| Quick Facts | |
|---|---|
| ENERGY STAR color MFD annual energy use (25 ipm class) | about 18 kWh/year required vs. about 109 kWh/year for a less efficient model (DOE FEMP) |
| ENERGY STAR imaging equipment efficiency gain | up to energy than conventional models (ENERGY STAR) |
| Annual ink-cost spread across tested models | more than 20-fold between the cheapest and priciest (Consumer Reports) |
| HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3101fdw print speed | up to 35 black-and-white pages per minute |
| HP LaserJet M110w print speed | up to 21 black-and-white pages per minute |
| HP OfficeJet Pro 8125e color inkjet paper tray | 225-sheet input tray with auto document feeder and duplex printing |
| HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301sdw | 250-sheet input tray; about 37.7 lb |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2800 ink supply | up to 2 years of bottled ink included, cartridge-free |
So, do you actually need a color printer at home?
Whether you need a color printer comes down to what you print in an average month, not what you might print someday; routing rare color jobs elsewhere usually beats owning the capability.
Shopping for a specific model? See our full home printers roundup — 10 models compared on the specs that decide it.
Most people shopping for a printer start with the wrong question. They compare specs across a handful of inkjets and lasers before ever counting how many color pages actually come out of their printer in a normal month. That's backward, and it's a big part of why so many color printers end up half-used with a clogged print head within a couple of years.
Consumer Reports' printer buying guide backs an instinct a lot of households already have: it frames plain text as the primary thing home printers are bought to do, with color and photos the secondary use. If that matches your household - bills, forms, the occasional boarding pass - a color printer solves a problem you don't actually have very often. If you're the exception - a parent printing school projects weekly, someone running a small craft or resale operation, a family that still prints photos instead of only viewing them on a phone - the case for color gets a lot stronger. For a wider view of what's on the market once that question is settled, our best home printers guide compares current models on price, features, and value without assuming color or monochrome going in.
How often people actually print in color
Consumer Reports treats plain black-and-white text as the primary job home printers do, with color and photos the secondary use - which is why so many color printers sit underused.
Ask someone why they bought a color printer and the answer is often some version of just in case. The data doesn't back up just in case nearly as often as people assume. Consumer Reports, which has tested printers for years, frames plain black-and-white text - bills, tax forms, boarding passes, homework - as the primary job most home printers are bought to do, with color graphics and photos the secondary use.
That doesn't mean color printing never matters at home. Parents printing a steady stream of school projects, anyone running a small craft or resale shop out of a spare room, or a household that still prints family photos rather than only swiping through them on a phone all have a real, recurring reason to want color on demand. The difference is frequency: color that happens weekly justifies owning it, while color that happens twice a year usually doesn't. That frequency gap matters for another reason too, since an inkjet that sits unused between rare color jobs is the printer most likely to let you down exactly when you need it. That failure mode is worth keeping in mind before the cost comparison in the next section.
What color printing actually costs after the printer itself
A printer's price tag is a small part of owning it; ink and toner replacement is where the real gap between cartridge inkjets, tank systems, and lasers shows up over a few years.
A printer's price tag rarely tells the real story of owning it. Consumer Reports tested annual ink costs across a range of inkjet and laser models and found more than a twentyfold spread between the cheapest and priciest options, with cartridge-based color inkjets consistently landing at the expensive end and tank-style refillable ink at the cheap one. That spread is the actual budget question, not the sticker price sitting on the shelf.
Tank-style color printers close a lot of that gap. Models built around refillable ink reservoirs, the kind detailed in our color home printer comparison, ship with enough ink included to cover roughly two years of typical use before anything needs refilling, trading a higher purchase price for a much lower cost per page than cartridge-based color inkjets. If color printing happens often enough to matter, a tank system is usually the better financial bet than a traditional cartridge printer, even at a higher price upfront.
