Best Printers for Students in 2026: Dorm-Friendly Inkjet, Laser and Ink-Tank Picks Ranked by Owners

If your printing is essays, readings and problem sets, a mono laser is the cheaper printer to own, and the Brother HL-L2405W is the one to buy. It prints 30 pages a minute from a 250-sheet tray, connects over dual-band Wi-Fi and prints from a phone through Brother’s app, and its toner is a dry powder that is still fine after a summer at home, where an inkjet would need cleaning cycles. A TN830XL cartridge lasts well over a thousand pages. It only prints, in black, on one side at a time; for scanning use a phone app, and for color homework look elsewhere. Owners rate it 4.1 stars from 2,400 reviews, and the value shows up in year two when the ink buyers have replaced cartridges three times.

The TS3720 is the printer for a student who prints a handful of pages a month and wants to spend the least possible. It prints, copies and scans, connects over dual-band Wi-Fi to a phone or Chromebook, and takes up very little desk. It is slow at under eight pages a minute, prints one side at a time, and its two-cartridge ink is the most expensive per page on this list, so a heavy printer will outgrow it in a semester. For a boarding pass, a syllabus and the occasional essay it is fine, and 3,500 owners rate it 4.0 stars. Buy the XL cartridges when the starters run out; if you find yourself printing every day, the TS6520 or MegaTank will pay back the difference quickly.

The HP Envy 6155 is the student printer for coursework that is not just text: it prints borderless photos and color graphics well, prints two-sided, scans and copies, and has a 2.4-inch color touchscreen that makes the menus obvious. HP’s dual-band Wi-Fi includes a self-healing feature that reconnects after a router drop, useful in a building full of them. It comes with a three-month trial of Instant Ink, HP’s subscription that mails cartridges based on pages printed; for a steady printer it can be cheaper than buying cartridges, but it renews monthly unless cancelled, so set a reminder. The 100-sheet tray is small and the review base of 430 owners is the smallest here, at 4.2 stars. For design, photography or presentation-heavy courses it is the pick.

The TR7120 is the TS6520 with an automatic document feeder on top, and for a student who scans handouts, lecture notes or a chapter at a time, that one addition is worth the small premium: drop ten pages in the tray and they scan to the laptop as a single PDF while you do something else. It keeps the duplex printing, dual-band Wi-Fi, OLED display and compact white design, and it uses the same two-cartridge ink system with the same cost-per-page caveat. It is newer and has about 500 reviews, but at 4.3 stars it is the best-rated printer here. If you never scan more than one page at a time, save the money and buy the TS6520; if you digitise paper regularly, this is the student all-in-one to get.

For the student who prints readings rather than reads them on a screen, the MegaTank G3270 changes the maths: its refillable tanks ship with up to two years of ink, rated at about 6,000 black and 7,700 color pages, and a bottle set costs about what a single cartridge pair does. It prints, copies and scans over Wi-Fi and is compact for a tank printer. It does not print two-sided automatically, which is a real omission for long papers, and its 1.35-inch LCD and Canon’s app setup are the usual gripes in its 4.1-star, 5,200-review record. Over four years it is likely the cheapest printer here to own by a wide margin. If duplex matters more than ink cost, pair the TS6520 with XL cartridges instead.

The Epson EcoTank ET-2800 is the tank printer with the longest track record, 18,000 owner reviews, and it offers the same proposition as the MegaTank: refillable tanks, up to two years of ink included, and yields of 4,500 black or 7,500 color pages per set. It prints, copies and scans over Wi-Fi with Epson’s heat-free head and produces good photos for project work. It shares the MegaTank’s lack of duplex and is slow at 10 pages a minute, and its 4.0-star average includes owners who ran into head-cleaning cycles or a long first setup. Between the two tanks the Canon usually costs less and yields more black pages, while the Epson has the bigger body of reviews; either will see a student through a degree on a couple of bottle sets.