Best Compact Printers of 2026

The Envy 6155 is the lightest full all-in-one here at 11.2 pounds, and the only one with a control panel you will enjoy touching: a 2.4-inch color touchscreen instead of the button clusters and two-line displays on everything else in this article.

A 100-sheet tray covers a week of homework and invoices, automatic duplex puts two-sided handouts out without you reordering pages, and the machine arrives with a three-month Instant Ink trial that ships cartridges by subscription. Read the trial terms before you start printing: the setup tanks in the box are rated for about 120 black and 75 color pages, so most of the first months of value sits in the subscription rather than in the starter ink.

The catch is the spread of outcomes. Some of these machines run for months without a hitch; others stop printing and stay stopped, and the wireless connection is close to a coin flip. That is why we rank it behind the Canon despite preferring its body and its screen. If the shelf is genuinely narrow and you want a touchscreen in reach, it is still the right buy, and buying where returns are easy costs you nothing.

The HL-L2405W is the only printer here that refuses to do things, and that is exactly why it earns a place in a house that prints pages rather than pictures. No color, no scanner, no copier — just black-and-white laser output, a 250-sheet tray, and a manual feed slot for envelopes and labels.

Laser toner is the practical argument. It sits in the cartridge without drying out, so a printer that goes three weeks between jobs does not open with a clogged head and a cleaning cycle. The 250-sheet tray holds as much paper as any machine in this group, dual-band Wi-Fi lets it join the less crowded 5 GHz band, and the Brother Mobile Connect app covers printing from a phone without a computer in the room.

What you give up is color and a scanner, and the second one bites more often than you expect: school forms, expense receipts, and signed pages all need a copy eventually, and a phone scanning app is the workaround for most of them. As the workhorse beside a small color machine, or as the only printer in a document-heavy house, it is the least fussy thing in this article.

Two and a half inches thick and 4.5 pounds is a different category of compact: the TR160 is the printer that goes in the laptop bag rather than on the shelf. It folds down to roughly the footprint of a hardback, holds 50 sheets in its single tray, and handles plain letter paper up to legal size — more than the inkless machines here can say.

This is the one that travels when printing has to happen somewhere else, and the job is narrow enough that its print-only design stops mattering. Ink is where the money goes: the five-color hybrid set produces genuinely good documents and photos, but it runs through it faster than the tank-fed models. Canon rates it at 9 black-and-white pages a minute and 5.5 in color, and a battery pack is available for the days when there is no outlet at all.

The OfficeJet 250 is the most expensive machine in this article by a wide margin, and it is the only one that prints, scans, and copies with no outlet involved. That single difference is what you are paying for.

At 6.5 pounds and 3.6 inches tall it drops into a messenger bag, the color display walks you through setup on the device itself, and HP Fast Charge refills the battery in about 90 minutes with the printer switched off — the detail that matters when you are packing up a hotel room at six in the morning.

The battery is also the risk. Packs that will not hold a charge are the failure to watch for, and they tend to announce themselves early, so charge it fully, run a dozen pages, and repeat before the return window closes. Wireless is the second soft spot, and 20 pages a minute is a paper-only figure that a photo-heavy page will not touch.

None of that changes who this is for. If your work moves — inspections, home visits, signings, a sales route — nothing else here scans a signed page and hands back a copy on the spot, and the price stops feeling strange the first week it saves you a drive back to the office.

Inkless printing sounds like a party trick until you work out what a year of cartridges costs. The D90E is the best of the thermal machines we tested: it pairs with a phone through its app in a couple of taps, prints a full letter page at 203 dpi, and arrives with a carry case and ten sheets so you can try it the day it lands.

The trade is the paper. This prints only on thermal-coated sheets, so a ream of ordinary copy paper is useless to it and you will be ordering letter-size thermal stock; thermal pages are also sensitive to heat and light, which makes them right for handouts, labels, and shipping documents and wrong for anything you need to keep for a decade.

The F11A takes the same letter-size thermal paper as machines that cost twice as much, and it does it for the least money in this article. At 0.43 kg and just over an inch thick, it is the one you can leave in a drawer and forget about until you need a label.

Pairing is the quirk to know before you order. The F11A does not pair in your phone's Bluetooth settings — it pairs inside the Rongta app — and it will not print through Chrome at all. Do it in that order and the rest is simple: crisp text on shipping labels, forms, and study notes, plus a USB-C cable for a laptop.

Where it trails the D90E is the extras: no carry case, and about 3.2 pages a minute is a queue, not a flood. But for a market seller printing labels, a student printing the odd handout, or anyone who wants a printer in a drawer rather than on a desk, the saving is real and the output is honest. We keep it as the budget inkless pick rather than the best one.