The best laser printer 2018: top picks for quick and quiet printing

Welcome to our list of the best laser printers of 2018. If you're looking for a new laser printer to handle heavy workloads, or you're sick of your inkjet printer guzzling ink cartridges like there's no tomorrow, then you've come to the right place.

There are a number of advantages to picking one of the best laser printers over their inkjet brethren. For a start, the running costs are lower, which means you’ll be spending less money replacing the toner of a laser printer, compared to refilling and replacing myriad ink cartridges.

They’re also a lot faster and quieter. This makes the best laser printers perfect for busy offices that require a lot of printouts, without annoying employees with too much noise. The best laser printers also produce excellent results with text documents.

Now, while the best laser printers used to be found most often in oftens, they’re more affordable and flexible than ever before. This means they make great printers for home use, too. The best laser printers come in every shape and size, and we went ahead and found a ton of recommendations so that you can find the right laser printer for your home or office– just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Samsung M2885FW 4-in-1 Multifunction Xpress

This temptingly priced printer offers 28ppm printing at up to 4,800 x 600 dpi (effective, rather than optical, resolution). With wired (Ethernet/USB) and wireless (Wi-Fi/NFC) connectivity, duplex printing, decent eco settings and support for a wide range of media, the Samsung is an excellent all-rounder, although the multi-purpose tray can only handle one sheet of media at a time. The main cassette has a more useful capacity of 250 sheets.

Samsung Xpress M2070W

The M2070W delivers a lot of bang for your business buck – there's NFC printing from compatible smartphones, online document sharing, and a clever Eco system that supplements the usual toner saving mode with a feature to remove images from documents by replacing bitmaps with sketches.

Factor in claimed speeds of 20ppm, a clever scan to mobile feature and an effective print resolution of up to 1200dpi and you've got a multifunction printer that's well worth considering.

Brother DCP-9020CDW

The DCP-9020CDW is a baby Brother – it's an entry-level all-in-one aimed at small offices, and with claimed speeds of 18ppm and a resolution of up to 2,400 dpi (effective) it has a decent spec for the price. It can upload to cloud services such as Dropbox and OneNote, it's wireless with WPS authentication and wireless direct printing, and its running costs are competitive. It also offers automatic duplex printing and its colour screen makes it easy to install and operate. This device is a solid all-rounder for PCs and mobile devices alike.

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This is a colour laser printer, plain and simple. It has a relatively small footprint on the desk thanks to a surprisingly compact design. The printer is fitted with a 150-sheet main paper tray and a 100-sheet output tray, with an integrated drum/fuser unit and manual duplexing capabilities. Controls are adequate, with a two-line LCD display and a number of buttons for basic menu navigation. The C1760NW also offers an Ethernet connector, 802.11n Wi-Fi and a USB 2.0 port; although there is no USB host connectivity. The printer is aimed at office or small workgroups and has a high-rated speed of 15ppm for black and colour. This is a good workhorse for everyday printing, where colour isn't a major part of the mix.

Brother HL-3140CW

At the time of writing, this Brother was Amazon's best-selling laser, and with good reason – for very little cash you're getting a superb wireless colour laser. However, at this price don't expect rock-bottom running costs – it's a printer for livening up documents with the occasional flash of colour, not constant photo printing.

It doesn't have automatic duplexing or an Ethernet port, but the HL-3140CW delivers superb print quality, reasonable mono running costs and good wireless features for a very low price.

The Xerox WorkCentre 6515/DNI is an excellent laser printer for office use. It can handle a huge variety of paper sizes and types, and it excels at printing text documents. As an all-in-one printer, it's a great addition to any busy office, and it's also very fast and quiet. However, if you need to print out lots of graphics, or photos, then you'll find better laser printers for the price.

If you're looking for a color laser printer that also does a good job of scanning and photocopying, then the Canon Color imageClass MF634Cdw is well worth considering. It's a great laser printer that provides very good print quality, and its output speed is impressive. It comes with plenty of features, including Wi-Fi capabilities. However, it is very large, so you may struggle to fit it into smaller offices and rooms. Also, it's output tray only handles 100 pages, which could prove annoying if you're printing large documents.

The HP T6B82A Color LaserJet Pro is a decent entry-level laser printer that's best suited to small business or home use. This is because while it's quite quite a low initial price tag, this isn't the fastest laser printer. It also isn't the most economical when printing large volumes. If you don't need a laser printer that can quickly and cheaply print out large documents 24/7, and instead want a decent laser printer that can also scan and photo copy for a low initial cost, then this is a worthwhile investment.