Best printer/copier/fax for home use and cheapest?

Best and cheapest are contradictory. You can find them for under $100 at Costco.

The cheapest printer has NOTHING to do with purchase price. If you pay less for the printer, you'll almost certainly pay much more for the ink cartridges. Look in the ink section of the store where you're considering buying. Divide the price of the cartridge by the number of milliliters of ink. You'll find you're paying anywhere from $1-$4 per ml. (For comparison, gasoline costs around $0.0008 per ml!!!)

Warning: it appears that lexmark and epson don't even bother to tell you have many drops of ink you're buying for $30. But if you hold it in your hand, you can easily tell the mystery cartridges contain much less than a 30ml cartridge.

In my check at Walmart, I found that only HP tells the number of ml, and they're beginning to hide it too. I also found that the single "cheapest" cartridge (over $1 per ml) is for my printer, which is 8 years old. All the new cartridges are about half that capacity, with about the same price (or higher!).

The best and the cheapest may be an old printer. But nevermind purchase price. Look at ink cost.

I'd go for any laser printer/fax/copier. They cost a little more than inkjet ones, but you'll save a TON on ink cartridges. You can print 5,000 pages or more on one laser toner cartridge... You'll get far less on ink jet cartridges. Just my two cents.

Cheapest and "best" are usually mutually exclusive.

The multifunction devices by HP are pretty good.