5 Of The Best Printers You Can Buy In 2026, According To Consumer Reports






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We may be living in the digital age, but having a printer on hand can still be very useful. Sure, you could head over to your local office supplies store to do this and pay for each sheet of paper you need, but that requires you to take time out of your day to perform a task that you could otherwise do with just a few clicks at home.

For some people, a basic printer is enough, while others may need a color-capable printer with extra functions like copying and scanning. Because printers aren’t exactly front of mind for most people, outlets like Consumer Reports are a great resource to identify printers on the market that not only fulfill one’s needs but come recommended by its in-house experts and real-world owners alike.

Here, we are going to look at five printers that are highly ranked by Consumer Reports. Rather than just showcasing the five with the highest overall ratings, these will cover a variety of printer types that the market has to offer. This should give prospective printer buyers a good selection to choose from, based on their needs and budgets.

Brother HL-L6310DW

One thing is consistent across just about every type of printer that Consumer Reports tests: Brother printers, like the Brother HL-L6310DW, rate very highly. It’s not just CR, either: the brand tops our ranking of printer brands as well. The L6310DW is a monochromatic printer that offers wireless and Ethernet connectivity, letting you print whatever you need from any device connected to the same network.

The Brother HL-L6310DW isn’t for those who only print occasionally, though. Instead, it’s an excellent printer for those who print a lot, whether at home or the office. Its specialty is high-capacity printing, with the ability to print up to 52 pages per minute, drawing from a tray that can hold 520 sheets. For those with specialty printing needs — like envelopes or custom media — there’s an additional tray that can hold up to 100 sheets. The output tray itself holds up to 250 sheets of paper. Included with the printer is an ink cartridge good for 6,000 sheets of printing. It is this level of performance that causes the Brother HL-L6310DW to retail for $469.99.

For all regular black and white laser printers tested by Consumer Reports, this printer actually ranks second in the category behind the Canon imageCLASS LBP247dw, though just barely. The reason the Brother earns CR’s primary recommendation over the Canon is the latter’s lower customer satisfaction score. For the serious, no frills printers out there, the Brother HL-L6310DW is a great choice.

Brother HL-L2480DW

Some users need a do-it-all printer, one that can scan materials and make copies. There are even those who still need to be able to fax documents as well, even if it is something of an outdated technology. If that is the case, the all-in-one laser printer for these people is the Brother HL-L2480DW.

The HL-L240DW is a black-and-white printer that’s on the more compact side compared to other Brother printers, with a paper tray that holds 250 sheets. The Brother HL-L2480DW can print up to 36 pages per minute and also supports double-sided printing. It has wired and wireless internet connectivity and can wirelessly connect to any device you need to print from. That connectivity also supports printing from and scanning directly to cloud services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneNote.

The Brother HL-L2480DW isn’t Consumer Reports’ top-rated printer in the all-in-one category, with four other printers scoring better, three of which are also Brother printers. There are a couple of reasons why this one gets the spotlight, though. For one, those three Brother printers are more designed for business use. This makes them much larger and far more expensive. The only non-Brother printer to outscore the HL-L2480DW was a Canon model, and CR considers that brand’s reliability to be drastically below that of Brother. The Brother HL-L2480DW retails for $249.99, meaning it’s able to not sacrifice quality for price.

Brother MFC-L3765CDW

Now, we turn to what Consumer Reports considers to be the best all-in-one color laser printer, and to nobody’s surprise, it’s a Brother printer. The Brother MFC-L3765CDW shares some features with its black-and-white siblings, but there are also areas where it goes above and beyond what those handle.

The Brother MFC-L3765CDW has a tray capacity of 250 pages, and along with that, boasts a feeder tray for scanning that holds up to 50 sheets — no scanning pages manually one at a time. The printer also supports double-sided printing and scanning, so you can get even more out of those 50 sheets as well. It can print up to 27 pages per minute, while scanning ranges from 27 ppm for black-and-white pages to 22 ppm for color pages. With its cloud connectivity, you can either print or scan from your preferred document app, including Google Drive and Dropbox.

This is not a runaway favorite, though. The Brother MFC-L3765CDW has the same overall score as the Canon Color imageCLASS MF753Cdw printer. The reason it makes its way onto CR’s list is brand reliability, as CR ranks Brother way above Canon in this category. It’s, thankfully, also a more affordable printer: the Canon printer goes for $529.99, whereas the Brother retails for $459.99. When the overall score is dead even, these two things push the Brother MFC-L3765CDW printer to the top. The MFC-L3765CDW is, at the time of writing, only available from wholesalers like Costco or BJ’s.

Epson Ecotank ET-3958

One reason why many people decide against buying a printer is the cost of the ink. Not only can the printer itself be expensive, but the cost of ink can run into the hundreds of dollars. Single-use cartridges can be okay for people who don’t print very often, but they can be expensive and wasteful. That’s where tank inkjet printers come in handy. These use tanks instead of cartridges, which dramatically reduces the cost of ink per page. The tank printer at the top of Consumer Reports’ list is the Epson Ecotank ET-3958.

