5 Best Printer For Home Use With Cheap Ink (Top Picks)

So, you are looking for the best printer for home use with cheap ink. Welcome to the club. Yep. Most of the home-based offices and small businesses are looking for the same – a study printer with sterling connectivity that drinks less ink while printing.

Here in this review article, we have focused on the core issues that a small office or a home-based business demands from a printer. We have sneaked through several printers available on the market that can cater to this segment of usage, along with a quick buyer’s guide to help you to connect your specific demands with the device you are looking for.

So, let’s get to it.

5 Best Printer For Home Use With Cheap Ink in 2022

1. Brother MFC-J995DW Printer

Brother-MFC-J995DW Printer For Home Use
Source: Rtings.com

Brother MFC-J995DW INKvestmentTank Color Inkjet All-in-One Printer is a real deal when it comes to finding the best printer for home use with cheap ink. It’s an advanced printing system in many ways. Firstly, its INKvestment tank inkjet printing technology works with an internal ink tank that can store 1-year of printing colors in its smart cartridges. Secondly, it can handle automatic duplex printing tasks, and it can handle automatic document feeding up to 20 pages.

Further, this same technology packs with another sterling feature, namely, Brother Page Gauge that can measure the amount of ink used and how many pages you can print further before replacing the cartridges. So, virtually, you can never run out of ink as the smart touch-display will always help you understand about the size of your printing demands and whether it can do it with the remaining amount of colors.

No ink replacement guesswork. Just clean printing.

Coming to its other essential features, this NFC smart printer can print 12 back & white and 10 color pages per minute at its max speed, and it can handle mobile and wireless printing tasks through Airprint, Google Cloud Print, Brother, and Wifi Direct.

Pros:

  • 1-year uninterrupted printing
  • INKvestment technology
  • Brother Page Gauge technology
  • Versatile Computer and Mobile OS compatibility

Cons:

  • Noisy printing process
  • Not a great scanner(poor resolution sense)
  • Drinks more ink than other similar printers
  • Color smudge appears in glossy printings
  • Glitchy IPV6 network communication

2. HP OfficeJet Pro 9025 Printer

Best Printer For Home Use With Cheap Ink
Source: digitec.ch

HP OfficeJet Pro 9025 Wireless Printer is probably the best inkjet printer on this list of the printer for home use with cheap ink as it comes with an array of state of the art printing features.

It has an automatic two-sided print-scan-copy ability. It prints 24 pages per minute with 35 pages of intuitive document feeding ability, and most importantly, it comes with two paper trays that can house 250 pages each. Further, this inkjet printer listens to Alexa, Cortana, and Google assistant with a self-healing Wifi communication protocol that automatically tracks and solves wifi connection issues.

So, are there more ‘Aha’ features? Yes. There are.

This printer for home use can turn your home into a full-fledged office through its official HP smart application functionality, namely ‘Smart Task.’ Control all your printing and official needs through your smartphone. Create and share editable and searchable documents.

Design your daily workarounds smartly by creating shortcuts to print, email, or save received documents automatically. Further, you can save the scanned documents to your Dropbox or Google drive just with a tap. This is ‘access everything remotely’ type of printer that caters to versatile printing demands on the go.

This formidable home printing beast also cares for the necessary security layers that you need in this connected age through its in-build wifi and document protection, and password encryption features. And, the fun part is that you get your Ink delivered at your doorstep when you sign up with the ‘HP instant Ink’ program.

Pros:

  • Best features for office and home use
  • Future smart in connection and security
  • High printing speed
  • Get ink delivered at reduced cost throughout the year at your doorstep.
  • Cloud storage integration

Cons:

  • Face issues while printing
  • Buggy in-built software

3. Canon PIXMA G7020 Printer For Home Use

Canon-PIXMA-G7020
Source: Rtings.com

The Canon PIXMA G7020 All-in-One Printer has all the virtues of being one of the best printers available today, both for office and home use with cheap ink. As the official tagline says- it’s designed for high-volume printing tasks with its wireless Supertank feature. Refilling ink to its integrated ink tanks has never been this easier before it surfaced. Cheap ink. Enhanced productivity and ink-efficiency.

Added to this, like the other new-age printers, it also has the primary and smart printing features like mobile printing with Airprint facility, Fax, ADF with mobile printing, auto document feeder, auto duplex printing, and a large paper cassette that can house 350 sheets. Further, with its default printing mode, this wireless smart printer can print up to 6000 black & white pages and 7700 cloured pages until another ink refill.