For households that need color at higher volumes - reports, presentations, a steady run of flyers - a color laser like HP's Color LaserJet Pro MFP 3301sdw pairs faster output with a 250-sheet input tray, in a unit whose roughly 37.7-pound weight reflects office-grade internals rather than a compact home footprint. It's the same tradeoff that makes monochrome laser printers the default recommendation for text-only households, just applied to color. Pay more upfront, spend less per page at volume.
When a black-and-white laser printer is the smarter default
If your printing is almost entirely text, a monochrome laser is usually the lower-cost, lower-hassle choice, and skipping color removes the ink-drying problem entirely.
For a household whose printing is essentially bills, forms, and homework, skipping color is the more defensible default. Toner doesn't dry out the way liquid ink does, so a monochrome laser can sit untouched for weeks and still print a clean page the next time it's needed. There's no cleaning cycle quietly eating toner in the background, because there's no liquid ink to dry out in the first place.
Current models built for exactly this use case make the case well. HP's LaserJet M110w is built around fast, black-and-white-only printing in a compact footprint, while the step-up HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3101fdw adds scanning, copying, and fax on top of print speeds rated up to 35 black-and-white pages per minute, genuinely fast for a home device. If that kind of speed and simplicity sounds closer to your household than color ever will, our laser printer guide narrows the field to models built around exactly that tradeoff.
There's also a quieter efficiency argument for going monochrome, and it isn't really about color at all, it's about how the printer is built. The Department of Energy's Federal Energy Management Program benchmarks a 25-images-per-minute color multifunction printer and found that an ENERGY STAR-qualified model in that class draws about 18 kilowatt-hours a year against roughly 109 kilowatt-hours for a less efficient unit of the same speed. That gap is worth checking on the spec sheet regardless of which way you land, since a color engine simply has more components drawing power in the first place.
When a color printer earns a permanent spot on your desk
A color printer is worth owning when color output is a recurring need rather than an occasional one - school projects, craft or resale work, or family photos printed at home instead of through a lab.
If color printing shows up weekly rather than twice a year, the calculation flips. A busy home office turning out client-ready proposals, a parent printing color school projects on a school-night deadline, or anyone who still prints photos for a scrapbook or a wall frame has a genuine, recurring reason to own the capability rather than route around it. That's the household this whole comparison is really written for.
An all-in-one built for that mix, like HP's OfficeJet Pro 8125e, pairs color printing with scanning, copying, an automatic document feeder, and duplex printing in a single 225-sheet-tray unit. That's the kind of feature set that earns its place on a desk used daily rather than a few times a month. The point isn't that any one model is right for every household; it's that the feature list only pays for itself if the printing habit behind it is real.
Cartridge-free tank systems deserve a specific look here too. Epson's EcoTank ET-2800 is built around bottled ink rather than cartridges, with up to two years of ink included in the box and a design aimed at cutting cartridge waste, a meaningfully different ownership experience than topping up small ink cartridges every few weeks. Once a household has decided color is worth owning, the tank-versus-cartridge decision matters almost as much as the color-versus-mono one did in the first place.
Keeping a color printer from clogging if you don't print often
Idle color ink can dry inside the print head within a few weeks, so infrequent color printing needs either routine maintenance pages or a tank or laser system that doesn't depend on liquid ink sitting still.
Ink sitting still is a color inkjet's real enemy, more so than time itself. Left idle for a few weeks, the tiny nozzles in a color print head can dry out enough to streak or skip colors entirely. The printer's usual response is a cleaning cycle that burns through ink without producing a single finished page, a detail no spec sheet ever mentions.
A little routine maintenance keeps that from happening. Printing a page every week or two, even a simple test print, is usually enough to keep the nozzles clear, and leaving cartridges installed between jobs matters more than most people realize, since pulling them out exposes the ink to more air. None of that changes the underlying tradeoff, though. If color printing happens rarely enough that you'd need to schedule maintenance prints just to keep the head alive, that's itself a sign you don't need a color printer as often as you assumed.