University Student Advice and Information Blog

Choosing the best Student Printer

Good quality, long lasting, and most importantly cheap and within a student budget continually throughout its lifetime. We review printers to take to university.

Taking a printer to university is a very good idea, giving you the freedom to print out often much cheaper than at your university, and in the convenience of your own home. It also means that you will not have to wait in queues when you are due to hand an essay in that afternoon, simply just print off at home and take it in! There are quite a few different printers out there but the best kind of printer is one that is both fairly cheap to start and then fairly cheap to run, the later probably being more important in the long run.

Standard Inkjet Printers

Generally Canon and Epson printers are thought to have the cheapest ink, many other manufactures include electronic components within their cartridges which increase the cost of their ink significantly.

Some printers have all-in-one features such as scanners and copiers which make them more useful for students when required to scan in figures or articles. Another useful feature of a few printers is WiFi which enables you to have a printer in another room in the house and allow more than one user of the printer. This could be a particularly useful printer to chose for a student household wanting a communal printer.

Our Recommendations

The Budget Budget Buy: Epson Stylus S22

The Budget Budget Buys

(The true student printer!)

If you don’t even want a scanner, then Epson offer a couple cheap no whistles, no bells printers. Priced at £19.99 on Amazon, the Epson Stylus S22 and the even more compact Epson Stylus SX130 (also £19.99) are incredibly cheap for a colour printers. Replacement ink for these printers is also available for under £10 on Amazon making them an incredible bargain.

The Budget Buy: Epson Stylus SX425W

The Budget Buy

(Rapid last minute essay printing, but with the ability to scan figures)

If you don’t want to spend much on a printer, or the ink for that matter. Then the budget buy that we recommend and most of our website users go on to purchase is the Epson Stylus SX425W, this boasts many of the same things as the two canons mentioned including scanner capabilities and colour printing. However it is not Wi-FI ready, nor will it print out to the same photo quality level that the Canon printers do. If you are planning on just using this printer to print out essays then I would recommend this one over our premium recommendation. Ink prices for the Epsom are substantially cheaper too, with a refill cartridge set costing less than £10

Best Portable Printer (and still an amazing budget buy): HP Deskjet 1000

Best “Portable” Printers

(Perfect for laptops, and packing for uni)

Normally portable printers are generally quite expensive, however we have found a really nice £17.49 printer, the HP Deskjet 1000. It is not our budget budget recommendation because the ink is a little more expensive at £8 a cartridge, but it might be worth it as its really compact and can neatly fold away into something small enough to fit in a suitcase. Even more portable printers include the Canon PIXMA iP100  (can be battery powered) and the HP Officejet H470b (Battery powered), however these are quite expensive compared at over £100 each.

The Premium Purchase: Canon PIXMA MG6150

The Premium Purchases

(Really nice photo printing, for the artists among you etc.)

Our top recommended printers for students is the Canon PIXMA MG5250 and Canon PIXMA MG6150 which are both good quality Canon colour printer, with a scanner and Wi-Fi ready meaning that they can be located anywhere within a house containing a Wi-Fi router and can be accessed by multiple computers and laptops on the same network. This printer would be of particular advantage to laptop owners as you could simply press print while you work in front of the telly and then go up stairs and collect your printed document! The price of ink is quite expensive though for these printers, at around £40-50 to replace the set.

Comparison Table

A crude calculation of three year cost has been calculated by adding the cost of a full ink set x three, to the cost of the printer. It is in no way accurate but will give you an idea.

Don’t forget!

Finally… Remember to get a printer cable! Most do not come with a printer cable these days.