For professional users, printers can get a little on the large size. So what do you do if space is at a premium but you don’t want to skimp on print quality? Thankfully, there are plenty of quality options available across all budgets, and we’ve highlighted the best small printers we’ve seen in 2022 below for easy perusal.
No, smaller doesn’t necessarily have to mean inferior print quality, and all of the options on this page will do an admirable job of keeping up with your workload, despite their diminutive proportions. Priced between £60 and £275 excluding VAT, most of these not only print a good page in mono or colour but are good for light scanning and photocopying duties as well.
To help you pick the right small printer for you, each entry below is accompanied by a chart detailing key details including print resolution, tray size, input tray, speed and, of course, physical dimensions to help you make an informed choice. If you want to read more, a link below each one will take you directly to a full review, so you can learn about the pros and cons in more depth.
When shopping for a small printer, size is obviously one of the biggest factors. If you’re working within the confines of a limited office space, you can’t afford to have a bulky behemoth of a printer, particularly if it’s not going to be used on a regular basis. One way to save space can be to look for a printer with as few additional features as possible; removing things like a scanner, ADF and display can allow manufacturers to squeeze machines into a more compact footprint without sacrificing quality.
Alternatively, you may wish to go down the opposite route - if you already have a separate scanner as part of your office equipment, opting for an MFP that combines scanning and printing functionality may allow you to save space by consolidating two machines into one. You may also want to look at a device with strong network or cloud connectivity, allowing you to print wirelessly. This will be particularly useful if the constraints of your workspace make it difficult to connect your PC to your printer with a cable.
You’ll also want to keep a close eye on quality, however, as there’s little point in a printer that doesn’t take up much space but also doesn’t deliver the results that it needs to. If you’re specifically looking for a machine with a minimal footprint, it’s probably not going to be used as a high-volume workhorse, but you should still make sure that quality and speeds are both up to the standards that you need.
If your working area doesn’t have a lot of spare space, it can be difficult to work out where to put even the smallest of printers. However, while placing it within arm’s reach of the PC may seem like the most natural option, this might not actually be the best location. Most modern printers now come with wireless networking as standard, which means you’re not limited by cable routing, and placing it somewhere out of the way - such as on a shelf, or even tucked away in a cupboard - can be a great way to stop a printer taking up valuable real estate.
For devices that may occasionally be used by other people such as coworkers, housemates or family members, you might also want to consider putting it in an easily accessible central location, such as on a sideboard or end table. If you’re going down this route, however, you may want to be more selective about the visual design of your chosen model.
There are a number of key tips for ensuring your printer stays in good working order over a long period of time, and one of the most important is to use it regularly. Running unnecessary print jobs in order to keep the machine healthy may sound a little counterintuitive, but ensuring that you’re printing at least one document every month or so helps keep everything running smoothly, particularly for inkjet devices where the ink in the machine can actually dry up and clog the workings.
Most printers include built-in nozzle cleaning cycles and head alignment processes, and running these can be a great way of killing two birds with one stone. You should also check regularly for firmware updates, as many machines don’t support automatic update processes; instead, you may need to manually download and install the latest software.
The rise of e-signatures, digital documents and cloud-based file transfer has meant that scanners are no longer as useful as they once were. While they may come in handy for businesses which need to digitise hard copies for the sake of record-keeping, the vast majority of users will likely never touch their printer’s scan functionality.
There are some exceptions; they can come in handy for taking scans of official documents such as passports or photo ID, for example, and artists who prefer working in physical mediums may find them useful for digitising their work. However, unless you already know you need scanning functionality, this can be safely discounted as a ‘nice-to-have’ feature.
The smallest printer you can buy
If space concerns are absolutely everything, then you won’t find smaller than this. Indeed, as our review says, “we’ve eaten bigger boxes of chocolates” than this, as this is a 1.6kg printer that’s intended for travel, rather than to live out its days in a single location. It even packs an internal battery, which means you can print from a laptop on a train if you really want.
Of course, making a product so small does come with drawbacks: there’s no scanning or photocopying, and it’s incapable of duplex printing. It doesn’t even have a paper output tray, such is its dedication to compactness. Performance is a little on the slow side, too, at just 6.9 pages per minute, or 2.2 for our complex colour test. Running costs are also high, with mono pages hitting 6p per page once the initial ink supply runs dry.
But you won’t find a tinier footprint than this, and for that reason alone the Epson WorkForce WF-110W deserves a place on our list of the best small printers.
309mm x 159mm x 61mm
Price when reviewed: £158 exc. VAT
Read our full Epson WorkForce WF-110W review for more information.
A superb all-rounder with a small footprint
While the Brother MFC-J1300DW All in Box can’t compete with the Epson WorkForce WF-110W in terms of size, this reasonably compact beast packs plenty of features and enormous value despite its relatively high price of entry. That’s because it comes with enough ink for 7,200 full-colour prints, and when that’s done (in around three years, Brother reckons), buying an XL cartridge will drive your running costs as low as 2.3p per colour page.
It offers scanning, copying and faxing (albeit not duplex) on top of its highly capable duplex printing performance, and it’s capable of outputting 12 pages of black text per minute. This easy-to-use printer is well worth its small-ish footprint.
435mm x 341mm x 195mm
Price when reviewed: £241 exc. VAT
Read our full Brother MFC-J1300DW All in Box review for more information.
The cheapest ink, without scrimping on feature
The Epson EcoTank ET-3850 may not be the smallest printer on this list, but considering it eschews normal printer cartridges in favour of tanks that you manually fill up with bottled ink, it’s still impressively compact.
