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 our top picks in each category, followed by an overview of some key features to look for when shopping for one.
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Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Canon Pixma G3270 Wireless MegaTank All-In-One Printer
Best Inkjet AIO for General Home Use
Why We Picked It
Most low-cost inkjet all-in-ones (AIOs) use expensive ink. Tank-based printers offer cheap ink, but are often so expensive that you may not print enough to save any money overall. The Canon Pixma G3270 is the rare exception, selling for little enough that the low ink price will almost certainly pay off in the long run. Each full set of cyan, yellow, magenta, and black ink bottles is rated at 6,000 mono text pages and 7,700 color pages (a little less for the first set, included in the box, but still a lot). With almost any cartridge-based printer that costs less, buying ink will eat up the initial savings long before printing anywhere near that much.
Even better, additional ink for the G3270 works out to less than a penny per page for both monochrome text and standard color pages, and just a few cents for a snapshot-size photo. Add in the good-looking output, particularly for photos, and the flatbed for scanning plus support for both Wi-Fi connections and for printing from and scanning to your phone or tablet, and you get lots of capability for not much money.
Who It’s For
The G3270 is more tortoise than hare when it comes to print speed, and its single, 100-sheet tray means frequent paper refills if you print much. But you get a reasonably low price; rock bottom running cost; good output quality, particularly for photos; a flatbed for light-duty copying and scanning; and the ability to print photos directly from your phone or tablet. If your family prints up to 400 sheets per month—or even 600 if you don’t mind reloading paper a little more often than once a week—it’s an excellent home AIO for printing and for light-duty scanning and copying.
PROS
- Prints, scans, and copies
- Tank-based ink offers low running cost
- Included ink rated to print thousands of pages
- Supports mobile printing via Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi Direct
CONS
- No ADF
- Scans up to letter size only, one page at a time
- Manual print duplexing only
- Paper capacity for printing is only 100 sheets
- Slow speed
Read Our Canon Pixma G3270 Wireless MegaTank All-In-One Printer Review
Canon Pixma TS9521C Wireless Crafter’s All-In-One Printer
Best Inkjet AIO for Light-Printing Families
Why We Picked It
The Canon Pixma TS9521C Wireless Crafter’s All-In-One Printer is a near match to the Pixma TS9520, which earned our Editors’ Choice designation for family and home-office consumer grade photo printer, but it ups the ante by adding crafting features, including support for 12-by-12-inch media for scrapbooking and square photos, assorted built-in printable patterns and templates, and the ability to print homemade greeting cards on card stock up to 74 pound weight.
Whether you need the crafting features or not, there are lots of reasons to consider the TS9521C, starting with its five-color ink system, which uses a second black ink to boost quality for photos. Beyond that, paper handling for printing includes two 100-sheet trays—one for up to letter size and one for up to 12-by-26.61-inch media—and automatic duplexing (two-sided printing). For scanning, there’s an automatic document feeder (ADF) that can hold 20 letter-size or 5 legal-size pages, and a letter-size flatbed for scanning originals that might be damaged going through an ADF. The ADF also offers manual duplexing for both copying and scanning, letting you flip a scanned stack of pages over for a second run and automatically interfiling the scanned or printed pages in the right order.
Who It’s For
The TS9521C’s crafting features are an obvious reason to pick it, but it can be the right choice even if you’ll never use them. The printer can handle all the standard home printing tasks and more, from a snapshot photo, to a business letter, party invitations, a tabloid-size chart for work, or large photos suitable for framing. However, its cartridge-based ink translates to a relatively high running cost, which makes it best suited for families with low-volume printing.
PROS
- Excellent print quality.
- Supports borderless square and tabloid-size media.
- Smart home ITFFF enabled.
- Robust connectivity.
CONS
- Lacks NFC and Wi-Fi Direct.
- Somewhat slow document printing.
- Lacks automatic two-sided scanning.
Read Our Canon Pixma TS9521C Wireless Crafter’s All-In-One Printer Review
Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550
Best Wide-Format Inkjet AIO for Heavy Photo Printing at Home
Why We Picked It
The Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 is our top pick for a wide-format photo AIO for high-volume photo printing at home. It’s pricey, but has such a low ink cost that if you print enough to balk at ink cartridge prices for less-expensive models, it will likely save more on ink than the extra you’ll spend up front. Its six-color ink system, with Photo Black and Gray inks added to the usual cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, make the cost per page (CPP) hard to calculate for photos, but for standard text and color pages, we calculated it at roughly two cents each. We can confidently say that the savings for photos will be substantial compared to cartridge-based printers, particularly when taking advantage of the ET-8550’s ability to print borderless prints at up to supertabloid (13-by-19-inch) size. And we judged the photo quality in our tests as nothing short of gorgeous.
