The best compact printer enables you to print photos, documents and more, in high quality, without taking up a lot of space. That's great when you're working out of a small home office, and also helpful if you're taking your printer out on the road. To help you find the right one for your needs, we've gathered together the best compact printers available today below.
Note that we're not talking about the best portable printers (opens in new tab) here. The way they differ is that compact printers print on ordinary-sized paper, whereas portable printers use smaller, specialized paper. In other words, a compact printer will do pretty much everything a larger printer can, just in a more space-efficient way.
That said, many compact printers are designed with travel in mind. Some can connect wirelessly to your laptop or tablet, and they may even come with rechargeable batteries, so you can use them away from a wall socket.
Best compact printers in 2023
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Able to handle glossy photo paper as easily as it does plain A4, the Epson WorkForce WF-110W is a hugely useful compact printer, with a rechargeable Li-ion battery built in. You can connect it to your laptop via Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct, it's an easy printer to set up and get started with, and it produces prints that are highly detailed and look fantastic.
On the downside, it's a little slower than other printers, and its inkjet cartridges are on the pricey side, so it's probably not the best option if you're going to be printing a ton of photos or documents.
See also Best all-in-one printers (opens in new tab)
Producing five-ink prints of outstanding quality on ordinary or photo paper, the Canon Pixma TR150 compact printer packs in a lot of technology for a device that can fit inside a standard backpack.
Connecting easily to your laptop or other device via USB or Wi-Fi, this inkjet printer can manage up to nine pages per minute in black and white, which is not too shabby at all for a portable device, and color pages are delivered at 5.5 pages a minute. It's also great for taking on trips, as it can be battery powered.
However, note that this doesn't come with the rechargeable power pack as standard. In some territories you can buy the TR150 with battery as a kit, and others the Canon LK-72 battery is sold separately.
As a scaled-down version of a desktop printer, the OfficeJet 250 enables full-sized printing on letter sized plain paper, as well as on glossy photo paper. And it comes complete with a built-in color scanner and color screen, enabling easy photocopying on the fly.
Usefully for portable printing, it also includes its own rechargeable battery pack, so you can print anywhere. The printer uses a pigment-based black ink cartridge and a tri-color dye-based cyan, magenta and yellow cartridge. Quality is good for color documents, although not the best for photo output on glossy paper.
Looking for a compact printer that's lighter on the wallet that the other models on this list? Then we recommend the Canon Pixma TS6350. This is a serious inkjet printer that uses Canon's Chromalife100 inks, making for durable, high quality results whether you're printing documents or photos. (Note that these aren't the cheapest, though).
This 3-in-1 device offers printing, scanning and copying, has a nice 1.44-inch touchscreen and prints at 15 pages per minute for docs, and a 10x15cm borderless photo in 21 seconds. For Cloud printing you can choose between the Canon PRINT app, AirPrint on iOS and Mopria on Android, and there's also auto 2-sided printing and paper width detection.
If you're looking for a budget friendly, compact home printer that all the family can use, we recommend the HP Envy 6020e. It allows you to print, copy and scan in colour, as well as featuring automatic two-sided printing and mobile and wireless printing. The price includes six months of Instant Ink, which allows you to print up to 700 pages a month free when you enrol. So for a family that's likely to use it a lot, this is an absolute bargain. On the downside, the printing speed of seven to 10 pages per minute is pretty slow.
Business printers don't have to be enormous. There are some very professional laser printers out there that won't take up much space, and here's our best buy if you run a busy office. The Kyocera Ecosys P3155dn will print clear, crisp and precise pages in black-and-white, very quickly; 55 per minute to be exact. With a maximum capacity of 2,600 sheets, it's a great choice when you need to print large documents. And although this is a big investment overall, the cost per page does turn out to be very economical.
If your main priority is printing photos rather than documents, here's a great option at a compact size. The XP-8600 is a six-ink printer, and those inks are carefully formulated to enable realistic photo output. What's more, Epson promises they'll last 300 years if you put your prints in an album.
Despite being so photo friendly, it's not bad at printing out documents too. You can print wirelessly and from mobile. There are dual paper trays (one for A4, another for photo paper), along with a nice touchscreen, and it all comes in at an affordable price. For more, read our Epson Expression Photo XP-8600 review (opens in new tab).
If you're on the go a lot, and want to print from a MacBook, the WorkForce WF-110W is a good choice. Small, light and perfectly formed, this versatile colour printer is nice and portable while still producing high-quality prints.
You can connect your MacBook via Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct, and AirPrint is supported too. There's a built-in battery, and Epson claims this will let you print 50 color or 100 monochrome pages on a single charge. You can power the WF-110W from a wall socket or via USB, and it's all quite easy to set up. On the downside, it's not the fastest (7ppm in mono or 4ppm in colour), and its inkjet cartridges aren't particularly cheap.
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