The best compact printers can allow 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 need to take your printer with you out on the road or to another venue. Some can connect wirelessly to a laptop or tablet, and some even come with rechargeable batteries, so you can use them away from a socket.
To help you find the right one for you, we've tested and reviewed a wide range of options on the market for this guide, and we've chosen the best compact printer for different needs. Compact printers use ordinary A4/Letter-sized paper and will do pretty much everything a larger printer can, just in a more space-efficient way. For even smaller printers, you may want to check out the best portable printers, which smaller, specialized paper sizes.
I found this to be a hugely useful compact printer. Able to handle glossy photo paper as easily plain A4, it has a rechargeable Li-ion battery allowing use without a socket.
This printer is of a similar size but produces five-ink prints for even better quality on both ordinary or photo paper. It packs in a lot of technology for a device that can fit inside a backpack.
This is my favorite standard sized photo printer. It runs on six dye-based inks for great photographic reproduction, while its bottled ink makes it cheap to run.
This scaled-down version of a desktop printer enables full-sized printing on letter-sized plain paper and glossy photo paper. And it comes with a built-in color scanner and copier too.
This isn't going to make the best prints of photos, but I think it's a very affordable option for anyone looking for a compact printer for homework and office documents.
For printing, copying or scanning lots of documents, this color laser printer covers all the bases. I found it to be a fast performer, and it's very competitively priced.
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Footprint: 31 x 6.1 x 15.5cm / 12.2 x 2.4 x 6.1in /
Weight: 1.6kg / 3.53lb
Battery: 1 x Li-ion
Compatibility: iOS/Android/Windows/Mac
Available colors: Black
Reasons to buy
+
Top-notch print quality for text and graphics on plain paper
+
Wi-Fi direct and AirPrint connectivity
+
Comes with battery
Reasons to avoid
-
Expensive inkjet cartridges
-
A little slow
-
Not so good for photos
This is our top pick as the best compact printer overall thanks to its versatility and portability. We found it to be a hugely useful compact printer that can handle glossy photo paper as easily as it does plain A4.
It has a rechargeable Li-ion battery built in, so you can use it without a mains connection, and you can connect it to your laptop via Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct. It's a good option for MacBooks because AirPrint is supported too. It's also so compact that it can fit inside a standard backpack, making it ideal if you're looking for a printer that you can take out on the road while still printing standard A4 size.
When we tested it, we found it very easy to set up and get started with. We also liked the results of the pigment-based inks on plain paper, with smudge-resistant crisp black text and vibrant color in graphics. However, while they can print on glossy paper, the results for photos are less impressive. Pigment inks in general are less suited to glossy paper, and the total of four inks isn’t enough for the best photorealistic output. The printer was also a little slower than some other compact 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 large numbers of photos or documents.
Footprint: 32.2 x 18.5 x 6.6cm / 2.6x 7.3 x 12.7in
Weight: 2.1kg / 4.63lb
Battery: Optional
Compatibility: iOS/Android/Windows/Mac
Available colors: Black
Reasons to buy
+
Optional battery power
+
High quality prints
+
Fits into a bag
Reasons to avoid
-
Battery is optional extra
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No NFC for mobile printing
The second compact printer on our list is of a similar size, although it's a little heavier. It also has a similar price, but it has the advantage of using five inks, which produces great results for colour printing on photo paper. Again, we found it easy to connect to a laptop via USB or Wi-Fi, and it can manage up to nine pages per minute in black and white, which is not too shabby at all for a portable device (color pages are delivered at 5.5 pages a minute).
The downside is that while this can be bought with an optional battery pack, it doesn't come as standard. In some territories you can buy it with a battery as a bundle, while in others the Canon LK-72 battery is sold separately.
