I am often asked to recommend printers and scanners. Here is my set of favorites as of November 2018.
Printers? I like Epson. I find HP to be bogged down with complex software and setup, I find Brothers to be good but finicky sometimes with connecting over the network, and I like Epson. I like Epson based on the experiences I have with them – people who buy them require less help in general and are happier with their printers.
So Costco is currently selling the Epson ET-4750 for $379. It scans, faxes, and prints.
Manufacturers now sell printers with ink tanks, rather than cartridges, and the Epson ET-4750 comes with 2 years worth of color and black and white ink. That’s why these new printers, while still inexpensive, are much more expensive than printers from a few years ago that replied on expensive cartridges to subsidize them.
As for scanners, you can easily scan with the Epson above, but for people that do a lot of scanning, and for people that scan documents of all sizes, I really like document scanners. I use a Scansnap S1500 and the modern versions of that sell for about $450 on Amazon. For less hard-core scanning, I recommend the little portable Scansnap scanners. The software is great and easy to use. The scanner is fast and creates super great PDFs and can also convert them to Word documents.
If you wanted a stand alone scanner for documents, receipts, and other things, these Scansnap scanners are the best. Here it is on Amazon