Printer security is often overlooked, but at your peril. Hackers can gain access to a network through the printer, and in any office printer that you're not right next to, sensitive documents in the paper tray can be seen by prying eyes before you get to them. Many business-centric models include a private printing feature, so that after you send the print job to the printer, you have to enter a PIN at the printer's control panel to actually print it.

For business printers in particular, firmware should be kept updated, as it often repairs vulnerabilities, and any printer hard drives should be encrypted. Many manufacturers offer administrative tools to help IT departments ensure printer security.

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.

Some snapshot printers can print from a computer over a USB connection, but most are meant as standalone devices for use with phones or tablets. Older models tend to come with Wi-Fi connectivity, and many can print directly from PictBridge-supporting cameras and memory cards or USB flash drives. (Make sure the printer is compatible with the memory card format you want to use.) A few print from internal memory, but you need to transfer files to the memory first, so find what connection you need to use to transfer images. Bluetooth connectivity is most common with today's "smartphone companion"-type printers.

Connectivity options for near-dedicated photo printers are much the same as for standard office models. Some offer a single USB connector; others add an Ethernet jack for easy sharing on an office network. Most now offer Wi-Fi connectivity, and a few offer all three (USB, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi). Few models at this level offer PictBridge connectors or USB flash drive ports or SD card slots, because the assumption is that serious photographers will want to tweak their images before printing from photo-editing programs on their PCs or Macs.