Best Color Multifunction Laser Printers of 2026

Thirty-five pages per minute, color or black, is the fastest engine in this group, and it changes what a shared printer feels like: two people can send jobs at once and neither waits long. The first page is out in about seven seconds, which is the number you actually notice on a one-page invoice, and the machine runs quieter than its speed suggests.

Where it beats the HP for a busy office is the combination of speed, paper handling and coverage. There's a 250-sheet cassette plus a multipurpose tray, support for legal paper up to 8.5 by 14 inches, fax built in, and a three-year limited warranty that is the longest coverage on this page. For a machine a small business will lean on every day, that last point is worth more than a slightly fancier panel.

Output is excellent: text stays crisp at 1,200 by 1,200 dpi, and color pages come out even rather than banded, which is what you want on letterhead and handouts. The starter cartridges are partial — 2,100 pages of black and 1,100 of each color — so plan on a full set arriving sooner than the box implies, and price Canon's 069 toner before you commit if you print in volume.

Brother ships this one with 3,000 pages of black toner and 1,800 pages of each color in the box, the most generous starter load in this group. What you're really buying, though, is the scanner: two-sided pages run through an 80-sheet feeder at up to 104 images per minute, so a folder of double-sided paperwork goes through in a single pass instead of two.

The rest of the package is built for a workgroup rather than a desk. Gigabit Ethernet and dual-band Wi-Fi mean you can wire it into a switch and stop thinking about it, the 7-inch color touchscreen is the largest and clearest here, and scan-to-cloud, email and SharePoint destinations are set from the panel. The security layer for documents in transit is the sort of thing a home office can ignore and a small business shouldn't.

Output is sharp and copies are clean, and at 33 pages per minute it sits just behind the Canon. It's also the most expensive machine on this page, and the included toner is the honest defence: factored against a year of supplies, the gap to the Canon narrows to something small. What none of that changes is the physical commitment it asks for.

If the printer has to live in the room where you work, this is the one to measure: roughly 17.5 inches wide, 16 inches deep and 14 inches tall, at 40.8 pounds, which is light enough for one person to lift onto a side table. That's a different machine from the 70-pound workhorses on this page, and it's the whole reason it earns a spot.

Nineteen pages per minute is the slowest engine in the group, so long documents take noticeably longer than they do on the Canon and the HP. What it keeps is everything a one-person office uses daily: automatic duplex printing, a 250-sheet tray, legal-size paper, dual-band Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi Direct, and color output that holds up on card stock and graphics.

Brother's TN229 cartridges come in standard, high-yield and extra-high-yield versions, so you can decide after the fact how much capacity to pay for — a good arrangement when your monthly volume is still a guess, and a rare bit of flexibility at this end of the group.

This is the budget slot in this group, and it doesn't behave like one: 26 pages per minute in color and in black, automatic duplex printing, and a 5-inch color touchscreen running Canon's Application Library. For a home office printing a few hundred pages a month, that covers the everyday work.

Twenty-six pages per minute is close enough to the HP's 28 that a five-page job won't feel different, and the first page is out in about 10 seconds. The touchscreen is the pleasant surprise at this price — pinning the jobs you repeat means copying an ID or sending a scan doesn't turn into a walk through the menus. We also like that the color engine runs at the same 26 ppm as the black one, rather than quoting a fast mono figure and slowing down the moment you print a logo.

Supplies run on Canon's 067 cartridges, which come in standard and high-capacity versions. Start on the standard set and move up once you know your monthly volume, because the high-capacity cartridges are where the running cost improves.

At 13.6 inches tall this is the shortest machine in the group, and for a small business with a counter to tuck it under, that's the whole argument. Lexmark builds it around a steel frame, adds protection for data on the device and on the network, and lets it run on recycled paper — details that matter to an office with a sustainability policy and barely register on a home desk.

The engine is a 26 ppm unit in color and black with automatic two-sided printing. Wi-Fi, Ethernet and USB cover connections, and the Lexmark Mobile Print app handles phones and tablets. Twenty-six pages a minute is mid-pack here, which for a small office means the printer is rarely the bottleneck, and duplex output means double-sided invoices come out without anyone flipping paper.

One number to ignore: 600 dpi is the lowest resolution quoted in this group and it doesn't mean much. Text is crisp, and for charts, letterhead and invoices the output is businesslike rather than vivid — the right trade for a small business and the wrong one for an office printing marketing proofs. Fax here is an optional cloud service rather than a modem, so check that it can replace the old machine's phone line before you retire one.