The smart part of the story is that the Canon Print Application lets you adjust documents and print pages through your smartphone and tablets. Moreover, along with Apple AirPrint edge, this inkjet printer also allows you to print seamlessly using your Android smart handhelds through the Mopria print service Android application.

In a nutshell, this Canon PIXMA G7020 inkjet printer is a breather for the home use that mainly addresses a bold print, scan, and copy approach with a smart ink monitoring attribute.

Pros:

  • Both pigment-based and dye-based printing technique
  • Better ink monitoring ability
  • Pack with a full set of color ink with three black ink bottles
  • Economical usage of colors
  • Mega tank printer

Cons:

  • Glitchy setup process
  • Questionable automatic duplex printing feature
  • Wifi communication is problematic.

4. Canon Pixma MG3620 Printer

Canon Pixma MG3620 Printer
Source: Tomsguide.com

Canon Pixma MG3620 Printer is fairly beefy with its robust features to get a place on this list of the best printers for home use with cheap ink. To start with, it surely is an eye-catcher with its sleek design that is ideal for both small office setup or home-based printing tasks. To support that, it has a good printing speed that reaches up to 9.9 black & white pages and 16 color pages in a minute with a stunning 4800*1200 dpi printing resolution.

Further, if it comes to printing images, its IPM or image printing speed per minute roams around 9.9 for black & white images and 5.7 for colored images. Coming to its other features, this simple yet smart printer has all the feathers in its cap like mobile device printing, auto duplex printing, and a spartan wifi setup process.

The dedicated Canon Print application along with Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, NFC support, and Mporia Android app brings the whole wireless printing experience at your fingertips. And, for the icing on the cake, it comes with a muscular scanning potential with 1200*2400 dpi scanning resolution with 24-bit output color depth. So, this excellent printing machine goes well with casual home use with cheap ink cartridges that closes the deal.

Pros:

  • Good wireless printing experience
  • Sleek design
  • Enhanced scanning attributes
  • Sturdy performance

Cons:

  • The Paper cassette is small.
  • Bluetooth connectivity is glitchy.
  • Paper tray- not completely enclosed type

5. Epson EcoTank ET-4760 – Best Printer For Home Use With Cheap Ink

Epson EcoTank ET-4760
Source: Rtings.com

Last on this list, but never the least. How about saving 90% of the printing costs for your home printing tasks? Yah. Epson EcoTank ET-4760 Cartridge-Free Supertank Printer is here to do exactly that.

It’s a cartridge-free printing system that promises a 1-cent per color page printing where the other printing devices follow a 20 cent rule. The official team declares a whooping 90% cost saving on the replacement of ink. Yah. That’s true. The Eco-fit ink bottles can achieve you that by offering a simple ink replenishment/filling process fit to pour inks to the EcoTank ink cartridges. Added to this

So, this is the best printer for home use with cheap ink on this list. Admittedly.

Coming to its other features, this economic printing system, catering to your home printing needs, packs with the needful features. Run for two years of think free printing with the ink in the box and with each ink replacement set that can print 7500 black and white pages along with 6000 color pages. Simply, pour and print. Less waste. Less printing cost. No-fuss.

Further, it packs with the asked smart features like wireless printing, mobile printing, 30 pages ADF, fax, auto duplex printing, 250 sheet paper cassette, and all of these features packed within a space-saving sleek body design. Yes. This printing machine has all the smartness under its belt to top this list of the best printer for home and small office use that uses cheap ink.

Pros:

  • The most economical printer on this list
  • 2-sided automatic print, scan, and copy attribute
  • Sharp color output powered by the PrecisionCore technology
  • Hands-free printing through voice activation
  • 2.4” color touchscreen navigation
  • Cloud storage integration

Cons:

  • Diminished print quality
  • Cartridgeless printing demands more maintenance
  • Page feeder location is not friendly

Buying Guide For Printer For Home Use With Cheap Ink

Modern printing technologies offer you the best printer for home use with cheap ink cartridges. Only, you have to decide your purpose of printing to save yourself some fortune. For that, we are here to guide you through that path.

What should you focus on the features?

  • Upfront investment
  • Cheap Ink supply under budget
  • Network connectivity at your home
  • Available Ink delivery system

Let’s shovel the ice from the path step by step.

Investment on Inkjet or Laserjet

These are the two basic types of printers available in the market.

– Laserjet

These are the best printer types to produce bulk loads of text documents with the highest quality printing and excelling at a better speed than the other one. Color printing and other services like copying, scanning, and faxing are not always available. Even if you get the color printing option, expect a poor quality for that.

