Best cheap printers 2022: Cut price, not quality, with these superb budget printers

Despite the explosion of online forms and digital documents in recent years, paper stubbornly refuses to go away. With this in mind, it’s handy to have access to a printer, but if you’re trying to set up a home office on a budget, or just don’t do enough printing to justify a huge outlay, you’ll be wanting the best cheap printer you can get.

Budget printers have a reputation for being noisy ink guzzlers with poor print quality and worse reliability, but it needn’t be that way. We’ve rounded up the best-value printers available, with prices starting from as little as £60 excluding VAT. Even the most expensive model on our list still comes in under the £130 mark, though, so none should break the bank.

Buying a cheap printer invariably means some sacrifices, but there are still some things that are important to get right. All the printers on this list have been tested to measure print speed and output quality, as well as how expensive each one is to run over the long term. You’ll also find a chart below each entry covering key specifications including print resolution, paper size, input tray size, speed and, of course, the kind of printing tech used. While the description of each is short, we’ve included links to our reviews so you can find out more.

With all that explained, here are the best cheap printers you can buy in 2022.

Canon Pixma TS8350

At £100 before VAT is taken into account, the Canon Pixma TS8350 offers phenomenal value. An all-in-one MFP that offers scanning and copying alongside its superb print quality, running costs are pretty reasonable too, with XXL cartridges providing a return of 3.4p per black-and-white page.

It’s also reasonably nippy, outputting 13 monoprints in a minute, and an acceptable four colour ones in the same timeframe. The only real issue we have is with its somewhat flimsy build quality, but given the exceptional value it offers elsewhere, we’re more than happy to put our doubts in this area to one side.

Price when reviewed: £100 exc. VAT

Read our full Canon Pixma TS8350 review for more information.

Epson Expression Home XP-4100

Compact and surprisingly feature packed, you get an impressive amount of value from the Epson Expression Home XP-4100… assuming you don’t get through hundreds of printouts a day. That’s because once you use the bundled ink, you need to use the company’s four-cartridge system, which equates to prices of 5.2p per mono page and 12.8p for colour sheets. Yes, you can subscribe to Epson’s cartridge subscription service, which brings the costs down to around 3.3p to 4.3p per page, but users with heavy workloads are still advised to look elsewhere.

If that doesn’t apply to you, however, there’s an awful lot to like, including a generous 100-sheet paper tray, 10ppm mono print speeds, lightning fast photocopy times and its ability to print double sided. And while standard print quality is a bit ropey, upping this to high quality eliminates the issues when it really counts, making this a bona fide bargain.

Price when reviewed: £60 exc. VAT

Read our full Epson Expression Home XP-4100 review for more information.

Canon Pixma TS6250

Only slightly more expensive than the Epson Expression Home XP-4100 is the Canon Pixma TS6250, for £67 excluding VAT. And it offers an awful lot for that money, with superb print quality and speeds of up to 12.7ppm for mono sheets and 3.9ppm colour prints.

Canon’s five-ink system, which uses two types of black pigment for text and photo prints, means that running costs are perhaps a little above average, but not dramatically so: you’re looking at costs of around 2.8p per mono page.

There’s no fax functionality and it can be a little noisy when operating, but considering the low cost of entry, we find it hard to stay too mad with the Canon Pixma TS6250, and you’ll likely be equally enamoured by the sheer bang for buck it provides.

Price when reviewed: £67 exc. VAT

Read our full Canon Pixma TS6250 review for more information.

Brother MFC-J1010DW

The Brother MFC-J1010DW is a dependable, if somewhat unexciting, addition to the list of the best cheap printers. There’s a lot on show, however; it’s not just a Wi-Fi printer with a colour screen and support for dual sided printing — it offers scanning, copying and faxing capabilities to boot.

Printing quality is merely so-so however, lacking saturation compared to some of its rivals, and running costs are nothing to write home about either: you can expect to pay 2.9p per mono page and 7.9p for colour ones, if you stump up for Brother’s XL range of cartridges. Still, it’s speedy — capable of outputting over 15 mono pages in a minute — and it’s hard to go wrong at just over £100 without VAT.

Price when reviewed: £104 exc. VAT

Read our full Brother MFC-J1010DW review for more information.

Brother DCP-J1140DW

There’s not a great deal of difference between the DCP-J1140DW and the other Brother printer mentioned above, but it’s all a matter of use case: as a rule of thumb, the MFC line is for occasional home use, while the company’s DCP range is for more intense office wear and tear.

That’s largely the case here. It’s built for more frequent use, is slightly more fully featured and a touch more nippy — especially when dealing with colour prints. Notably, this one won’t fax, which is curious as you’d assume that’s more an office throwback than something for the home, but there we are.

Otherwise the same praise and criticisms as above apply. You get a lot for your money, but print quality could be better, and it could be cheaper, too, with prints coming to around 2.9p per mono page and 7.9p for colour ones.

Price when reviewed: £129 exc. VAT

Read our full Brother DCP-J1140DW review for more information.

Xerox B230

If you only ever print in monotone and value speed over everything else, then the Xerox B230 is well worth a look. A compact printer that’s comfortable with Wi-Fi or wired connections, it can rattle through up to 27.3 pages per minute.

But it won’t do so quietly, and the results aren’t the best we’ve seen either. While black text was near perfect in our tests, mono graphics had a bit more banding then we would comfortably recommend for the price. Still, with costs of 2p per page after you’ve worked through the 1,200-page starter toner, it’s a good investment if you need to print a lot of text documents in a hurry, and don’t mind a mild racket as the trade off for that impressive speed.

Price when reviewed: £116 exc. VAT

Read our full Xerox B230 review for more information.

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