Epson claims that the ET-3958 comes with enough ink to print up to 6,600 monochromatic pages or 5,500 colored pages. By the company’s calculations, that means you should get up to three years of printing done before having to refill. With a tray that can hold up to 250 sheets of paper, you can take your time refilling the paper, too. The Epson Ecotank ET-3958 can also make copies and scan papers.

The folks at Consumer Reports are big fans of the Epson Ecotank series, as they occupy the top 11 spots on its list of all-in-one inkjet printers. There are actually newer and more expensive Ecotank printers available, but CR believes in the Epson Ecotank ET-3958, which retails for a pretty reasonable $379.99. It’s currently only available for purchase at Costco.

Brother MFC-J1360DW

Not everyone will want to spend hundreds of dollars on a printer, whether because of their fiscal situation or simply because they don’t expect to be printing all that much. Luckily, there are budget-friendly options available, and the one Consumer Reports recommends for these folks is the Brother MFC-J1360DW, which has a retail price of just $109.99. That is a remarkable deal considering the prices of the other printers on this list.

This is a full-color, cartridge-based inkjet printer that also has scanning and copying functionality as well, so you’re not giving up features to get a $100 printer. Where you will see cost-cutting is in its size: the MFC-J1360DW’s paper tray only holds up to 150 sheets, and while it does have a feeder tray for scanning to forgo you from manually going one by one, it can only hold up to 20 sheets. You do still have all of the wireless connectivity you could need for cloud app printing and scanning, though, which is great to have for the price.

The Brother MFC-J1360DW may be the printer Consumer Reports recommends for low cost, but this is by no means the top-rated color cartridge inkjet printer available. Of all the models CR has tested, this ranks 12th overall. That’s not bad, considering CR has reviewed 68 inkjet printers to date, but you’d hope for one at least in the top five. The problem there is that all of those top-tier models cost hundreds of dollars. So, if you’re seeking that sweet spot of quality and price, it’s the Brother MFC-J1360DW.





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ZDNET’s key takeaways

  • Amazon is reportedly developing a new Fire Phone.
  • The previous model had several issues, including an inferior app store experience.
  • Under new supervision (and with more experience), Amazon can do better this time.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t have “new Amazon smartphone” on my 2026 bingo card. As it turns out, according to Reuters, the retailer may be developing a new smartphone, internally known as “Transformer.” 

Those familiar with the industry will instantly draw parallels to Amazon’s previous smartphone effort, the Fire Phone from 2014. Appropriately, that phone ended up as part of a fire sale about a year later.

Now, in 2026, with no fewer than five phone brands in the US — Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola, and OnePlus — Amazon faces a lot of competition. In fairness, it also has two fewer platforms to compete against. In 2014, Windows Phone and BlackBerry were still very much part of the smartphone conversation; these days, not so much.

The AppStore problem

But there’s one mistake Amazon made in its first effort that will absolutely torpedo its chances at succeeding — the Amazon AppStore and specifically the decision to forego Google Play services. Google is simply too valuable in too many lives to not support the platform. Oh, and the Amazon AppStore is terrible.

Also: What’s right (and wrong) with the Amazon Fire Phone

It has admittedly been a few years since I last inventoried the Amazon AppStore, but when I last checked, the Amazon AppStore was a wasteland of half-supported or unsupported apps, with two notable exceptions. Finance, home control, and communication apps were either absent or had not received updates for years prior.

The only apps in the Amazon AppStore that remained up to date were productivity apps (largely powered by Microsoft) and streaming apps. Those two categories work very well on the cheap, underpowered hardware that Amazon usually launches, and that’s fine. A coffee-table tablet is a nice thing to have lying around.

A spark of hope

Amazon Fire Phone

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But a phone is another animal entirely. If a tablet is a device to entertain, a phone is a device for everything else. One of the key reasons Windows Phone failed was its lack of an app ecosystem. The Senior Vice President of Devices and Services,  Panos Panay, is very familiar with that saga, so I’m hopeful that he will make the same arguments to the powers that be at Amazon. 

Honestly, if there is anyone who I think can pull off an Amazon phone revival, it’s probably Panay, who understands design and product development better than most, and to be perfectly honest, he’s my absolute favorite product presenter.

Also: Amazon Fire Phone review: Not a great smartphone

Of course, all of this is early days. This phone is being worked on internally, and even Reuters reports that it could get the axe long before it sees the light of day. Personally, I’m intrigued by the idea, but I sincerely hope that Amazon doesn’t make this the shopping phone it tried to build in 2014. 

If Amazon just wants to make a nice, well-built smartphone, with a skin that pushes Amazon content to the fore, I’m fine with that. But leaving Google behind is a mistake that Amazon cannot afford to make again. Fool me once, and all that.

So, if this phone is to have a chance at success, it needs to embrace Google services so it can be a phone that everyone can use. Amazon has the brand power to make a phone like this work, even up against juggernauts like Apple and Samsung, but it needs to approach this correctly, lest it end up in yet another Fire phone fire sale.





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