Printers

Lifetime score

Our overall score combines test performance (how well the appliance works) with predicted reliability (how likely models from the brand are to remain free of faults) and owner satisfaction (how likely owners of the brand are to be very satisfied).

We’ll only recommend appliances you’ll love to own, that work well and keep working well for a long time.

Test performance

It’s no good if a product lasts for several decades if it doesn’t work well in the first place. A disappointing product will soon become unloved and unwanted. For this reason, our independent lab testing still forms an important part of our overall lifetime score.

Our printer test includes:

Performance

We measure how quickly printers can print and how accurate the final product is, for a variety of print jobs including photos, letters and spreadsheets.

The test also covers ease of use, from how involved it is to connect the printer to a laptop, to whether it can print from an SD card or USB drive, to how long it takes to start up.

For multifunction printers, this score also includes scanning and copying performance.

Ink and energy efficiency

Over an inkjet printer’s lifetime, you’ll likely spend more on ink than the printer itself, generating plenty of plastic waste in the process. But some printers use a lot less ink in their everyday operation, while some are less wasteful to refill.

In order to capture the ongoing costs of owning each printer, we recently elevated this part of the test into a key score.

We also bundled it with some other environmental parts of the test, such as energy use measured in four states: off, idle, standby and printing.

Predicted reliability

It’s reasonable to expect a new device to remain fault-free for the first five years. Our predicted reliability won’t tell you whether the printer in your study will start jamming tomorrow, but it does show which brands make models that are less likely to fail.

Owner satisfaction

Satisfaction is important – no device should be a source of buyer regret. Printers with very satisfied owners are more likely to get maintained well, and owners are more likely to keep hold of them rather than chop and change.

About our survey data

In our annual reliability and satisfaction survey, consumers tell us about faults that have left an appliance they own unusable or mean they’ve had to change how they use it. We also ask them how satisfied they are with the appliance. We use their data to produce our predicted reliability and owner satisfaction scores.

We use a statistical test to rate the relative performance of each brand. Compared to data we have for all products (of the same type) in the survey, we rate each brand with excellent, good, average, poor or terrible reliability and satisfaction. You can compare the rating of different brands for the same product type (for example, the reliability rating for Miele and Haier washing machines), but you can’t compare the results for different product types (for example, satisfaction of LG TVs and Samsung phones).

We analyse brands that get at least 30 responses in our survey. That means there are some brands we can’t analyse because we don’t have enough data. For those brands, we assume they have average predicted reliability and owner satisfaction.

Our data is based on responses for 1475 printers in our November 2021 survey.