For home users the inkjet printer reigns supreme. It's a cheap all rounder that can do colour and black-and-white documents, labels, photos, T-shirt transfers and just about everything else. On the downside, inkjets are expensive to run if you stick to genuine inks and papers. They're also relatively slow compared to laser printers, and some of them can be noisy.

Colour laser printers are expensive to buy though marginally less expensive to run than inkjet printers. They're better than inkjets for business documents with coloured charts and graphics, but not suitable for printing photographs. Monochrome lasers are perfect for high volumes of text pages in black and white, being cheap to run, fast and very quiet, but they're useless for anything else. A cheap monochrome laser paired with a cheap inkjet printer is a versatile and economic way to print most documents.

A specialised alternative is a dye-sublimation printer, which unless you spend a lot of money, usually takes the form of a small format device for printing snapshot-sized digital photos. Many dye-sub printers can be connected directly to a digital camera for use without a computer, and some are portable. Heat-sensitive solid inks and paper are combined in a single (and rather expensive) cartridge containing a fixed number of sheets, but at least the cost of each print is known in advance.