What’s the Best Printer? 7 Options Ranked

The primary job of a printer is to print out pages, and black-and-white print speed tests are just measurements of how long it takes a printer to produce pages that are purely black and white. The better a printer is at printing in black and white, the more pages it’s able to produce in a minute.

Print speed is largely a matter of convenience, so while we have a minimum speed we suggest (generally around 20 pages per minute) there’s no real downside to a printer being slower if you’re using it at home – you’ll just end up having to wait longer to finish printing out a document. However, printers in professional settings need to be snappy because they’re going to be used constantly, and the faster a printer is able to produce documents, the better.

Much like black and white print speeds, color printing speed is simply a measure of how long it takes a printer to print out color documents and photos. If you’re purely printing photos, you’ll see an ever further reduced speed (given the size of photographs and the detail they demand.)

Color print speed is less important (generally) than black and white speeds, simply because it’s usually done less. However, if you’re constantly printing photos at home or in the office, higher print speeds are good to keep you from waiting around for a print job to finish.

Using your printer uses up ink, which means it costs money. Printing costs are usually measured as cost per print (or page) and are gauged by calculating how much each print costs by comparing the cost of an ink or toner cartridge to the total number of pages printed by the cartridge.

Print costs should ideally be as low as possible, with the greatest number of pages per cartridge being the obvious “goal” to aim for. Black ink, being the cheaper ink, means that black and white printing costs are usually lower on a per page basis. If you’re printing constantly, getting the cost as low as you can means you’ll be spending less on cartridges in the long run.

The other side of the coin when it comes to printing costs is the cost for printing using colored ink or toner. While it’s measured the same way as you’d measure black and white printing costs, the acceptable cost is much, much different. Colored ink is more expensive than black and white ink, and if you’re constantly printing photos, the cost of printing in color will ramp up very fast.

We therefore recommend that your printer print color pages at a cost of 40 cents per page or less. Less is always better – getting the cost as low as possible without compromising print quality is the ideal, after all.

Color accuracy with printers uses a mix of standardized references (like the Adobe ColorChecker) and a color control sensor to check the accuracy of the colors printed by a printer and then grades the accuracy on a 10-point+ scale. Unlike most scales, where 10 is good, color accuracy scores are reversed, with 0 and 1 being the most desirable score, as it indicates little to no deviation from the reference color.

Generally speaking, color accuracy should be at least a 5 or lower to be considered “good.” At 6 or higher, the colors are noticeably different, which is an issue if you’re printing photos and hoping for accurate colors.