If you've already decided to get an inkjet printer but you're having a hard time choosing a model, it's understandable. There's a wide range of inkjet printers, from expensive, full-featured models to simple budget options. There are many things to consider when shopping for the best printer for your needs, like how much you print, your budget, and whether you need other features, like a scanner or support for USB thumb drives.
We've tested over 120 printers, and below are our recommendations for the best inkjet printers you can buy. You can also check our picks for the best photo printers, the best all-in-one printers, and the best home printers.
Inkjet Printers At Best Buy
The best inkjet printer we've tested is the Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850, a supertank model with tons of features to satisfy all your office needs. It's a pretty large printer that takes up a fair amount of desk space, but it feels sturdily built, with a design that allows quick access to paper jams. Connectivity options include USB, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet, and it supports Apple AirPrint and Mopria Print Service. It has an ADF-equipped scanner with duplex scanning capability, meaning you can quickly process multi-page and double-sided documents.
Our best mid-range inkjet pick is the Brother MFC-J4335DW, a simple all-in-one printer that's designed for home use. It prints over 2000 color and 800 black pages before you need to replace the ink cartridges, so the cost-per-print is very low, and it's eligible for Brother's ink subscription service, which might further help save some cash. Its printing speed is great, but you'll have to refill the input tray often during large print jobs because it can only hold 150 sheets of paper.
It has an ADF-equipped scanner that processes up to 20 pages per minute, plenty of connectivity options, and mobile app support. It prints exceptionally high-quality documents, and while it doesn't have the best color range and accuracy, it still produces very detailed photos. Overall, it's a great option for most households and one of the best all-in-one inkjet printers we've tested.
The Brother MFC-J1205W is our best budget recommendation. It's an inkjet model designed for people who print slightly more than the occasional once-in-a-blue-moon project. It has a sturdy build and a decent number of connectivity options, and it prints high-quality documents and decent-looking photos. Its ink cartridges last a long time and are relatively cheap, so the cost-per-print is exceptionally low. As it's a budget model, it does come with a few compromises, like its slow printing speed and the lack of an automatic document feeder. It's compatible with Brother's mobile app, which you can use to print, scan, copy, perform maintenance tasks, and order supplies.
While the other picks in this article are all great printers, they're mainly designed for general purposes like everyday printing and scanning. If you're looking specifically to print photos and want the best print quality you can get, the Canon imagePROGRAF Pro-300 is your best bet. It produces incredibly detailed, vibrant, and colorful photos with no banding or other artifacts, and it can print on wide format paper sizes up to 13" x 19".
You can connect to the printer via Wi-Fi, USB, or Ethernet; however, it doesn't support printing from USB flash drives and SD cards. Of course, there are some downsides to specialized printers like this one. First, there are nine ink cartridges to replace, and they're rather expensive, so the cost per print is high for photo printing. Second, it's a print-only model, meaning you'll need to get a separate scanner if you want to digitize or make copies of old photos. Last, it prints very slowly, taking more than two minutes to produce a 4" x 6" photo, so you'll have to be patient.
Is your preferred choice for your next printer an inkjet? You can find the technology in a huge variety of single-function printers and all-in-ones (AIOs) designed to fill a wide variety of roles at home or at the office. Here, we'll explore the different types of inkjets, and highlight some key features to look for when shopping for one.
It's important to be clear about what you need to do with the printer before you start shopping. Some inkjets are meant for family and home use, which means they focus on photos and often come with apps, firmware, or connections to cloud services that include photo albums and options to print output of particular interest to home users (from greeting cards to graph paper for a homework assignment). They usually offer good quality for photos and graphics, but they may or may not handle text well. A subset of home printers is the dedicated photo printer, designed to print photos in one or more small formats, from wallet-size to 5-by-7-inch snapshots, at a quality level as good as anything you can get from your local drugstore or equivalent online photo service.
