Printing is still an important part of everyday working life. The drive to go paperless has been successful to a point but there are many situations where it is still better to just print a sheet out. The cheapest way of printing has usually been a monochrome, or black and white printer. The best black printers use only a single ink reducing their complexity, saving money on both the hardware and the ink. A black and white printer is suitable for most uses including printing reports, order forms, letters and memo's. In this article we are going to take a look at the best black printer for home or office use.

Benefits of a black printer

The main advantages of a good black ink printer is that the overall cost of printing is reduced. The printers can also be much smaller and compact due to only requiring hardware to print in black. The ink cartridges tend to be larger reducing the print cost per page, plus they tend to have a higher PPM (Page Per Minute) print rate and include features such as automatic duplex printing. It can also stop employees from "borrowing" your printer to print off reams of full page color photos.

Laser, Inkjet or Bubble-jet black printer

You may well struggle to find good black printers that use inkjet or bubble-jet technology - most of those types are now integrated into color systems due to their low cost. Indeed most of these printers have separate black and colour inks, meaning they can be very inexpensive to run. Laser printers are the dominant black printer ink only machines, and they produce the best quality output in my opinion. Duplex on an inkjet requires 20-30 seconds to dry, as a laser printer can still do 30 pages a minutes with printing on both sides.

Which is the best black printers to buy?

With companies merging, acquiring each others and some going bankrupt, there are now only two big consumer and business brands left producing the best quality black printers. These are the big names: Brother and HP. Brother is really the laser printer specialist and produces some great models including compact laser black printers with duplex and wifi connectivity. I personally use a HL1440DW which is a great compact duplex printer which can be used to print a lot when required. HP sells mostly inkjet printers which are traditionally more expensive ink wise but cheaper to buy. HP's new large capacity inks include black ink cartridges capable of doing 2500 pages - unheard of 5 years ago on a consumer printer. 

The decision to buy one of these makes printers, or indeed one from brands such as Samsung, should be made firstly by looking how many pages you print per month. Most ink cartridge sites give a cost per page, include the cost of the printer and work out the combined cost per page over 18/24 months. You should also look if you want additional features such as wifi/wired Ethernet or duplex printing. Most include at least one of these features but be wise - some manufacturers disable these features on their cheaper models.

So which is the best black printer?

Personally, I don’t think you can go wrong with a Brother printer, but HP's come a close second and if you want something with scanning functionality then HP's are much cheaper to buy than Brothers. HP often offers cash back on their models so check out the best printer deals at stores such as Staples, Best Buy or Amazon.

Which do you think is the best black printer? Do you always buy printers from Brother, HP or from other companies such as Samsung? Help others by leaving a comment below. If you need to join InfoBarrel then you can by using a link below.