5 Of The Least Reliable Printer Brands, According To Consumer Reports – BGR

Personal printers are some of the most notoriously finicky electronics you can purchase. Depending on your personal needs or line of work, you may not be able to avoid purchasing one, so at the very least, you want something you know that you can rely upon to get the job done without jams or ink spurts. Based on a series of surveys conducted by Consumer Reports, some printer brands like Lexmark and Epson are definitely less reliable than others, particularly if you factor their laser and inkjet offerings separately.

As Consumer Reports’ survey explains, laser and inkjet printers have several distinctive differences that affect their overall efficacy. This means that one brand that does good work with one style of printer may not be able to pass muster with another style. If you’re planning on buying a printer for yourself or your office, you should know ahead of time which of the dominant types it is, as well as which brand is making it, all so you know if you’re in for paper jams and cartridge replacements later down the line.

For its survey of laser printers, Consumer Reports tested devices from Brother, Canon, HP, Lexmark, and Xerox. Laser printers are usually more expensive at the jump than inkjet printers, but have generally better long-term reliability, thanks in part to the powdered toner used for heat transfer instead of printing text with ink cartridges.

Consumer Reports’ analysis only mentions Lexmark laser printers in one of its tested subcategories, that being all-in-one color laser printers. Compared to other tested devices in this subcategory from Brother, Canon, and HP, Lexmark’s all-in-one color printers came in with middling ratings in Consumer Reports’ findings. To clarify, Consumer Reports’ findings are based on a survey of CR members, who provided feedback on nearly 70,000 printers purchased between 2016 and 2024. Considering Lexmark is barely a footnote in CR’s findings with that big a sample size, we have to assume that not many users invested in Lexmark laser printers, and those that did weren’t impressed.

Compared to Lexmark, Xerox’s laser printers had a much larger footprint in Consumer Reports’ findings. Interestingly, this was the first year that Consumer Reports actually included the Xerox brand in the running; previous years didn’t show a large enough sample size of user feedback to produce reliable data. Xerox is one of the oldest printer brands in the world, and is largely credited with kicking off the modern photocopier scene, though it seems to have more historical than practical value.

Xerox laser printers were tested for several subcategories, including all-in-one black and white laser printers, all-in-one color laser printers, and regular color laser printers. In these categories, Xerox’s offerings were only acceptable at best, and middling at worst. None of Xerox’s laser printers were outright awful, but compared to the much higher ratings given to Brother, HP, and Canon in those and other categories, there simply isn’t much reason for a user to even invest in a Xerox printer in the first place.

In addition to its primary dealings like DSLR cameras, Canon deals in both laser and inkjet printers. Inkjet printers are more common and affordable than their laser-based counterparts, though they also tend to be less reliable in general. According to a separate report from Consumer Reports, the most common problems with inkjet printers are a lack of text legibility and expensive costs related to replacing and maintaining disposable ink cartridges. Because of these baseline problems, none of the inkjet printers tested by Consumer Reports scored particularly high.

Consumer Reports tested three subcategories of inkjet printers: all-in-one inkjet printers, regular inkjet printers, and tank inkjet printers. Regular and all-in-one inkjet printers use the typical disposable ink cartridges, while tank printers can be refilled with bottled ink, which helps to save some money in the long run. Among the three subcategories CR tested, Canon only turned in a decent performance for the first and second subcategories, and even those only produced middling reliability scores. Canon’s tank inkjet printers in particular scored the lowest rating across all tested categories, far too low for Consumer Reports to even tentatively recommend using them.

Besides Canon, Consumer Reports tested inkjet printers from Brother, HP, and Epson. While Canon’s performance was something of a mixed bag, HP’s inkjet printers were determined to be consistently middling in quality, similarly to its less-than-reliable laptops, which may be a positive or a negative depending on your own perspective. After all, a middling product may not break the moment you plug it in, but you could still be dealing with consistent small problems adding up over a long period of ownership.

HP is the most popular brand when it comes to all-in-one inkjet printers specifically, though even on its supposed home turf, its overall reliability ratings were only acceptable rather than impressive, and not to any noteworthy capacity over its chief competitors, Brother and Canon. HP performed similarly unspectacularly in the tank inkjet printers subcategory, with roughly the same reception as Brother and falling short compared to Epson. HP put on its worst performance in regular inkjet printers, missing Consumer Reports’ par for reliability recommendations entirely with all of the models that it checked.

Compared to Brother, HP, and Canon, Epson has a comparatively much smaller market share in both laser and inkjet printers. There’s a reason for this: Epson’s bread and butter is tank inkjet printers, and in fact, Epson has the dominant market share among all other brands when it comes to tank printers specifically. Indeed, in this sole sector, Epson did okay for itself in Consumer Reports’ survey, scoring the highest out of all tested brands.

However, it seems Epson is a bit too specialized for its own good, as tank inkjet printers are the only subcategory where it managed to excel. For all-in-one inkjet printers, Epson only barely made par, getting beaten out by Brother, HP, and Canon in reliability scores. It did even worse in regular inkjet printers, falling below par alongside HP and losing eligibility for a Consumer Reports recommendation entirely. If you specifically wanted a tank inkjet printer, that’s a sector Epson could provide in, but for any other style of printer, Epson may be best avoided.