Black Friday printer deals 2021: early sales and our predictions
Black Friday printer deals are typically the best way to get some big-name printers for your home or office for cheap, and we expect to see some big savings this year from many of the leading brands like Canon, Epson, and Lexmark.
Black Friday 2021 itself is officially on November 26, so if you’re anticipating making any printer purchases in the next month and a half, it’s a good idea to plan ahead and possibly even snag yourself one of the early bargains that will likely be as good as the price you’ll see on Black Friday itself.
Even as we expect this Black Friday to be one of the biggest shopping events of the year, there are still all sorts of wrinkles that are going to impact prices and availability that you’ll want to keep in mind as you do any research.
Black Friday has never been a bigger deal for online retailers, and the brainboxes at Adobe have crunched the numbers to provide the evidence.
The company discovered that consumers spent $188 billion across the all-important November and December periods in 2020. That’s a huge amount of money – more than $40 billion more than was spent in November and December 2019, and an increase over what Adobe itself predicted people would spend before the buying season kicked off.
Drilling down into the data revealed some more startling figures. Consumers spent more than $9 billion on Black Friday itself, which is an incredible figure for a single day. And on the all-important Small Business Saturday, more than $4.5 billion was spent, with much of that cash going on hardware like printers and scanners. Overall, twenty-five days across November and December saw sales top $3 billion, so deals are easy to find across the whole period.
Printers are still big business, too. Analysts at ResarchandMarkets.com found that the global printer market was worth $132.4 billion in 2020 and expect that to grow to $144.6 billion in 2021, and the firm expects further growth to continue in the years beyond.
Office hardware like the best home printers have been in high demand for the last year and a half as workers around the world were forced to work from home in ways they hadn’t anticipated, necessitating the purchase of all kinds of new office equipment that many didn’t even realize they’d need, a good printer being one of them. This might translate into less available home office printer inventories with major outlets.
On the flipside, now that businesses are slowly starting to roll out office reopenings in the months ahead, the best small business printers are also going to be especially choice items as offices look to update their equipment. This is exactly the kind of customer that Black Friday deals on printers and other office hardware are going to be targeting, so we are definitely expecting more robust laser printers to see some really great deals. If you’re okay with a bulkier printers taking up some desk or shelf space, a modest laser printer from brands like Brother and Canon might be your best bet this Black Friday.
There are also going to be a lot of great Black Friday printer deals on last year’s and even older models since the demand for small business equipment fell through the floor during a year and a half of lockdowns. All those printers that retailers had been expecting to sell throughout the year are taking up valuable warehouse space, so big name retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, and Target are likely going to price these models to move. This makes them a perfect buying opportunity.
So whether you’re looking for the best inkjet printer, the best laser printer, the best all-in-one printer, or anything in between this Black Friday, we’re here to guide you through the best Black Friday printer deals we can find and help you find the right printer for your needs and budget.
Today’s best printer sales
With the ongoing stock issues around semiconductors and a growing bottleneck in the global supply chain, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2021 are shaping up to be a lot more hectic than usual for major retailers.
The biggest players, like Walmart, Amazon, and others, have even rented out entire cargo container ships just for their own merchandise in an effort to avoid any supply disruptions caused by a worsening port crisis in the US and UK.
Whether these gambits pay off in terms of Black Friday sales remains to be seen, but what we do know is that warehouse space is incredibly scare right now across the entire supply chain, so whatever companies can move out now means more room for goods being shipped in for the holiday season.
This means we can see some early sales ahead of Black Friday on some high-quality but somewhat older printers. While we’re not expecting fire sale prices, necessarily, if retailers are desperate for space, they may cut prices significantly or even sell some stock at a loss if it means stocking up on newer printers they can sell at a higher margin.
Some of these deals are even live right now, and while the best Black Friday printer deals might be even better than what we’re seeing today, there are still some really choice items to be had at fantastic prices that make them well worth picking up.
Top US retailers:
Top UK Retailers:
Black Friday printer deals: Our predictions
When will the best Black Friday printer deals start in 2021?