Who It’s For
The ET-8550 will be of interest to families who print lots of photos, including at least some large ones. It’s also an inexpensive option for semi-pro photographers or small businesses who want to print small quantities of marketing material at up to supertabloid size, and home or business users who want to print graphics or other digital art at high quality. And while you wouldn’t buy it primarily to serve as a light-duty home, home-office, or small-office AIO, it can fill those functions as well. However, the emphasis is on light duty. It offers only a 100-sheet main tray for printing plus a 20-sheet insert for snapshot-size photo paper, and only a flatbed for scanning. The key reason to consider it is for printing photos, graphics, or both, and printing enough of them for the low ink cost to save money in the long run.
PROS
- Prints borderless from 4 by 6 inches to 13 by 19 inches
- Exceptional output quality
- Relatively fast printing speeds for its class
- Low running costs
- First two years of ink are free
CONS
- Purchase price is a little steep
Brother MFC-J4335DW
Best Inkjet AIO for Home Offices
Why We Picked It
Brother’s MFC-J4335DW is not only our top pick for a home office AIO, it’s so far out in front that it’s hard to find any strong competition. Its compact design takes up very little flat space, while delivering suitably robust paper handling for a micro or home office for up to legal-size paper. You’ll find a 150-sheet input tray and single-sheet bypass tray for printing, and a 20-page automatic document feeder, as well as a flatbed for copying, scanning, and faxing. Beyond that, it delivers good-enough text quality for most business use, better-than-merely-good-enough graphics, and drugstore-level photo quality. It even offers both a low initial price and relatively low running costs, at less than a penny per text page and under a nickel per color page. The one trick it misses is support for scanning two-sided documents. You have to scan each side of each page manually on the flatbed.
Who It’s For
As long as you don’t need to scan, copy, or fax multi-page two-sided documents, the MFC-J4335DW is hard to beat for a home office. It delivers all the capability you likely need for printing, scanning, copying, and faxing in one small machine; it offers good print speed and output quality; and its low running cost is a welcome bonus.
PROS
- Duplex printing
- Fast print speed for the price
- Fax function
- Prints from and scans to mobile devices
- Low price plus low cost per page
CONS
- ADF does not support duplex scanning
- Text quality is poor at small font sizes and with some stylized fonts
Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850
Best Letter/Legal-Size Inkjet AIO for Heavy-Duty Office Printing
Why We Picked It
For printing, scanning, copying, and faxing at up to legal size, the Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850 tank-based inkjet AIO is hard to beat. It delivered suitably fast performance and high-quality output on our tests, and its cost per page (CPP) is just 2 cents for both mono text and standard color pages. It also offers robust paper handing, including two 250-sheet drawers, a 50-sheet rear tray, and auto-duplexing for printing, plus a 50-sheet auto-duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning.
Who It’s For
The Epson EcoTank Pro ET-5850 delivers everything a midsize office or workgroup needs in a workhorse color AIO, from paper handling to performance to output quality. Traditionally that would be a role for a laser printer rather than an inkjet, and many offices will still a prefer a laser for its archival-quality printing, high-quality text at small font sizes, and more consistent color when printing on different papers (toner is made of tiny plastic particles fused to the paper, so it won’t smudge if it gets wet, lasts longer on the page than most ink, and sits on the surface of the page rather than soaking into it, which can affect the color). If you’re not concerned with those issues, however, and you’re attracted to the low CPP compared with lasers, particularly for printing in color, the ET-5850 is probably the printer you’re looking for.
