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Save space and get quality prints on the move using one of the best compact printers available today thermal sticker
The quick list ↩ 1. Best overall: Epson WF-110 2. Five inks: Canon TR150 3. Photos: Epson Photo XP-8600 4. With scanner: HP OfficeJet 250 5. Fastest: Canon Pixma TS6320 6. Best budget: HP Envy 6020e 7. Laser: Kyocera P3155dn How to choose How we test FAQs
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.
We 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.
If your main priority is photos, this is our pick for a compact photo printer. The XP-8600 is a six-ink printer, and those inks are carefully formulated to enable realistic photo output.
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.
We found this to be a great value compact multifunctional printer. In our tests, the combination of pigment ink plus four dye-based inks delivered well for both mono and color printing.
For a budget-friendly, compact home printer, we recommend this all-in-one, which can print, copy and scan in colour, including automatic two-sided printing and mobile and wireless printing.
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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.
Read our full Epson WorkForce WF-110W review for more details.
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.
Based on our tests, we think this is the best compact printer for photos. It's a six-ink printer, which already gives it an advantage for creating more precise colour prints, and those six dye-based inks are carefully formulated to enable realistic photo output. Epson even claims the colours will last 300 years if you put your prints in an album.
We found that the colours were actually a little too vivid when we left the default ‘auto corrections’ function on, but after disabling this, we thought prints looked great when using the standard settings. We recorded print times of 13 seconds at standard quality and 52 seconds at high quality for 15x10cm borderless prints. A4 borderless prints took either 50 seconds or 2 minutes 17 seconds. That’s quite quick.
While it's geared towards photos, we found it to do well printing out documents too. You can print wirelessly and from mobile, and we found the touchscreen nice and intuitive to use. There are dual paper trays (one for A4, another for photo paper) and even a built-in scanner, so photocopying is also an option. And it all comes in at an affordable price.
Read our full Epson Expression Photo XP-8600 review for more details.
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.
For value for money, we highly recommend the Canon Pixma TS6350. It's a serious inkjet printer that uses Canon's Chromalife100 inks, making for durable, high-quality results whether you're printing documents or photos. We think the price is very good when you consider the quality and speed, and the fact that the device provides printing, scanning and copying, although the inks aren't the cheapest to replace, so the cost will start to add up if you print a lot.
When we tested it, we found print speeds to be impressively quick: around 15 pages per minute for mono documents and 10ppm for color, while 6x4-inch photo output at optional quality settings took 19 seconds (normal) or 43 seconds (high). The automatic duplex printing worked well for double-sided output flipped on either the long or short edge. We also found it very easy to use for cloud printing, with the option to choose between the Canon PRINT app, AirPrint on iOS and Mopria on Android.
See our full Canon Pixma TS6320/6350 review for more details
If you're looking for a budget friendly, compact home printer that all the family can use, we think the HP Envy 6020e offers great value. It allows you to print, copy and scan in colour and has automatic two-sided printing and mobile and wireless printing.
white uncoated paper The price includes six months of Instant Ink, which allows you to print up to 700 pages a month for free when you enrol. We think that makes this a great buy for a family that's likely to use it a lot. On the downside, we found the printing speed of around seven or eight pages per minute is quite slow, and photo printing isn't the best quality.