9 Best Printer for Printing From Phone | Ditch The Cable

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Homework, forms and the odd photo — handled quietly from your phone without a fuss.

A 2.4-inch color touchscreen is the feature that separates this from most budget home printers, which still make you peck at arrow buttons. Tap through the menus, and the same jobs are available in the HP app on your phone. Dual-band Wi-Fi is the part that matters for phone printing — it uses both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and is built to detect and repair dropouts on its own, which is exactly the failure that makes people give up on wireless printing.

Print speed runs to 10 pages per minute in black and 7 in color. That is slower than the HP OfficeJet 250 above, and slower than the Canon TR7120’s 14 black and 9 color, so treat it as a document machine rather than a workhorse. The 100-sheet input tray and automatic two-sided printing are what you actually use day to day: a school project prints on both sides without you flipping anything. One owner described exactly this use, saying “I don’t print a lot at home, but need to print about 10-20 sheets a month,” and finding setup simple despite not being tech-savvy.

The recurring gripe is the ink subscription tie-in. Some buyers find the wireless connection demands an HP Instant Ink account first, and cancelling that service can leave cartridges refusing to print — which is worth knowing before you sign up for the free trial. It is also built with at least 60% recycled plastic content, if that matters to you.

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The desk printer that also swallows a stack of pages and scans them without you babysitting each one.

An auto document feeder is the reason this one beats the HP Envy 6155 for anyone with paperwork. It pulls multi-page documents through for scanning and copying on its own — no lifting the lid for page two, three, and four. Toss in automatic two-sided printing, a 1.42-inch monochrome OLED panel that shows ink levels at a glance, and dual-band Wi-Fi that runs on either 2.4GHz or 5GHz, and you have a hybrid-work machine that covers the boring jobs properly.

Print quality is the thing owners talk about first, and setup is what they mention next — a good sign, because those are the two moments that decide whether a printer gets used or shoved in a cupboard. One five-star write-up put it simply: “It was very easy to set up and connect to my mobile phone and lap top. Copies are clean and clear.” Another said it was up and printing with no issues at all.

Here is the catch worth checking before you buy: the color inks are combined in one cartridge, so when the cyan runs dry you are replacing the whole color unit. That is a cost quirk, not a defect, and at low volume most people shrug it off. There is also a documented gap for laptops running ARM processors, where no Windows 11 ARM driver exists — if you use one of those, confirm compatibility first. Output runs at 14 pages per minute black and 9 color, and it takes paper up to 8.5 x 11 inches.

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Dock your phone, get a 4×6 print in roughly 55 seconds, and never touch a cartridge again in your life.

This machine exists for one job, and it does that job with a method nothing else here uses. 4PASS dye sublimation lays down three color layers and then seals the print under a clear protective laminate, so the finished photo shrugs off fingerprints, water, and fading. Each 4×6 print takes about 55 seconds from dock to finished sheet. The physical docking station is the clever bit: your phone sits on the printer for a steadier connection and charges while it works, which solves the classic phone-photo problem of the battery dying mid-session.

Treat it as a casual photo printer rather than a lab, and it delivers. Buyers print gift photos and family-gathering snaps by the dozen — one ran through roughly 200 photos in a week with only a couple of restarts. Another put it bluntly: “I love this printer. Easy to use, easy to set up, and great photos.” The Bluetooth route through the Kodak Photo Printer app works, and the dock works, so you have two ways in if one misbehaves.

The honest limits sit on the photo side. Colors can land slightly off with weak yellows, and sharpness is not lab grade, so it suits casual prints rather than framing a portrait. Paper handling is fussy too — load single sheets, not a stack, or it will jam. Refill cartridges and paper can be harder to track down than standard ink, so buy a spare set when you order the printer.

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Fill it from bottles twice a year and stop thinking about ink costs entirely.

Epson’s whole pitch lives in one number: a full replacement ink set is rated for up to 4,500 pages in black and 7,500 in color. That is why the box ships with up to two years of ink inside, based on roughly 125 pages a month. Instead of cartridges you pour from four 65 mL bottles into top-mounted reservoirs, and Epson states each bottle set equals about 80 individual cartridges. If you print school packets, forms, or work-from-home documents in volume, refillable tanks cut your monthly ink spend more than any other spec here.

Print speeds are modest: 10 pages per minute in black and 5 in color, with a first page out in 10 seconds. There is no automatic duplex — you flip the stack yourself for two-sided jobs. What you get instead is AirPrint and the Epson Smart Panel app for printing straight from a phone or tablet, a flatbed scanner with a color display for copying, and a Micro Piezo print head Epson describes as heat-free, which is gentler on a wide range of paper types.

The one thing to plan for is the network. Setup is considered easy by most, but the Wi-Fi wants a 2.4GHz band, and a few people ended up joining directly through the printer rather than through the phone app. If your home router pushes both bands under one name, sort that before you start. Beyond that, a handful of owners note it can be louder than their old machine until quiet mode is switched on.

