The best printers and what to buy

About as close as you are likely to get to a great all-in-one budget colour printer, the Canon Pixma MG4250 comes with scanning, copying and colour printing, and is wireless so you shouldn't need to wire it up to your PC or mobile. Ink cartridges are not cheap on this model, coming in at around £15 for a cartridge, so its lifetime cost is going to add up significantly. It is a decent home printer for those who only need to do a few dozen sheets every now and then, but need the flexbility of an all-in-one.

In terms of features, you get around 10 pages per minute in black, or around six pages of colour, so it's a pretty sluggish machine in terms of speed. It has capacity for 100 sheets of paper and can be set up with PC and Mac.

HP Envy Photo 7134

If you want to print photographs then the HP Envy Photo is a great mid-range colour printer. You get reasonable speed at around 14 pages per minute in black and white, or nine pages per minute in colour. Set up is over Wi-Fi, which, while simple in theory has had a number of HP users complaining in reviews as the instructions are not all that easy to follow.

As well as Wi-Fi, you can insert and SD card and print photographs directly. The input tray includes space for 125 standard A4 sheets. Ink is, as ever, and issue with this HP. HP offers a monthly deal for printer cartridges with HP Instant Ink, although if you plan to print hundreds of pages per week may not be enough. It costs between £1.99 and £7.99 to print between 100 and 300 pages with this deal. Regular cartridges start at £15 for 200 sheets.

Brother HL-L2340DW

If high capacity printing is your priority, this Brother printer can meet your needs for high volume and speed. This Wi-Fi and wireless printer can churn out 26 pages per minute and store 250 sheets in its in-tray. It only prints in mono, or black and white, and not colour. It's probably best for users who need an home office printer with high-capacity.

Cartridges for this laser printer are also fairly cheap too, costing around 7p per page, giving you a capacity in the region of 1,000 pages or more per cartridge. This is a laser printer, which generally speaking means it is more economical than cheaper inkjet printers. You have to cash out more at the beginning for this printer, but over its lifetime you will get far more pages for your money.

Epson Ecotank ET-2600

The challenge with the printers we have already mentioned is the running costs. While some printers may look cheap on first glance, the fact you could be eating through cash to fund new ink cartridges is a major headache.

Which is why we like the look of the Epson Ecotank. It comes with high-yield ink bottles rather than cartridges, which should allow you to get in the region of 1,000 or more pages at around 0.1p per page. The printer also comes with easy to use scan and copy functions. The printer comes with two years worth of ink included, although it is slightly slower than some other printers we have mentioned at around 10 pages of black and white per minute. An Epson bottle with 4,000 pages of ink costs £6.99 on Amazon.

What to look for in a printer

Don't doubt it, buying a printer is one of the most challenging pieces of technology to buy. Not only do printers have a long history of being full of reliability issues, they are also expensive due to changing ink cartridges and time consuming if you have to fix jams and breakdowns.

Finding a decent printer is tricky. For starters, issues with poor quality prints can be apparent on cheaper models, such as streaky images, while cheap printers can also be hungry for printer ink.

Some key things to look for in a printer include:

• Print speed: How many sheets per minute your printer is going to churn out, especially if you plan to do lots of printing by numbers
• Connectivity: Is your printer wireless or wired? While wireless printers are more versatile if you are printing from a laptop, many printers are known for having connectivity issues
• Sheet capacity: So you don't have to add new paper every five minutes
• Ink cartridge price: A major gripe for printer users, paying too much for print cartridges is infuriating, but generally speaking your printer will work best when it uses its own bespoke cartridges

Should I buy an inkjet, laser or "supertank" printer

There is a lot of debate in which type of printer you should by, but ultimately it comes down to cost effectiveness over the lifetime of the printer. Inkjet cartridges tend to be more cost effective for people who will only print a handful of pages every week, given their cost at between £15 and £20 on average for only a couple of hundred sheets.

Laser printers use heat to fuse the colour to the page, while inkjet printers use tiny physical dots to fill the page.

But the start up costs for Inkjets are cheaper. The two models we recommend cost as little as £35. This means if you printed 1,000 sheets your printing costs would be £110 for the year.

Laser printer cartridges are normally more cost effective for bulk printing, but the printers themselves have an additional upfront cost. Take the Brother printer we recommend. You can get 1,000 pages from this printer for £11, but the cost of the printer itself is more than £140. However, if you planned to print hundred pages per week over the life of the printer you would save money.

Supertank printers are a similar proposition to inkjet, but are a relatively new innovation. They have refillable ink wells, rather than cartridges, so are cheaper on the ink. With one bottle you can get up to 4,000 sheets, so overall it could work out cheaper for bulk printers.