The upfront investment is higher, as well as the cartridge price. But being a high-capability device, the cartridge produces a lot more papers than inkjet, and so the per-page cost of printing drops at a good deal. Moreover, less-frequent alteration is needed for its toner cartridge because of the same reason. Hence, ink supply headaches are also reduced.

– Inkjet

The best type of printer for home use purposes. Versatility is its mantra. Color printing is almost a professional level if you are not focusing on the top-most quality images. Sufficiently good quality text printing, flat-bed scanning interface, copying, and faxing performs without a glitch. You can get it under a lower first-hand budget. Cheap ink cartridges are available but don’t last for long. Hence, the price per page increases and the pressure of cartridges changes as well.

All-in-one Feature

This specification is definitely a home use oriented factor. You can get this spec in both types of printers, but the inkjet quality speaks more positively.

Network Connectivity

This era is also popularizing wireless network systems. But, you have to keep in mind where you are going to print your documents.

  • Does your home have glitch-less Wifi connectivity with high-speed internet services? Otherwise, buying a wifi printer will do you no good.
  • In that case, go for a product with an ethernet access port. You can even save some money by sacrificing the coveted application of wireless connection. But you have to have access to at least a USB port if you want to print or scan from mobile devices and if you don’t mind getting up for that to reach up to your printer to finish the job.
  • Do you compliment yourself as a rightful member of the lazy community? Or are you one of the super busy multitaskers? Then the voice-activated application is your requirement.
  • For the people dealing with multiple devices at a time, try having a printer with IFTTT support.
  • For photographers or graphics professionals, memory card accessibility and sometimes multi-format card reader slots are not optional. Bluetooth connectivity isn’t that important for you, is it?
  • The PictBridge feature lets you print directly from a digital camera.
  • If your files are mostly saved in the cloud, then the cloud-ready Wi-Fi Direct feature should be your choice.

Ink Cost

It is said that ink is one of the most valuable fluids you use in your everyday routine. So, choose wisely. If you are buying for your home use, and need to print color documents frequently, try ink-tank printers instead of regular inkjets. They are built with a super-tank facility to reduce the need for frequent cartridge replacement in inkjet technology printers.

These tanks have refillable reservoirs of ink bottles. Although these printer models charge you more than regular ones, they save you a lot of money in the long run. If it’s not a laserjet, then your printer will milk out a certain amount of ink for their routine maintenance. So, check out how much a model uses ink for that before purchasing.

Ink Supply

When you are buying for your home use, it becomes another possible reason for ripping off your hair when you forget to order a new cartridge after it finishes. If your house is in a remote place, then I don’t even want to talk about what happens.

So, it’s better to be ready for the problem before it knocks. Some manufacturers offer automatic ink supply services under a very low or sometimes without a subscription cost. You can always unsubscribe if you want. Also, they tap on your head for low ink-level notifications earlier than it ends. This is also recommended for the forgetful folks as well.

Other features

There are other features beneficial for busy office days, but not so crucial for home uses to splurge money on them.

  • Duplex: If you are at home and the printer stays under your nose, you can quickly flip the paper without much of a problem. So, the auto-duplex is not so important except for a high workload.
  • Speed: The slower PPM (Pages per minute) printers cost less, but provide enough speed to manage all your printing tasks at home.
  • Color and Resolution: DPI (Dots-per-inch) is defined as the ink dots per square inch of paper. More dots means better quality. But most printers stand on the ISO standard of that, and not so differ much than the others.
  • Duty-cycle: It’s the highest number of printable pages per month. I’m sure you can’t reach up to this much document printing alone at your home. So, it should not bother you much but keep it to reach the maximum level.

Manufacturing Companies

Epson, HP, Canon, and Brother are leading right now, but you should stay focused on your requirement. On that note, everyone offers almost the same for similar technology types.

Last Words

We hope this list of smart printers that you can set up for your home use or small office printing tasks may help you to decide the best printing system that understands the present age of connectivity along with the optimized costing.

Further, the short buying guide is there to help you concentrate on the required features that you need from these printing machines, considering the focal points like a printer for home use coupled with economical ink usage.

Now, it’s very accurate to say that your particular requirements define your best pick. And, the Epson EcoTank ET-4760 Wireless Printer checks all the boxes for the typical home-based usage that drinks cheap ink.

Are you a college student and need a printer? Read our recommendation in here: Best Printers for College Students.

Credits:

NYTimes.com

Consumerreports.org