Print size: Up to A4/US Letter (15x10cm / 13x18cm for glossy photos)
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, USB
Dimensions: 44.5x34x16.7cm
Weight: 6.6kg
Battery: No
Compatibility: Windows/Mac
Reasons to buy
+
Fabulous photo print quality
+
Inexpensive for a bottled ink printer
+
Cheap to run
Reasons to avoid
-
Less ideal for document printing
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No touchscreen interface
-
A bit slow for postcard sized photo prints
I like that, as with other Canon MegaTank inkjet printers, the G620 (G650 in Europe and G660 in Australia) is a cartridge-free machine that has relatively high-volume ink tanks, topped up by 60ml bottles of ink. With my money-saving head on, that works out to about an eighth of the cost of most cartridge-based printers. I also like that the printer itself is very affordable to buy, compared with many bottle-fed printers.
The photo-friendly line-up of six dye-based inks includes CMYK plus red and grey inks, aiming for a wide color space and enhanced mono photo quality. The individually keyed, squeeze-free bottles ensure simple, mess-free top-ups and make it impossible to pour any color of ink into the wrong tank. There’s no color touchscreen but the small mono LCD enables an intuitive pushbutton interface. It makes short work of creating mono or color photocopies, courtesy of the built-in scanner. Connectivity is good too, with USB and Wi-Fi, the latter enabling PIXMA Cloud Link for smartphones and tablets, Apple AirPrint, Mopria for Android and Wireless Direct.
A set of ink bottles is sufficient for 3,800 6x4-inch photos, or around 3,700 mono documents, or 8,000 color documents. Despite lacking a pigment-based black ink, mono text is pretty crisp. I find that print speeds are a little pedestrian, taking around 47 seconds to create a 4x6-inch glossy photo, but a borderless A4 photo print only takes a couple of minutes in standard photo quality mode. Color rendition is impressively accurate, tonal range is very good and the printer makes a good stab at black & white photo printing. In the long run, it’s great value for a highly capable and compact photo printer.
The best all-in-one compact printer for scanning and copying
Our expert review:
Specifications
Paper type: Plain paper / photo paper
Print size: Up to A4/letter
Connectivity: USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Footprint: 38 x 40 x 27cm / 14.97 x 15.8 x 10.6in
Weight: 2.96kg / 6.51lb without battery
Battery: 1 x Li-ion
Compatibility: Windows/Mac
Available colors: Black
Reasons to buy
+
Includes a built-in scanner
+
Built-in color screen
+
Rechargeable battery
Reasons to avoid
-
Bigger than most compact printers
-
Photo print quality is mediocre
We found the OfficeJet 250 to be effectively a scaled-down version of an all-in-one desktop printer. It allows full-sized printing on letter-sized plain paper and glossy photo paper and comes complete with a built-in color scanner and color screen, enabling easy photocopying on the fly.
We found it to be useful for portable printing and copying since it has its own rechargeable battery pack like our top pick. The printer uses a pigment-based black ink cartridge and a tri-color dye-based cyan, magenta and yellow cartridge. We found that combination made for good results in olor documents but the best for photo output on glossy paper.
The Canon PIXMA TR7020a / TS7450i (depending on whether you're in the US or UK) only has four colors in its two cartridges, and the quality of photos it prints is pretty mediocre. So why am I recommending it? Because I think it's perfect for homework and any other occasional mainly text-based print job required at home.
It can print double-sided and at a decent speed, and it provides USB, Wi-FI, and Bluetooth connectivity, so I had plenty of options for sending documents to print. It's also compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant if you prefer to issue voice commands.
When I reviewed it, I was impressed by the printer's mono document printing, which is fast, crisp, and detailed. And while the fairly minimal cartridge setup means photo printing on glossy paper is lackluster, it does keep the running costs low, which I think makes it a great choice as a home-working printer for schoolchildren, students, and adults alike.
You might well think that a printer weighing in at 22.6kg is a bit of a stretch for a ‘compact’ printer. I've certainly majored on inkjet printers in this guide but a laser printer might be better for you if you want to print high volumes of documents, because they're fast and produce really sharp, smudge-resistant text.
And when it comes to full-color laser printers, this Canon is more compact than most. And that’s despite featuring a full range of printing, scanning, and copying functions. I was pleased with the speed of printing, including in automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, and I liked the intuitive color touchscreen interface. In my review, I also highlighted the excellent connectivity options. There are the usual USB 2.0, Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi direct, but an additional USB 2.0 port allows scanning/printing and directly to/from a memory stick and there's support for cloud platforms like Google Drive, OneDrive and DropBox.