If you want the best possible deal on a printer, wait for Black Friday itself. It’s traditionally held on the first Friday following Thanksgiving, and this year it’s going to fall on November 26th.
That’s not the only date to ink into your diary, though. As the data shows, Black Friday isn’t actually about one day, and that means retailers will try to entice customers with top-notch offers for a far longer period.
The best deals span the entirety of Thanksgiving week, with the key “Cyber 5” days responsible for the biggest spending across the entire sale season. That’s no surprise, either – our experts and those at Adobe have both observed that prices start to drop dramatically at the beginning of Thanksgiving week.
That’s not all we’ve noticed, though. Deals gain prominence from the start of November, and we’ve even seen some prices begin to drop towards the middle and end of October. We fully expect the same patterns to repeat in 2021, with online shopping only becoming more popular and generating more cash.
When it comes to printers, expect even the newest and best products to have discounts during the Black Friday period alongside older devices that are still extremely capable. One word of warning: check just how old a printer is before you buy. While it’s true that lots of older products are still decent, you don’t want to buy anything that’s too archaic.
Where will you find the best Black Friday printer deals?
There’s one extremely easy way to make sure that you stay on top of every key deal on Black Friday 2021 and beyond: keep this page bookmarked.
We understand if you feel the need to head to the wider internet to try and find your own deals, though, and we can hardly blame you with so many good offers available. We’ve listed some of our favorite US and UK sites right here and explained exactly what makes them so good.
Top US retailers:
Amazon: The world’s biggest retailer will often have the lowest prices
HP: An industry leader, buying printers from HP can mean big savings
Walmart: A huge inventory of great printers at affordable prices
B&H Photo: Find specialist and profession printers for creatives
Adorama: A wide range of printers from mainstream to specialized
Best Buy: Excellent range of consumer products for every price and need
Top UK Retailers:
Amazon: Amazon‘s range is hard to beat with great prices to match
Currys: Every mainstream printer represented with physical stores too
HP: Get reliable printing options right from the source for big savings
Ryman: A trusted retailer for reliable office equipment
Printerbase: Expert advice and printers from all the top brands
Canon: A top-tier printer manufacturer, especially for photographers
What kind of printer should I buy on Black Friday?
There’s no denying it: the printer market is complex. But happily, there are some rules of thumb to follow if you want to plan what machine you need to buy on Black Friday.
Two kinds of printer dominate the market: inkjet and laser. Inkjet printers are ideal all-round options – perfect if you need to print documents, photos and web pages from home. They produce good-quality prints, and they tend to be smaller, and so ideal for homes and home offices – perfect for remote working. Negatively, though, they’re slower and more expensive to run than laser devices.
The best laser printers have the speed edge, so they’re ideal for the workplace, and they’re great for churning through documents – but they’re not great with photos, and they’re larger and louder than inkjets.
Once you’ve decided if you need an inkjet or laser device, it’s time to consider the finer details. You’ll have to weigh up if you need a conventional device or the best all-in-one printer to handle scans and copies too. Once that’s done, you need to consider how fast you need it to be, and if it’s going to use a wired or wireless connection. If you want wireless and quick printing, it’ll cost more, but you can save cash if you’re willing to compromise in those areas.
If you’d like to print high-quality photos then find printers that produce finer levels of detail, but consider a cheaper monochrome device if you just want to churn out pages full of text. And also think about running costs – it’s no good buying a cheap printer if you’re going to have to take out a loan every time you need some more ink.
If you’d like to do some more research, we’ve got you covered: here are our favorite cheap printers, these are the best all-in-one printers, and we’ve selected the best wireless printers too.
Black Friday printer deals to expect in 2021
You’re likely to see every kind of consumer inkjet and laser printer get some kind of discount during Black Friday 2021 – and that includes the newest and best products too.
Printers don’t generate the kind of excitement that smartphones or laptops do, so there’s less incentive for manufacturers and retailers to keep the best models at full price. Instead, fierce competition means that you’ll find discounts on every kind of top-notch mainstream printer.
That bodes well for anyone who’s searching for a new printer for the home or office. And there are plenty of deals to be found at the other end of the market, too. Because printers tend to last for a long time and product refreshes don’t happen frequently, you can find older and more affordable products that still offer great quality for home or office printing.