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At 4.5 pounds, it slides into a backpack beside a laptop and prints pages the size of a full sheet.

Portability here is measured in pounds, and 4.5 is the figure that matters. The HP OfficeJet 250 is the only other portable machine on this list and it carries a battery and a scanner with it; the TR160 strips those out to get down to that weight, and it still prints a full 8.5 x 11-inch page. A 1.44-inch monochrome OLED panel shows ink levels and status, so you are not guessing before you set it down on a café table.

The cleverest part for phone users is wireless direct mode — your handset joins the printer’s own signal, no router involved. That is what lets you print a boarding pass in a hotel lobby with no network login. The Canon PRINT app handles it, AirPrint and Mopria cover the rest, and there is a 50-sheet tray, which is far more than most travel printers offer. One 5GHz-capable owner was set up in 10 minutes flat and called the print speed and quality “just fine.”

Now the trade-offs, and there are a few honest ones. Output is 9 pages per minute in black and 5.5 in color, so it is for a handful of documents rather than a bulk run. Photos come out with a warm, dull cast that needs correcting in your phone’s editor first. There is also no scanner — this is print only. A battery is sold separately if you want to work with no wall outlet at all.

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Thirty-six black-and-white pages a minute, and the toner never dries out between jobs.

Nothing else on this list prints this fast. 36 pages per minute in black and white, a first page out in 8.5 seconds, and a 50-sheet auto document feeder that sweeps through multi-page scans at up to 23.6 images per minute in black and 7.9 in color. It is a laser, not an inkjet — so it sits idle for three weeks and then fires up perfectly, with no clogged nozzle or dried cartridge to clean. For a small business or home office with steady paperwork, never clearing a clogged print head is worth the higher sticker price.

Connectivity is generously covered: dual-band Wi-Fi on 2.4GHz or 5GHz, Ethernet for a wired desk, and USB for one computer. The Brother Mobile Connect app handles printing and scanning from a phone, and duplex printing works automatically from the start. Owners who print hundreds of pages a week describe years of trouble-free service, sharp text, and toner swaps that take a minute when the time comes.

The friction point is setup, specifically the wireless side. Several people found the firmware update asks for a password printed on the back label, which you then have to change through the web interface before the machine behaves. Scanning and saving to a PC can also be fiddly, with one frustrated user describing the software as arcane. Get it onto Ethernet first, then add Wi-Fi, and most of this melts away.

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A separate photo tray means borderless pictures come out without reloading the paper you print documents on.

A second, dedicated photo tray is the detail that makes this a family machine rather than a document machine. You leave plain paper in the main tray and photo paper in the other, so a homework sheet and a birthday print do not fight for the same slot. Borderless printing runs up to 10 pages per minute in color and 15 in black, with automatic two-sided printing and an auto document feeder as standard. The touchscreen is one of HP’s larger color panels, and the whole thing is AI-enabled to strip adverts and web clutter out of printed pages so you do not waste sheets.

Where it delights is photos. Prints on glossy paper come back true to screen with color that lands accurately without fiddling with settings, and the machine stays quiet while it works. One delighted owner summed up the phone side perfectly: “It connects quickly to your wifi, prints photos like a professional and it’s compact.” For kids’ projects, recipe cards and framed snapshots, that is the whole use case covered.

The catch, and it is a real one, is setup. When the network connection and the app line up, it is quick — inside 10 minutes for plenty of buyers. When they do not, people report reinstall loops and a cartridge error solved only by wiping a contact. Printed pages have also been known to land on the floor rather than in a tray, which is a quirk of the paper path rather than a fault. Persist through first-time setup and it settles down.

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35 pages a minute in full color, from a machine built for a busy office floor.

Color laser output at 35 pages per minute in both black and color is a different class of machine from everything else here. The Xerox runs single-pass duplex scanning, so a two-sided stack of contracts goes through once rather than twice. It comes with starter toner — 1,500 pages in black and 1,000 in color — and takes high-yield cartridges, which is what you want if you are pushing up towards its stated 2,500 pages a month. A 4.3-inch touchscreen makes the setup menus navigable, and the Xerox Easy Assist app guides the phone-pairing and network steps instead of handing you a manual.

Phone and tablet printing come through built-in Wi-Fi, Apple AirPrint and Mopria, with scan-to-cloud alongside it. Print quality on card stock and full-color documents is where buyers get their money back — one owner who replaced a desk-sized inkjet noted that despite deeper specifications, the Xerox takes no more table space because the output stays inside its own footprint instead of extending a tray out the back.

Be clear-headed about toner cost. Laser cartridges are the price of laser speed, and this one is no exception — the cost per page is lower than ink, but the cartridge price itself is steep. There is also a size warning: at 59.5 pounds this is a two-person lift, not something you shift around the house. Set it up once, on a solid table, and leave it.