The best printers for students are a crucial part of any household or dorm room; whether you're finishing a term paper at home or creating a presentation while at a university, you need something that won't quit in the middle of an important print job. That printer has to also offer a good deal of value for its performance and features.
Thankfully, the budget printers included here are more than up to the task. They're also an excellent resource for your studies, whether that's printing outsources so you don't have to go to the library or assignments, so you can skip the internet café and get right to work, saving you a ton of stress, time, and, possibly, even money.
You don't have to grab the most expensive printer for decent-quality output. Since this is a student printer, the cost and replacement ink are vital when selecting the best printers. Additionally, the printer needs to give you a decent number of printouts before replacing the ink since ink cartridges will be the most significant expense in the long run.
The printer also needs to offer good quality printing, providing sharp and clear printouts in various document types. And, since students will be limited in space, it needs to be compact.
We've compared the best printer for students, from printing speed and pricing to building quality and size. We also considered the type of connectivity options the printers featured, their interface, and the quality of the prints, among other things.
With our list of the best printers for students, we've put together our top picks that will suit a student's needs, no matter what educational institute they are at. If you're also looking for a laptop, check out our best laptops for students or our best student Chromebook guides.
The best printer for students 2023
The best printer for students in 2023 in full
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The HP DeskJet 2755 is an affordable color inkjet aimed at the home office and comes with key features such as auto duplex printing and dual-band Wi-Fi built-in.
It can print on photo paper, envelopes, and any size of plain paper up to A4. With AirPrint and Google Cloud Print compliance, it’s easy to print via your smartphone, and HP’s companion app for iOS/Android is particularly strong.
There’s not much room for paper in the main tray (just 60 sheets of A4), but the conveniently compact design goes a long way to make up for that. There is a flatbed scanner at the top to convert documents and photos, but the print quality of pictures is not great. Although the ink cartridges are cheap, their yield is fairly low, so the running costs are bound to increase.
Epson’s supertank range proved that cartridge-free printing is the way forward for inkjets, though they were somewhat expensive. Thankfully the prices have come down and the Epson EcoTank ET-2720 is both cheap to run and relatively cheap to buy.
It’s also well-equipped with scanner bed, a color LCD screen and inbuilt Wi-Fi including Wi-Fi Direct. The main attraction for students will be its low running cost and the generous amount of ink included in the box — enough to keep printing through three years of study (or 4500 color pages).
Since bottled ink is around 80% lower than cartridge ink, you can rest assured knowing that the running costs won't be too high — perfect for students that need to print color photos often. The image resolution is also high, making this printer good for printing on glossy photo paper.
This print-only device is the simplest and cheapest model in Canon’s current MegaTank lineup, making it ideal for students who want to print a lot and not worry about ink.
You get enough bottled ink in the box for 6,000 mono A4 pages and 7,700 color, which may well see you through to graduation. It can print crisp coursework on plain paper and high-resolution photos on glossy photo paper.
There’s no auto-duplex mode, scanner, display, or Wi-Fi, and the print rate is slow (9 pages per minute), but if you’re in no hurry, this simple supertank will deliver high quality prints at the lowest per page cost. Along with regular plain paper, it can print on envelopes, glossy photo paper, and print banners too.
The printer isn't cheap, but by purchasing inexpensive bottled ink instead of cartridges, you can reduce costs by 80 to 90%.
As the smallest member of Epson’s Premium range of home printers, the XP-6105 is well suited to student accommodation. Apart from a fax facility, it is fully featured with Wi-Fi, auto duplex printing, USB and SD card slots all built in, and the ability to print on any kind of media from blank CDs up to A4 photo paper.
Along with Wi-Fi, it has Wi-Fi direct and AirPrint to make it hassle-free to connect to Apple devices without the need for Ethernet or USB cables. It lacks a touchscreen display, but there's a large color display (with buttons) that's easy to use, and for the money, the performance is impressive.
It's not the cheapest printer to run because of the ink costs, but the print quality's great and the printing speed is good even over wireless connections.
Thanks to its two-way cloud-based network connection, you can operate this ‘smart printer’ from your mobile device with or without a Wi-Fi network. It has no USB or Ethernet ports and no scanner either.
Instead it relies on wireless connectivity while the Tango companion app harnesses your smartphone’s camera to scan and straighten images for printing. All this allows the Tango X to be smaller than other inkjets and cheaper too. It’ll print on envelopes or photo paper of any size up to A4 and turn out pages at a reasonable rate of 11ppm.
It is particularly user friendly, thanks to the excellent app, and can even be voice controlled with the assistance of Alexa. Replacement ink cartridges are rather costly, but you can sign up for HP’s Instant Ink program to make some saving while having replacements sent in the mail.
Read the full review: HP Tango
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Frequently Asked Questions
How to choose the best printer for students for you?
The best printers for students have lots to offer to their users, but you'll want to keep some critical considerations in mind to select the right printer for your needs.
First, you'll want to assess your printing needs based on your course. You'll want to select a heavy-duty printer that can churn out plenty of prints every month for intensive printing.
You'll then want to consider whether your printing is primarily text or image-oriented. If your photo prints need to be detailed and precise, you'll want a high-resolution color printer with low ink costs. Your running costs will be much lower if you primarily print the black and white text.
Make sure to evaluate other aspects of the printer that enhance convenience, like the printer's speed, multi-function capabilities, connectivity options, control panel, and pricing.
The best printers for students: How we test
We test all our printers on our test bench and compare the findings against the other printer we've reviewed.
To examine the printer's performance, we use a standard ten-page document. We print the same documents across all the printers to analyze their speed, quality, vibrance, sharpness, color fidelity, and contrast. These test pages have fonts of different sizes and colors, mixed texts and images, and just photos.
We also check the printer's build quality, size, design, connectivity options, interface, and importantly, the running costs and pricing.
For more on how we test printers at TechRadar Pro, check out our guide on How we Test: Printers