Indeed, the printer market is one of the best around for Black Friday deals. Across the entire November and December shopping period you’ll be able to find discounts on the newest products alongside big savings on older hardware that’s still very good indeed.
There’s only one caveat here: you may not see big discounts on certain products, like ink-tank printers, A3 printers and other specialist hardware.
What were last year’s best Black Friday printer deals?
The best way to get a preview of the best Black Friday printer deals in 2021 is to look back and see what happened on Black Friday in 2020.
We saw dozens of brilliant discounts on printers last year, including some printers that were cut down to almost half their retail price alongside others that hit the market with other significant discounts.
No one has a perfect memory for those kinds of details though, so to help you out, we’ve collected a few of our favourite deals from 2020 to give you a flavor of what we expect in 2021.
HP LaserJet Pro M155 laser printer – $119.99 108.99 at Best Buy
Save $11 – HP has used its printer expertise to build one of the smallest laser printers in its class, and so it’s a top-notch option if you need a compact machine that can produce loads of business documents – perfect for a home office.
Canon MF264DW Wireless Mono Laser Multifunction Printer – $199.99 $124.99 at Staples
Save $75 – this versatile printer was available at a huge discount in 2020, and it was one of the best bargains anywhere. It produces thirty pages per minute and is ready to print in just five seconds, and wireless connectivity helps your office stay free from clutter. View Deal
HP Envy Photo 6255 – $149.99 $79.99 at Amazon
Save $69.90 – last year’s Black Friday period saw this superb printer’s price almost slashed in half. It was a tremendous deal, and this machine paired great quality levels with three months of free Instant Ink, duplex ability, and even voice control.View Deal
Canon MAXIFY MB5120 Inkjet All-in-One Printer – $299.99 $249.99 at Walmart
Save $50 – Canon is well-known for building printers that produce fantastic photographs, and that’s true of the MB5120 – and this great 2020 deal meant you could do that while saving cash too. It was a great all-rounder last year, and it still impresses today.View Deal
HP PageView Pro 552wd – $699.99 $649.99 from HP
Save $50 – this monster is an office printer that can produce a mighty 70 pages per minute, and elsewhere it has loads of connectivity options and two 500-page paper trays alongside a great warranty. It’s expensive, but its price was reduced in 2020 and it’s a top-notch office device.View Deal
How to find the best Black Friday printer deal
There are a few key things to know before you go looking for Black Friday printer deals, and even just in general regardless of whether there’s a deal or not.
The difference between buying the right printer for you is about much more than just the cost of the hardware, since a poorly researched purchase could turn a great bargain into an office paperweight in an instant.
The printer market isn’t as complicated as it looks, though, and we’re here to help point you in the right direction so you get the best value for your money.
1. Know what you want before Black Friday
This is one of the most important, but often most neglected buying advice any of us ever hear: know what you want before you go shopping for it.
Take the time now to look into the kind of printer you want or need, what your budget will be for the next several weeks, and know how each kind of printer will work for your needs.
If you’re a student who just needs to print out assignments, short papers, or other similar items, a cheap inkjet will serve you well and save you money. If you’re running a business and need to print out dozens or hundreds of pages of reports, invoices, and more, than a laser printer is definitely the way to go, If you are going to be working from home for the foreseeable future and need a bunch of office gadgets like a scanner, copier, and old school fax machine, then All-In-One printer deals are what you’re going to want to dig into.
Once you know the type of printer you need, research your options in and just above your price range – early sales and Black Friday deals could drop many of these into your budget, after all.
When you find a handful of great printers that do what you need them to do and fit within your extended price range, search for these deals specifically in the weeks leading up to Black Friday and especially on the day itself, when the internet is going to be a firehose of deals that will be harder to sift through if you don’t already know what you want.
Do this, and you are all but guaranteed to find the right printer for you and hopefully you can save a good bit of hard earned money in the process.
2. Resist an impulse purchase
If you know you want a printer for cheap, don’t start your search on Black Friday itself, when retailers may have all kinds of tricks and gimmicks like countdown timers or bright red text saying “Only X number of items left!” splashed all over their product pages.
