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Technology.

24 June 2021

Top five best colour laser printers for 2021

The best colour laser printers will give you good-looking colour prints, and without high printing costs. Find yours with our expert guide.

Hollie Hennessy

When it comes to producing great black-and-white or colour prints, laser printers are often faster than inkjet printers and typically cost you less per printed page.

The five colour laser printers in the table below, including models by big brands such as HP and Samsung, are perfect for printing big, text-heavy documents or office prints with colour charts and graphs.

But, not all laser printers are sure-fire winners. Colour laser printers can cost a pretty penny, so don't get stuck with a an underwhelming model that produces poor photos or stripy blocks of colour – scroll down for our list of colour laser printers to avoid.

If you want a monochrome laser printer (only able to printer in black-and-white), there are five Best Buy models featured in our best laser printers guide.

Only logged-in Which? members can view our recommendations in the table below. If you’re not yet a member, join Which? to get instant access.

Top five colour laser printers

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70%
£271.02
This is a high-quality Best Buy laser printer. With wireless printing features, auto-duplex printing and sharp, speedy prints, it’s almost the full package. Photos aren't the best, though.
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70%
£269.99
This colour laser printer can quietly churn out excellent text and office documents and it's pleasingly affordable to run. Although it prints in colour, it's not the best for photos.
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69%
£189.99
This is among the more affordable colour laser printers we’ve tested. It can’t scan or copy, but it can print in colour. It’s great at black text, but it struggles with anything more complicated, so it’s not ideal if you’re buying a printer specifically for photos.
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67%
£279.99
It falls short of our Best Buy printers, but there’s still a lot to like about this all-in-one colour laser printer. It’s cheap to run and comes with an automatic document feeder, which can significantly speed up scanning and copying.
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Some of the models we've selected aren't recent launches, but they're still some of the highest performing printers out there. You can check our printer reviews page for new reviews monthly. The table above was updated in May 2021.

Not found the laser printer for you? Browse all of our laser printer reviews

And here are three colour laser printers to avoid

Laser printers have plenty of merits, but printing top quality colour prints is not one of them. While the models above have excelled in our testing, plenty of colour laser printers underwhelm when it comes to turning out images, spreadsheets and photos.

The three printers below promise to turn out crisp colour prints at an affordable cost, but all you'll see is red at the poor quality prints that'll drop into the paper tray.

Colour laser printers to avoid

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63%
£379.99
This pricey colour laser printer is excellent for black text, but falls short on anything more challenging. There are much better options for printing photographs, even among other laser printers.
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60%
£289.99
All things considered, this isn’t a terrible printer. But its colour printing is poor, and its black and white printing isn’t good enough to beat higher scoring (and sometimes cheaper) rivals.
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51%
£244.99
Although its printing costs are impressively low, this print-only colour laser printer is expensive to buy. If you’re spending this kind of money on a printer, you should expect top quality in return, and this printer falls well short on that score.
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Buy your laser toner online

Most laser-printer users tend to buy branded, or original toner because the third-party choice is more limited compared to printer ink.

While the big names tend to dominate the toner market, however, according to our survey of laser printer owners, the joint top-scoring laser toner brand sells compatible and remanufactured toner cartridges – sometimes at almost half the price of first-party alternatives.

Find the best laser toner for your printer with our expert guide to buying toner, which includes the best places to buy laser toner online.