PROS
- Two years of unlimited ink
- Very low running costs
- Terrific print quality
- Auto-duplexing ADF
- PrecisionCore 4S printhead
- Excellent mobile connectivity options
- Two-year warranty with registration
CONS
- High initial purchase price
Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7840 Wireless Wide-Format All-in-One Printer
Best Wide-Format Inkjet AIO for Moderate Office Printing
Why We Picked It
The WorkForce Pro WF-7840 delivers a long list of strong points—from excellent output across the board, to fast speed on our tests, to wide-format printing on up to supertabloid-size (13-by-19-inch) paper, and more, including a low price. The catch? It uses cartridges, which means that depending on how much you print, the savings in initial cost compared with tank-based printers with competitive features could wind up getting eaten up by high ink costs. If that’s not an issue, however, there’s a lot more here to like, including a 550-sheet paper capacity spread across three trays; borderless (“full-bleed”) printing at up to tabloid size; auto-duplexing (two-sided printing), support for mobile printing; single-pass, two-sided scans for copying, scanning, and faxing; and scanning at up to tabloid size using either the AIO’s flatbed or its 50-sheet ADF.
Who It’s For
The WF-7840 is a strong candidate for any office that needs a wide-format inkjet AIO for low-to-moderate volume printing at up to supertabloid size, and also needs scanning, copying, and faxing at up to tabloid size. That said, if you’re choosing between it and a more expensive tank-based printer with similar features but cheaper ink, and you don’t mind doing a little math, you might want to calculate how many pages you need to print before the WF-7840’s higher cost per page cancels out its lower initial price. If it’s more than you expect to print over your next printer’s lifetime, the WF-7840 is probably the right choice.
PROS
- Fast and excellent PrecisionCore output
- Supertabloid and borderless tabloid printing
- USB thumb drive support
- Two large paper drawers and an input tray
- Relatively low purchase price
Read Our Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7840 Wireless Wide-Format All-in-One Printer Review
Epson EcoTank Pro ET-16650
Best Wide-Format Inkjet AIO for Heavy-Duty Office Printing
Why We Picked It
For midsize offices and workgroups that need wide-format printing and also print enough that running costs matter more than the initial price, the Epson EcoTank Pro ET-16650 is an obvious pick. It combines the low cost per page (CPP) that tank-based inkjets are known for—just 2 cents for both standard color and mono text pages—with levels of paper handling, performance, and features that are often missing. For printing, it offers a 550-sheet capacity, split among three trays, and can handle pages as large as supertabloid size (13 by 19 inches). It can also print edge to edge (borderless) at up to tabloid size (11 by 17 inches), and supports auto-duplexing (two-sided printing). For scanning, copying, faxing, it offers an auto-duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) that can hold up to 50 sheets of tabloid-size paper. It also turned in high scores for both performance and output quality in our tests.
Who It’s For
The Epson EcoTank Pro ET-16650 is a great fit for offices that print enough to save overall from the low CPP despite a high initial cost, need to print color and mono pages at up to 13 by 19 inches, and also need to scan multi-page documents at sizes up to 11 by 17 inches. It will be even more attractive to medium-size offices and workgroups that need the extra convenience of three trays, so they can easily switch back and forth between different paper types and sizes.
PROS
- Two years of unlimited ink
- Excellent print quality
- Very low running costs
- Auto-duplexing ADF
- Thousands of pages worth of ink in the box
- Two-year warranty with registration
- Excellent mobile connectivity options
CONS
- High initial purchase price
Epson SureColor P900 17-Inch Photo Printer
Best Oversize Pro Inkjet for Dedicated Photo and Graphics Printing
Why We Picked It
As with most printers loosely identified as professional photo printers, the Epson SureColor P900 is designed for both professional photographers and graphic artists. Both use them for the prints destined for galleries and art fairs, making breathtaking output quality an absolute minimum requirement. Epson is known for offering some of the most impressive printers for pros, and the P900 is one of Epson’s best. Much of the credit goes to the printer’s 10-color ink system. Not only do the extra colors beyond the usual cyan, yellow, magenta, and black deliver a much wider gamut (range of colors) than are physically possible from fewer ink colors, but there are also gray and light-gray inks to help improve subtle shading in both color and grayscale prints. The ink system plus the color management technology deliver images that are state-of-the-art spectacular, combining vibrant color, dark blacks, and top-tier color accuracy.
Pros often need to print large, which the P900 is also designed for. The base unit can handle a wide variety of photo papers at sizes up to 17 by 22 inches for cut sheets. And if you add the optional roll adapter, it can print on rolls up to 17 inches wide as well, for banners or exquisite panorama as large as 17 by 129 inches (10 feet, 9 inches).
Who It’s For
If you’re not sure you need this printer, you don’t need it. If you do, your business card likely identifies you as a professional photographer, graphic artist, or graphics designer; you insist on gallery-level quality; you need to print at sizes up to 17 inches wide; and you may need the ability to print panoramas on roll paper.
