The Best Photo Inkjet Printers in 2026, Ranked by Print Quality and Cost per Print

Updated June 18, 2026

A photo printer is judged on two numbers the brand pages never put side by side: how good the print looks, and what each print costs you. Glossy hero shots sell the first and bury the second. We rank photo inkjets the way they actually earn their place at home — by output quality on real paper, by cost per print once the in-box ink is gone, and by the clog risk that turns against anyone who prints only now and then. The cheapest photo printer to buy is almost never the cheapest to use.

Our top pick is the six-ink supertank that makes store-quality prints at refill-bottle cost — the ET-8500. The right photo printer turns on three things: wide-format size, the lowest cost per print, or craft-and-cut capability. One pick here is a photo cost trap. Here is the shortlist, ranked.

1. Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 — best photo value: six-ink borderless prints at a few cents each on bottle ink.
2. Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 — best wide-format: the same six-ink engine, scaled to borderless 13x19 prints.
3. Canon PIXMA G620 MegaTank Photo — best non-Epson: bottle-ink photo economics outside the EcoTank ecosystem.
4. HP Envy Photo 7975 — the cost trap: a tidy cartridge photo printer whose ink empties fast.
5. Canon PIXMA TS9521Ca — best for crafts: 12x12 and 11x17 stock for scrapbooking and print-and-cut.

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1

Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500

4.2 Photo and craft households that print borderless pictures often and want store-quality output at refill-bottle running cost rather than drugstore-print prices.

2

Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550

4.1 Specific buyer fit

3

Canon PIXMA G620 Wireless MegaTank Photo All-in-One Printer [Print

4 Specific buyer fit

4

HP Envy Photo 7975 Wireless Color Inkjet Photo Printer

4.2 Specific buyer fit

5

Canon PIXMA TS9521Ca – Wireless Home All-in-One Inkjet Printer

3.9 Specific buyer fit

6

Epson SureColor F170 Dye-Sublimation Printer – Compact 8.5 x 11 in Format – I…

4.6 Small-space buyers

Quick Picks at a Glance

1. Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 — Best Photo Value

The ET-8500 is the photo printer most people imagining "store-quality prints at home" should buy. It runs Epson's Claria ET Premium 6-color ink delivers breathtaking detail and vibrant colors — two more inks than an office printer carries — and Epson invites you to Challenge your artistic boundaries with edge-to-edge printing. for borderless output. The output earns its 4.2-star owner record, and because it fills from bottles, each print costs a fraction of cartridge photo printing. The honest catch is the use case, not the quality: buy it to print pictures often, or its premium is wasted on documents a four-ink tank handles for far less. Read our full ET-8500 review for the paper-and-clog detail.

Check Price on Amazon Read our full ET-8500 review →

2. Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 — Best Wide-Format

The ET-8550 is the ET-8500 with reach: the same six-ink Claria engine, scaled to print Extraordinary media support, including borderless photos up to 13 by 19 inches. Owners rate the result close to far pricier dedicated units — one calls the quality The print quality is incredibly close to dedicated, high-end pigment printers. The running-cost pitch holds at scale, too: Epson quotes photos for about 4 cents each vs. 40 cents with traditional ink cartridges. The cost we would weigh harder is the printhead — a working print-seller warns this Epson uses non replaceable and non serviceable print heads, so a clog under idle use is a printer-ending event, not a service call. Pay the wide-format premium only if you print large often; the two photo Epsons go head to head in our ET-8550 vs ET-8500 comparison, where the only real question is the 13x19 reach.

Check Price on Amazon How refillable tanks cut photo cost →

3. Canon PIXMA G620 MegaTank Photo — Best Non-Epson

Epson does not own bottle-ink photo printing. Canon's G620 MegaTank makes the strongest case outside the EcoTank line, rated to Print up to 3,800 4” x 6” color photos on a full set of ink. at a quoted LOW COST PER PRINT with approx. ink cost of 2.5 cents per 4” x 6” color photo. — even cheaper per print than the Epsons above it. The honest asterisk is output expectations. One owner was underwhelmed by saturation on both glossy and matte paper, then fixed it: Edit your photos to increase saturation / vibrance. That fixed it. That is the photo-printer reality across this list — good prints want a paper profile and a calibrated screen, not just a good machine. Pick the Canon for the lowest photo running cost and a smaller footprint. More on Canon's photo and MegaTank line covers the rest of the range.

Check Price on Amazon Why photo paper choice decides the print →

4. HP Envy Photo 7975 — The Cost Trap

The Envy Photo 7975 is the tidy cartridge photo printer that looks like a bargain and prints like a tax. It makes clean borderless 4x6 prints and adds a document feeder, so on paper it fits a home that wants the occasional photo. The trap is the cartridge math. One owner reports the bundled set ran dry fast: The included ink cartridges were out of ink just after EIGHT printed pictures. Bronzing on prints hides only on HP's own pricey stock — an owner notes good results need but that's HP Advanced photo paper that costs a premium. And it ships with the HP subscription nudge, a three-month Instant Ink trial where After 3 months, monthly fee applies unless cancelled. Buy it only for light, occasional photos you accept paying HP prices to make. More on HP's ink lock-in spells out the subscription terms.