These are designed to rush you into making a purchase then and there before you have the chance to think through the purchase fully – and an impulse purchase can prove very costly if you buy a printer that can’t do what you need it to do.
If you go into Black Friday having researched and narrowed your list down to a handful of printer models that you know are right for your needs, then impulse purchases won’t be as much of a threat to your wallet.
If you know you need a color laser printer for your business, it won’t matter that the most premium inkjet printer in the world is 95% off on Black Friday. That printer isn’t the right one for you so you can quickly move past it to the printer that is.
3. Keep your receipt
Just because you bought a printer for a great price does mean it will actually be a bargain. All sorts of issues can arise with printers that can’t be easily reconciled, so you might need to return it days or even weeks later.
You better believe that retailers are going to want to see that receipt before the hand back any of that Black Friday money they made.
4. Consider all the costs of the printer
When you buy a printer, your investment doesn’t end there. You’re going to need ink or toner in order to print anything, and depending on the type of printer, you might even need special paper for photos and the like.
These will all continue to cost money over the life of the printer, so make sure you understand what these costs are before buying anything if you have a more limited budget for supplies.
5. Check in with TechRadar often to find the best Black Friday printer deals
No, we’re not being cheeky here. Trying to cull through the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Black Friday deals online is going to be hard work, even if printer deals are only a small part of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales overall. You’re still going to be hit with every ad imaginable and dozens of retailers will be vying for your attention and your holiday dollars.
We have a crack team of writers, editors, and staff whose job it is to do all of that work of sorting the wheat from the chaff for you so you can pick the right printer for you from the very best Black Friday and Cyber Monday printer deals we’ve found online.
3 Black Friday printers deals to keep an eye on
While there’s no way to know which Black Friday printer deals are coming until they are announced, we can still tell you which ones we’re hoping to see on November 26. We chose the inkjet, laser, and all-in-one printer we’d most like to see go on sale this Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or just about any time, really. They’re that good.
The laser printer deal we want to see most
The Xerox VersaLink B600DN is just about everything you could ask for in a monochrome laser printer, from nearly one page a second printing to its large paper capacity, the VersaLink B600DN is a laser printer’s laser printer. The problem is that it costs a small fortune.
And while the initial cost for a monochrome print-only device like this seems pretty high, this is a seriously premium machine that is actually very practical to run with a lower long term cost per print and its consistent print quality justifies the price tag, in our mind, especially if you’re in a business that needs to print a lot of black and white paperwork. We’d really just like to see it come down a good bit in price.
Read the full review: Xerox VersaLink B600DN
The inkjet printer deal to look for this Black Friday
Inkjet printers aren’t the fastest print game in town, and the Canon Pixma G6050 definitely takes its time to print a page, with an average of just 13 pages per minute or just a little over 4 seconds per page.
The key is that when it finally does finish up that print job, the quality is some of the best we’ve seen. Canon’s cartridge-free printers are particularly easy to top up whenever you see the ink in the window getting low and they come with plenty more ink in the box, enough to print 7,700 full colour images, or 18,000 in black and white.
Add to this an excellent 250 sheet paper capacity and you go a long way toward justifying its price. If we can get a Black Friday printer deal on this one, we’d very easily recommend it for creatives, students, and other non-enterprise users.
Read the full review: Canon Pixma G6050
The All-In-One printer deal we most want to see
A great All-In-One printer has a rep for being the Jack-of-all-trades of home office machines, and that assessment isn’t wrong, but the truly best don’t succumb to the master-of-none downside that comes with versatility.
The Brother MFC-J5330DW is a color inkjet printer that produces high quality photos with truly accurate color, a relatively fast 22 PPM (mono) and 20 PPM (color) printing rate, though your performance may vary with the nature of your print. It is able to print A3 size paper as well, making it well suited for special projects and poster printing.
It’s somewhat pricey at retail, especially since you’re locked into having to buy expensive color inks throughout its effective life, so if this all-in-one printer gets a big enough price cut this Black Friday, we definitely suggest you give this one a long look.
Read the full review: Brother MFC-J5330DW