A second category is aimed at offices. These printers often print photos well, too, but some don't offer the same photo quality as home printers. They tend to offer better text quality, though, along with good graphics quality, plus faster printing, higher paper capacities, and lower ink costs. They're also more durable, designed to print more pages per month and more over their lifetimes. And because almost any inkjet today can do a credible job with photos, there's also a subset of office printers for dual use in a home and a home office. Many of these are just as suitable for micro offices or as personal printers in larger offices. A small subset of office inkjets offers monochrome printing only, in direct competition with mono lasers.
A few top-end photo models, aimed at imaging pros, excel at producing gallery-worthy prints. These "near-dedicated" photo printers are widely used by professional photographers and artists looking to sell their work, by graphic artists, and by photo enthusiasts. They differ from the dedicated home printers both in the maximum size of the output and in their ability to print top-quality text and graphics as well as photos. Desktop photo printers can handle standard paper sizes as large as 13 by 19 inches, while floor-standing models can print at still larger sizes.
Finally, a few inkjets are designed for mobile printing, complete with rechargeable batteries. Most are meant for printing a handful of pages per day. They are primarily for business use, letting a salesperson print a proposal for your new roof while sitting at your kitchen table, for example. But because they're designed as portables, they're of potential interest to anyone who wants a small printer they can bring with them, to print from their laptop, say, or who doesn't need to print much and doesn't have a lot of free desktop space for a printer.
Don't get too focused on low ink costs. Tank printers cost significantly more to buy than fully equivalent traditional-cartridge based printers. For the lower ink cost to save money in the long run, you have to print enough to make up for the extra cost of the printer. When choosing between tank and cartridge printers, you'll want to compare total cost of ownership for the competing choices to see which is really more expensive.
An alternative way to save on ink is an ink subscription program. HP, Brother, and Canon all offer similar plans (HP Instant Ink, Brother Refresh EZ Print, Canon Pixma Print Plan). Each is available for only some printers, however, and details vary. That said, you're more likely to save with any of them if the number of pages you print is close to the number included with the plan. And since they charge the same per page for a full-page color photo as for a black-and-white text page with a single character on it, the higher the percentage of color output you print, the more you'll save.
Output quality for any printer depends partly on the paper you use. For example, plain papers that offer brighter whites result in higher contrast, which improves both perceived color brightness and how sharp text and line drawings look. But the choice of paper has a much more obvious effect on quality for inkjets than for lasers.
Laser printers fuse melted plastic toner particles to the surface of the paper they're printing on, so the differences in output quality with different papers are limited to differences in perception. For inkjets, there are also differences in the printed image. Inkjets spray small drops of ink, which are absorbed into the paper to some extent. Plain paper typically absorbs enough so colors lose vibrancy and saturation. The ink also tends bleed sideways, which leads to a loss of crisp edges in text and line drawings. So the same inkjet printer can give you crisp, or merely acceptable, text; eye-catching, or disappointing, color for graphics; and stunning, or poor, photos, depending on the paper you're printing on.
Inkjets also show a much bigger difference in output quality than laser printers when you use different print modes. Almost any printer's driver will give you more than one print mode to choose from, with slower speeds at each step up in quality.
Given the range of output quality you can get from the same printer, it's important to know what level of quality goes with which paper and which speed when you're choosing a printer. With the exception of dedicated and near-dedicated photo printers, the quality and speed we discuss for text and graphics in our reviews is based on printing on plain paper and using the printer's default quality setting. For photos, we use the manufacturer's recommended paper, which for inkjets almost always means a paper developed in tandem with the printer's ink for best quality. We also use a higher quality setting. (See How We Test Printers for more details.) When we use different papers or quality modes, we specify that in the reviews.
Text quality on plain paper used to be a major Achilles' heel for most inkjets, but now many of them can print text nearly as crisply as a laser printer, at least at 10 and 12 point sizes. At smaller sizes like 4 or 6 points, however, few inkjets can match most lasers for how readable the text is (although, to be fair, not all lasers print perfectly formed characters at such small sizes, either). 2ff7e9595c
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