Readers' Choice Awards 2020: Printers

Chances are, you aren't in the market for a printer—it's one of the longest lasting product categories in tech, and with a modicum of care, a printer can seemingly last forever.

But if you're ready to upgrade, or COVID-19 work-from-home requirements mean you can no longer rely on the printer at your office, there's only one printer brand PCMag readers recommend again and again.

You read that right, a dozen years. This Readers' Choice survey has become a love letter from PCMag readers to Brother International. If there's any knock against the company in the results it's that Brother's 8.9 out of 10 high score for overall satisfaction from last year has dropped—but only by a tenth of a point to a still-stellar 8.8. As knocks go, that's the faintest ever heard.

Look across the categories we ask readers to rate, and Brother is on top in almost all of them. Standout scores include a 9.0 for reliability, 8.9 for paper handling, 8.8 for ease of use, 9.0 for copier functions (when the unit is a multi-function, aka all-in-one device), and an 8.9 for the likelihood to be recommended to others.

Dell's second place showing shouldn't be overlooked. It's a nice bump up from third place last year, when Samsung was the runner-up. There are a couple of areas where Dell equals or outperforms Brother this year, such as cost/value (tied at 8.8), print speed (tied at 8.7), and quality of photos (Dell's 7.6 to Brother's 7.3) and documents (9.3 to Brother's 9.2). You'll be happy with a Dell printer, or even a Samsung, but consider the consistency Brother brings to the table before making that final purchase. (Not that you can really buy a Dell printer anymore, they got out of the printer biz a couple years ago. These scores are built on nostalgia perhaps.)

Looking at those photo-quality numbers, it's clear that few people are happy with the images they get on paper—except from Canon. It earned an 8.1 for photo quality, and is followed up by the two lowest-scoring brands in our results—HP and Epson. Both have a 7.7 for photo quality, and don't do bad at all for document quality, either. It's kind of a surprising result for a world that has so embraced digital photography that good scores like that don't elevate the brand in other areas.

That said, the range from high to low overall satisfaction is within a point, from Epson's 7.9 up to Brother's 8.8—the average across all brands is 8.3. It's the same under the likelihood to recommend (7.9 Epson up to 8.9 for Brother, for an average of 8.2).

Are you going to regret buying any of these printer brands? Probably not, but consider your other needs. The scores for Epson and HP are relatively weak under tech support and repairs, for example. And Samsung's photos and overall paper-handling abilities are on the low end.

If you're looking to get a specific type of printer, Brother is also on top when it comes to ink-jet multifunction/AIOs (with an 8.5 overall score), monochrome laser AIOs (8.9), and color laser AIOs (8.9). It ties with HP on standard monochrome lasers (9.0).

For more, read The Best Printers of 2020The Best Printers of 2020.

You may be wondering: "What about 3D printers?" We asked about them, and respondents had experience with Creality 3D, Dremel, MakerBot 3D, Monoprice, and XYZprinting printers. But we require a minimum number of responses before we include any vendor in the results, and none met that threshold. Maybe next year.

Full Results

Readers' Choice 2020 Printers -- Full table

The PCMag Readers' Choice survey for Printers was in the field from June 22, 2020, to July 13, 2020. For more information on how our surveys are conducted, read the survey methodology.

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About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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