PROS
- Excellent print quality
- Prints borderless banners and panoramas up to 17 inches wide
- Prints cut sheets up to 17 by 22 inches
- Uses UltraChrome PRO10 pigment inks for increased color gamut
- Switches from photo black to matte black ink automatically
- Competitive per-millimeter ink costs
CONS
- Paper roll adapter costs extra
HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One Printer
Best Portable Inkjet AIO Printer
Why We Picked It
All-in-one portable inkjets aren’t quite as rare as snowfall in Florida, but there’s only one current model we know of—the HP OfficeJet 250 All-in-One Printer. That would automatically make it the best, even if it hadn’t earned our Editors’ Choice designation for a portable printer when we reviewed it. More important, whatever extra points it gets from its ability to scan and copy is over and above the high marks it earns for printing.
The OfficeJet 250 offers typical text quality for an inkjet along with slightly above-par graphics and photos. It also proved faster on our tests than most single-function portable inkjets. And although it doesn’t offer automatic two-sided printing (which is true for single-function portables as well, since the feature would add weight), it supports manual duplexing, which lets you print one side, then reinsert the pages in the 50-sheet input tray to print the other side. The simplex (single-sided) scanner offers a 10-sheet ADF for scanning and copying. Connection choices include USB, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct, letting you print from PCs and both Android and iOS phones and tablets.
Who It’s For
If you need to scan and copy as well as print on the go, the OfficeJet 250 is the obvious best pick for a portable printer. Those who usually need only scanning or only printing could be better off choosing a slightly lighter single-function printer and a separate scanner, so they can carry just the one they need on a given trip. However, the OfficeJet 250 will be less cumbersome to set up when you need both, and it will likely be lighter that the combined weight of two units.
PROS
- Portable.
- Scans and copies.
- Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and USB connectivity.
- Rechargeable battery.
- 50-sheet input tray.
- 10-sheet ADF.
- Output quality worthy of a desktop inkjet.
- High claimed page yields for print cartridges.
- Lighter than its predecessor.
- Fast photo printing.
CONS
- Lacks a USB cable.
- Heavier than most laptops.
Buying Guide: The Best Inkjet Printers for 2023
It’s important to be clear about what you need to do with an inkjet 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.
(Credit: Epson)
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.
How Much Will It Cost to Print?
Ink costs for cartridge-based inkjets have been long been a sore spot for both business and personal inkjet users. However, in the last few years, manufacturers have offered a choice of ways to pay less for ink. The most significant potential savings is with tank printers, most of which let you buy ink in large bottles and pour it into tanks in the printer. The savings come both from buying in bulk—the proverbial large “economy size”—and from eliminating expensive cartridges. Epson, Canon, and HP all offer tank-based printers with ink in bottles, ready to pour into reservoirs in the printer. Brother’s tank inkjets use high-capacity cartridges that serve only to hold ink.
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, Paper, and Print Speed
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.
(Credit: HP)
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 and Graphics Quality
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 can, at least at 10 and 12 point fonts. 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).
A potentially more significant issue for inkjet-printed text is that ink can smudge if it gets wet. If you must have archival-quality text, as in most medical and law offices, or need professional-looking documents that won’t smudge if someone spills a few drops of water on them, this can be enough to rule inkjets out.
The situation with graphics is more complicated. You can count on almost any inkjet today to print graphics good enough for both internal business use (from PowerPoint handouts to graphics in reports) and home tasks (like party invitations and greeting cards). But good enough and objectively good aren’t the same thing. In general, when using default settings and plain paper for color graphics, color inkjet output isn’t a match for color laser output.
For most inkjets, graphics on plain paper printed at the default quality mode deliver somewhat unsaturated color, sometimes enough so to look faded, and often show obvious banding and other issues. Changing to a higher-quality print mode, using a recommended paper for the printer, or both will deliver better—often excellent—quality, even to the point of being suitable for a graphic artist. But the paper will add to the cost per page and the higher quality mode will take longer to print.
Color inks are often close to smudge-proof on plain paper even for inkjets that have easily smudgeable black ink, but you can’t count on them being 100% smudge-proof. For office inkjets, we test both mono and color pages for smudging, and mention the results in our reviews.