Scanning double-sided documents takes longer than with some more expensive printers, as the paper is fed twice (once for each side) but the scan quality is good. Competitively priced and with reasonable running costs, I think this is smart and relatively compact color laser printer for the busy household or small office.
The best compact printer for you will depend on your priorities. You will need to decide whether you want a printer purely for printing text documents or whether you also want to be able to print decent-quality photos. You will also need to decide how compact you want to go. Some compact printers are small and light enough to carry from place to place with relative ease, while some are much bulkier.
You'll also need to decide if you want the additional functions of scanning and copying. The most compact of small printers tend to only print. However, there are some reasonably compact multifunctional devices available. If you do need these functions, you might want to sacrifice some portability since an all-in-one works out cheaper and has a smaller footprint than separate devices.
Most compact printers are inkjet, but we have also included a laser printer in our list. Laser printers tend to be bulkier and more expensive to buy, but they are much faster, which makes them a better option for businesses that need to print large volumes of text documents. They can be more economical in the long run since they usually work out cheaper per page.
We test as many compact printers as we can get our hands on, and we look at the speed and quality at which they can print documents and photos. We test using a range of printing jobs, from monochrome A4 documents to full-color photographs, and assess the level of detail and color rendition the printer achieves as well as the print speed.
We also consider the printer's running costs – how quickly it burns through ink, and how much its cartridges cost to replace – to get an idea of how good a buy it is in the long term. We also asses build quality and how easy the printer is to use – how easy its menus are to navigate, and the options it provides for connectivity (USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc). For compact printers specifically, we have also taken into account size and weight for ease of portability.
Our test procedure begins with installing the latest software drivers and running nozzle check and print head alignment routines. We then create test prints from mono documents, mixed text and graphics color documents, and a wide range of digital photos that include landscapes, portraits, and black & white images. We also create prints from our own specially created test chart to test the printer's accuracy in terms of color reproduction, tonal range, retention of detail in bright highlights and dark shadows, and the ability to deliver smooth gradations in subtle color variations
During testing, we make sure to try the various available quality modes, including optional image enhancement features. For output speed, we record the time taken to produce various sizes of prints at different quality settings. Ink costs are calculated on typical page yield against average prices for the manufacturer’s own-brand cartridges or bottles. The printer manufacturer’s own-brand inks and papers are used throughout the entire testing procedure.
The definition of 'compact' can vary. However, by 'compact printer, we're talking about printers that still use A4/Letter-size paper but are small enough to more easily transport between different workplaces and to put away on a shelf or in a drawer or cupboard when you're not using them.
We've included devices up to a maximum of around 45cm / 17in in width. This is not something you'll want to be carrying around all day on a regular basis, but it's a size of printer that is feasible to put in a large bag for transport while still producing full letter-size prints. Some will connect wirelessly to your laptop or tablet, and some come with rechargeable batteries, so you can use them away from a wall socket.
Naturally, some devices are more compact than others, but while small, these are still designed to be used on a surface such as a desk or shelf. If you want an even smaller printer for using on the go, see our guide to the best portable printers, which use smaller paper sizes.
What is an all-in-one printer?
A couple of the devices in our guide are what are referred to as all-in-one printers, or multifunctional devices. As well as printing, they can also scan and copy. For more options, we have a dedicated guide to the best all-in-one printers for home offices.
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Matthew Richards is a photographer and journalist who has spent years using and reviewing all manner of photo gear. He is Digital Camera World's principal lens reviewer – and has tested more primes and zooms than most people have had hot dinners!
His expertise with equipment doesn’t end there, though. He is also an encyclopedia when it comes to all manner of cameras, camera holsters and bags, flashguns, tripods and heads, printers, papers and inks, and just about anything imaging-related.
In an earlier life he was a broadcast engineer at the BBC, as well as a former editor of PC Guide.
