
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