Photo Printing: Expect True Photo Quality
If you’re looking for a home printer to output photos, but also capable of printing a range of other document types, you want an inkjet. When printing on photo paper, nearly any current inkjet (and no current laser) can at least match the minimum quality you’d expect from your local drugstore or online photo-processing service. The few exceptions are among printers aimed at offices, but even most office inkjets do a decent job with pictures. You can even find a few all-purpose inkjets whose output rivals photo printers meant for professional photographers.
Prices today for inexpensive inkjets designed for home use start at well below $100 for both inexpensive single- and multi-function models. But while almost any can print photos in the same league as you can get from your local drug store, some offer more of an emphasis on photo quality than others. Unfortunately, printer manufactures are less likely today than in the past to use “photo” as part of the printer name, or to have a Photo Printer category on their websites. They’re more likely to add “Office” to the name of those that aren’t focused on photo printing, or may include the phrase “office printer” in the first sentence of the description.
Some printers are still identified as photo printers in their website descriptions, but it may take a little work to find them. Often some printers within a given series are photo printers, while others aren’t. You’ll want to check for specific features that tend to be important for photo printing. One key feature is the ability to output borderless prints on any paper size the printer can handle. Many photo printers also add extra inks beyond the usual four, if only a second black ink specifically for photo paper. (More on extra inks shortly.) Also look for photo features that you need in particular. You might want to print directly from your camera’s memory card, for example.
If you haven’t shopped for a photo printer in a while, know that some features that used to be standard for photo printers, like printing directly from memory cards or support for printing directly from cameras with PictBridge, are harder to find today. Others, including slide-scanning for an AIO, aren’t available at all. Similarly, the ability to print labels directly onto ready-surfaced optical discs, which was never common, is even less common now.
At the high end of the photo-centric models are the near-dedicated photo printers mentioned earlier. These are single-function machines that—although they can print text and graphics on plain paper—are built for, and excel at, printing high-quality photos on photo paper. They can also print graphics on photo matte paper suitable for professional graphic artists. The more expensive prosumer and professional models are capable of outputting gallery-quality prints. They have more ink tanks than your typical basic inkjet’s four (we’ve reviewed models with as many as 12), with each tank holding a different color or shade of ink.
Adding extra colors doesn’t necessarily improve output quality, but it makes it easier to design a printer that can reproduce all the subtle gradations and vividness in photorealistic images. Some models even include more than one type of black ink and several shades of gray, making them particularly adept at printing monochrome images. They can typically print at up to super-tabloid (13-by-19-inch) size, which necessarily makes them larger than typical letter and legal-size printers. Some, especially the professional models, can print from both sheets and paper rolls.
Another category of photo printers is the dedicated, small-format printer. These models print nothing but 4-by-6-inch, 5-by-7-inch, 2-by-3-inch wallet size, and other small photo prints. Some of these use thermal-dye or inkless Zink technology, but many are inkjet-based. In choosing one, first make sure it prints all the photo sizes you want to print. Also be sure it will print using all the sources you want to print from, whether through a wired or wireless connection to your camera, phone, or PC, or directly from your camera’s media card. And if you plan to print where you may not have easy access to an electrical outlet, you’ll want a model that can print using batteries.
USB and Beyond: Printer Connectivity
Today’s inkjets offer the same range of connection choices that lasers do. A few inexpensive models offer only USB, which makes them a good choice if you need a personal printer to connect by USB cable to a single PC. Windows will also let you share USB printers on a network, but the better option is to pick a printer that can connect to the network directly.
You can connect to a network using either an Ethernet port, which many inkjets offer, or Wi-Fi, which all but the least expensive offer. Ethernet offers the simplest setup. In most cases you only have to plug in the cable. Wi-Fi can be almost as easy to set up, but often isn’t. However, it has the advantage of letting you put the printer anywhere without having to worry about stringing a cable to your router.
Recommended by Our Editors
If you want to print wirelessly from a mobile device, note that you can do that even with printers that don’t support Wi-Fi. As long as the printer manufacturer offers an appropriate printing app for your phone or tablet, you can print though a network to any printer on the same network as the device, including for printers connected by Ethernet.
Most printers that support Wi-Fi also support Wi-Fi Direct (which some manufacturers give a different name) with or without Near-Field Communication (NFC). Wi-Fi Direct allows a direct peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection between the printer and a compatible device, with the printer acting as its own access point. For printers that offer NFC with Wi-Fi, the connection can be established simply by touching the device to a designated spot on the printer.