Check Price on Amazon How cartridge photo costs add up →

5. Canon PIXMA TS9521Ca — Best for Crafts

The TS9521Ca is the pick when the job is crafts, not gallery prints. Canon built it to print large documents including oversized 12-by-12 and 11-by-17 stock for calendars, posters, and scrapbooking — media most photo printers cannot touch — and it handles heavy cardstock for print-and-cut work. The output is sharp, but a fair reviewer flags the running cost: While the print quality was sharp, the ink drains quickly under heavy craft use. We rank it last on one honest worry — reliability is uneven. One owner's unit failed almost immediately: It prints one copy then threw a 5100 error and never recovered. A good TS9521Ca is a strong craft printer; buy from a seller with an easy return window. Which printer features actually matter helps weigh craft size against photo accuracy.

Check Price on Amazon More on Canon's craft printers →

Also on the radar: Epson SureColor F170 — Compact Dye-Sublimation

One more printer earns a place on the radar, with a caveat we have to be straight about: the Epson SureColor F170 is a dye-sublimation printer, not a dye photo inkjet like the five above. It does not print pictures on photo paper. It lays heat-activated ink onto transfer stock that then bonds to mugs, shirts, phone cases, and other coated substrates — the print-and-press craft job, not the framed-photo job. We list it here because that work overlaps the photo-and-craft buyer this tier attracts, and because nothing else on the page covers it. The honest fit is narrow: a compact 8.5-by-11 aluminum-bodied unit aimed at small-space buyers who want sublimation output without a wide-format machine taking over a desk. Our read of the listing is favorable but thin — the Amazon review base is shallow, so we will not pretend to a verdict we cannot back. If your project is transfers rather than prints on paper, it is worth a look; if you want photos on glossy stock, buy one of the five dye printers above instead.

Check Price on Amazon How sublimation printing differs from photo printing →

How We Chose

Here's the thing: a glossy hero shot tells you nothing about what a photo printer costs to live with. We do not run a print lab. We read the owner record closely — the verified Amazon reviews, the community threads — and we price the cost of ownership the box leaves off. For photo printers specifically, that meant scoring three things the brand pages glamorize past: real print quality on the paper owners actually use, cost per print once the in-box ink runs out, and clog risk under the stop-start usage photo printing tends to invite.

Print quality is where the six-ink tanks separate from the cartridge crowd, and where paper does as much work as the printer. Independent testing backs the cost gap: RTINGS' lab-tested inkjet printers and Consumer Reports' inkjet printer ratings both score cost-per-print as a first-class number and both rate bottle ink far below cartridge cost per page. The manufacturers confirm the spread in their own specs — Epson's photo EcoTank specifications and Canon's PIXMA photo printers both quote single-digit cents per 4x6, while HP's photo printer pages lean on Instant Ink rather than a low cost per print. We grade every model against the full owner record in our inkjet printers evidence hub, and the photo cost case carries into our ET-8500 review.

The result is two clear winners, one strong alternative, and one cost trap.

Buying Guide: What to Look For

Three things decide a photo printer, and none of them is the glossy product render. Read them in this order.

Ink architecture and print quality. Photo output lives or dies on the ink set. Six-color dye printers — the Epson Claria pair and Canon's G620 — render skies, skin tones, and gradients more smoothly than the four-ink office printers that double as photo printers. A four-ink HP can still make a passable 4x6, but next to a six-ink print the subtle tones flatten. Dye versus pigment ink matters too: dye sets like these give punchier color, while pigment sets last longer and resist water — a trade only the dedicated photo printer market resolves. For most home photo printing, a six-ink dye supertank is the sweet spot.

Cost per print, not sticker price. This is where photo printers ambush you. A cartridge photo printer is cheap to buy and ruinous to feed — Epson's four-cents-a-print figure against forty cents on cartridges is the whole argument for a tank. A supertank front-loads its cost into a high sticker, then prints for cents for years. Before you buy, look up the printer's quoted cost per 4x6 and the replacement-ink price, and divide by how many photos you actually print a year. That number, not the box price, tells you what the printer costs.

Paper, calibration, and clog risk. A great photo printer makes mediocre prints on the wrong paper and an uncalibrated screen — the washed-out-saturation complaint is almost always a color-management problem, not a hardware fault, fixed with a paper profile and a calibrated monitor. And every machine here is a dye inkjet, so idle weeks invite dried nozzles and ink-wasting cleaning cycles. Print in color most weeks and a photo supertank is the cheapest quality printing you can do at home; print twice a year and the heads dry out before the savings arrive. We map the full idle-clog and paper pattern in our inkjet printer buyer problem guide and weigh every axis in our comparison criteria.

Wide-format and craft sizes. Standard photo printers top out at letter and 4x6; only the wide-format ET-8550 reaches 13x19, and only the craft-oriented Canon TS9521Ca takes 12x12 and 11x17 stock. Pay for the oversized media only if your work needs it — it raises the sticker without improving everyday photo quality.