What kind of printer you get for your home depends on what you plan on printing. As a general rule, if you print text only, or text and graphics that don't need color, a mono laser printer will do the trick. If photos are on your agenda, you need an inkjet or dedicated small format photo printer. If the only color output you print is graphics, you probably want an inkjet as well, but if you print infrequently, an inexpensive color laser may be the better choice. Laser printers have the advantage of being able to sit for months without being used, and then simply turn on and work, without the clogged nozzles or wasted ink for cleaning them that inkjets sometimes need. If you plan on doing any scanning or copying, but not so much that you need a standalone scanner, you should look to an all-in-one or multifunction printer. Decent AIOs aren’t that much more expensive than their printer-only counterparts. 

Each family or home office has unique print and copy volume needs. Since we're focusing on cheap single-function and AIO printers here, this roundup assumes you won't be printing or copying more than a couple hundred pages monthly. This is plenty for most families and homebound office workers, but demand is rising as we're seeing more printing from home.

We scrutinized all of the printers PC Labs has tested in the last few years that are still on the market, focusing on home-office or business models (both laser and inkjet) and photo-centric models (all inkjets among desktop printers). Usually, you'll see significant differences in features between machines tweaked for office use and photo printing. Low-cost office inkjets, for example, often include automatic document feeders, while their photo-centric counterparts don't.

Meanwhile, photo-minded inkjets offer better photo quality, with some higher-priced models employing five or six ink colors instead of the standard four (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, often called CMYK). The extra inks don't guarantee better photo quality, but they make designing a printer with better color accuracy easier. By contrast, the cheapest inkjets sometimes use old-school dual-cartridge (black and tricolor) designs, which work fine but are more wasteful as you must throw away the color cartridge once one of its three hues runs dry.

We've also included two niche classes of printers widely available for under $200: label printers (both for hobbyists and for folks shipping lots of items from home) and portable photo printers (for quick snapshots from your smartphone). The very smallest of the latter use an inkless technology known as Zero Ink (Zink) that applies heat to specially treated paper. However, their output quality falls short of inkjet and dye-sublimation photo printers.

Finally, we can't recommend any color laser printers for less than $200 (or anything close to it). The laser machines in this price class are monochrome.

It's important to note that you can find some very cheap printers nowadays—some under $50—at the bottom of most manufacturers' product lines. But it rarely makes sense to buy a slow printer with scanty features and replacement cartridges that typically cost as much or more than the printer. It's smarter to look for printers that will save you money in the long run and check your possible choices against reviews that assess features and cost of ownership, as ours do.