Duty Cycles and Paper Capacity
Most inkjet printers are designed for either homes, home offices, and personal office printing on the one hand, or light-to-medium-duty printing in small offices on the other. But inkjet technology is showing up in more and more business-oriented models meant for heavier-duty printing. Some high-end models can even rival laser printers in speed (typically by using printheads that run the full width of a page) and even in rated maximum monthly duty cycles. (“Duty cycle” is the number of pages a printer can print in a single month without shortening its life, assessed in concert with the total pages printed over its lifetime.)
Some Epson EcoTank Pro printers we’ve reviewed offer maximum monthly duty cycles rated as high as 66,000 pages, along with a recommended monthly duty cycle of 3,300. (The recommended duty cycle is the most you should print per month to get the full design lifetime in years.) Ratings for many laser printers are higher still, but even these maximum and recommended ratings are well into laser printer territory, and 3,300 pages per month is sufficiently heavy-duty for most offices or workgroups.
(Credit: Canon)
That said, many inkjet makers don’t publish rated duty cycles for at least some of their printers, and many ratings that are published for inkjets are quite low compared with those of lasers. If you print enough so you’re concerned about how many pages the printer is designed to print per month, don’t even consider one that doesn’t have a published rating for duty cycle. Beyond that, if you are concerned about duty cycle, base your requirements on the recommended rating, and make sure the maximum duty cycle is far higher than you’re likely to print in any month.
Also check the paper capacity. The maximum capacity for many inkjets is as low as 100 sheets, and only a few can hold 500 or more sheets. In most cases you probably won’t want to reload the paper more than about once a week, which for a 500-sheet capacity would translate to printing on roughly 2,000 sheets per month. Keep in mind that if you print mostly in duplex, each side of a sheet counts as a printed page for duty-cycle purposes. Also, if you print on more than one kind of paper, including switching between plain paper and photo paper, you probably want a second paper tray, or at least a bypass tray for single sheets. Otherwise, you’ll have swap out paper before and after printing every time you use the second type of paper.
Inkjets for the Office
Office-oriented inkjets include the few single-function printers and MFPs designed for relatively heavy-duty printing, as well as any that have office-centric features. Among these are standalone faxing; faxing directly from your PC’s hard drive; and scanning to email and automatically adding the scan as an attachment, whether by connecting to an email server directly or using your PC’s email program. That said, keep in mind that faxing can be helpful for home use, too. Some medical offices, for example, insist on faxing, rather than emailing, medical information.
Automatic document feeders (ADFs) for easy scanning, faxing, and copying of multipage documents are also common on office AIOs. If you need to scan duplex documents (with printing on both sides of the page), make sure the ADF can handle them. Those that scan both sides of a page on a single pass are faster, more convenient, and unfortunately more expensive than reversing ADFs, which scan one side, flip the page over, and then scan the other. Some, but not all, ADFs that scan one side only also let you manually flip entire stack over and feed it back into the scanner; it then interfiles the pages for you in the right order.
(Credit: Canon)
Most inkjets meant for offices, including home offices, offer duplex printing. However, a few don’t, so if you want to print two-sided documents, make sure the printer you pick includes an auto-duplexer. Most print on up to legal size paper. A few support printing at up to tabloid size (11 by 17 inches) or even supertabloid size (13 by 19 inches), giving you a better chance to fit all the columns in a wide spreadsheet onto a single page. Many can also print on longer sheets of paper, at various non-standard sizes.
One specialized kind of office inkjet is the mobile, or portable, printer, meant for business travelers who need printing wherever they go. Aside from thermal printers that use special paper, these inkjets are the only choice for mobile business printing.
(Credit: Canon)
Mobile printers typically have low paper capacities and slow speed, and they demand a few other compromises. There aren’t many models in this category, however, and they tend to cost a lot more than comparable non-mobile inkjets. That said, if hard copy on the spot is paramount, and you’re looking to print documents (contracts, receipts, prospectuses, and the like) in a client’s office, on a potential customer’s kitchen table, or in your car just before a meeting, a battery-powered mobile inkjet will do the job.
So, Which Inkjet Printer Should You Buy?
Below, we’ve compiled a list of specs for the top inkjets we’ve tested in PC Labs, spanning a variety of usage cases: home- and small-office printing (color and monochrome alike), photo printing, and mobile document printing. For more picks, check out our favorite printers overall (including laser printers alongside inkjets), our preferred AIOs, and our top photo printers.
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