No longer having to buy replacement cartridges is not only more environmentally friendly, but cheaper too, and the cost of ink can come to down as little as 0.2p per page, once you’ve used up the 14,000 pages’-worth Epson supplies with the ET-3850. Pages shoot out at a pleasing 15.5ppm in black and white — which is actually a little faster than Epson’s own estimates. In other words, if you get through a lot of pages, this is probably the small printer for you.
375mm x 347mm x 231mm
Price when reviewed: £275 exc. VAT
Read our full Epson EcoTank ET-3850 review for more information.
Combining cheap ink with a low upfront cost
The ET-2710 is slightly smaller than the ET-3850, but you still get extremely low running costs thanks to the EcoTank system where you top up ink tanks yourself from bottles. It’s weaker in other ways, though - which is perhaps to be expected considering it’s close to half the price.
For one thing, we found the print mechanism to be extremely noisy, and it’s not the fastest, either. It’s capable of speeds of 9.6 pages per minute for black-and-white sheets, dropping to 2.9 for colour graphics. There’s also no control screen or duplex printing, but for its low costs (both upfront and ongoing), it remains an excellent small printer.
375mm x 347mm x 179mm
Price when reviewed: £145 exc. VAT
Read our full Epson EcoTank ET-2710 review for more information.
The best small printer for under £100
You may be sceptical about how good a printer can be for less than £100, but the Canon Pixma TS6250 defies all expectations, proving to be an impressive little performer with decent speeds of 12.7 pages per minute for mono sheets and 3.9 for colour graphics. It’s not just pleasingly speedy either: print quality is exceptional.
So, what’s the catch? Well, for the price, there really aren’t many. It has no fax functionality, and it can be a touch on the noisy side thanks to a wheezy mechanical sound when in use, but considering it doesn’t break the three-figure mark, that’s literally a small price to pay for quality printing in one compact package.
372mm x 372mm x139mm
100-page input tray, 100-page rear feed (or 20 photo sheets)
Price when reviewed: £67 exc. VAT
Read our full Canon Pixma TS6250 review for more information.
The cheapest decent small printer you can buy
Unbelievably, you can get a quality printer for even less money than the Canon Pixma TS6250, although those who get through a lot of sheets may find this machine a false economy, given the company’s four-cartridge system makes for pricy ongoing printing costs of 5.2p per page of mono and 12.8p for colour.
If you only occasionally print, however, it’s a great little performer once you turn the quality up to ‘high’. It can print double sided, makes lightning fast photocopies and can turn out pages at a decent ten pages per minute for mono content, which is impressive for such an affordable model.
375mm x 300mm x 170mm
Price when reviewed: £60 exc. VAT
Read our full Epson Expression Home XP-4100 review for more information.
A fully featured option at a competitive price
Brother’s MFC-J1010DW packs an awful lot in, considering its compact frame and low price tag. For the money, you’re getting a Wi-Fi printer with a colour screen as well as scanning, copying and faxing capabilities. It also supports dual-sided printing, which is far from guaranteed in more expensive models, let alone one available for just over £100.
The performance isn’t the best, as it offers only so-so print quality lacking in saturation when compared to other options in this list. The ongoing print costs aren’t super cheap either, and you can expect to pay 2.9p for a mono page and 7.9p for colour sheets, if you purchase Brother’s XL print cartridges. neither of these things should be deal breakers considering the low initial outlay and decent feature set, however, and for those needing an affordable all-rounder it’s an excellent option.
400mm x 343mm x 151mm
Price when reviewed: £104 exc. VAT
Read our full Brother MFC-J1010DW review for more information.
A low-cost compact printer that punches above its weight
Another low-cost powerhouse, the Canon Pixma TS8350 won’t win any prizes for build quality — which feels a touch on the flimsy side — but it punches above its weight in all other respects.
Print quality is up there with the best of them, whether you want pages of black and white text or need a bold photo print in a hurry. It can handle all kinds of media types and prints out pages at a nippy 13 pages per minute in mono, too. There’s no automatic sheet feeder, which is a pity, but it’s a compact and capable solution that will be at home in any small office.
373mm x 319mm x 141mm
100-page input tray, 100-page rear feed
Price when reviewed: £100 exc. VAT
Read our full Canon Pixma TS8350 review for more information.
When testing a printer, there are two key metrics that we measure to assess its performance: speed and image quality. The first of these is measured by running a batch of documents through the machine and timing how long it takes to get through the whole job from the point we hit print, as well as how long it takes to produce the first page.
We use a 25-sheet black and white text document to test mono performance, as well as a mixed sheaf of 24 web pages, magazine pages and presentation slides to test colour speed. For inkjet devices, we’ll also repeat the mono test at draft quality, and to measure duplex printing, we’ll run the first ten pages of the mixed graphics workload, measuring the images per minute.
Image quality, meanwhile, is tested by assessing a series of greyscale images, colour photos and mono office documents. For devices with scan functionality, we’ll look at the image quality of a scanned office document, colour photo and colour input target chart, looking primarily for any evidence of colour banding or loss of clarity in both cases.
To measure scan speeds, we time how quickly it can deliver a single photocopy, how quickly it scans at various resolutions, and how quickly preview images appear. In the rare event that a compact printer includes an ADF, we’ll use a ten-page copy job to test its speeds in both mono and colour (where we can), and if both it and the printer are duplex, we’ll test this with a ten-sheet double-sided batch as well.
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