What is the best inkjet printer?

Updated June 18, 2026

There is no single best inkjet printer — the winner forks by what you print. A bottle-fed supertank wins on running cost, rated for that’s enough to print up to 4,500 pages black/7,500 color from in-box ink. A budget cartridge all-in-one wins on entry price. A six-colour photo tank wins on borderless prints. An ADF-and-duplex machine wins for an office. Match the machine to your volume.

Start with cost, because it is the question most buyers arrive with and the one the brand sites bury. The cheapest printer to buy is rarely the cheapest to own. A budget cartridge machine sells for less than a tank of fuel, then feeds on small cartridges rated near 100-300 pages that keep cost-per-page high. According to RTINGS, which lab-tests printers and scores cost-per-print directly, cartridge ink runs many times dearer per page than the bottle ink a supertank pours. That single gap is why the running-cost winner is almost always a tank, not the cheapest box on the shelf.

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Refillable tanks

The supertank's pitch is the cost answer in numbers. The entry Epson EcoTank ships Up to 2 years of ink in the box, and Epson frames the whole line on a simple promise: No more tiny, expensive ink cartridges; each ink bottle set is equivalent to about 80 cartridges. For a home that prints weekly, that is the best inkjet printer full stop — the running-cost math no cartridge machine can match. We line the tanks up in our best supertank printers roundup, and our full Epson EcoTank ET-2803 review names who it suits.

The cheapest printer to buy is a different winner, and an honest one for the right buyer. A budget HP DeskJet is the entry pick — The DeskJet 2855e is perfect for homes printing to-do lists, letters, financial documents and the occasional recipe. It runs Print speeds up to 5.5 ppm color, 7.5 ppm black and one owner pinned its fit exactly: Great printer for someone who only uses it a few times a month. Buy a budget cartridge machine if your volume is truly low; pay for a tank only once your pages justify it. Our best budget inkjet printers roundup ranks the cheap-to-buy field.

The one rule that crosses every use-case is the idle clog, and it is the reason "best" depends on your habit, not just your budget. Every inkjet dries in the nozzles when it sits, and the community is blunt about it: If you don't print frequently, inktank printers will get their print heads clogged. The best inkjet printer for a desk that prints twice a year is not an inkjet at all — it is a laser. We track which models clog hardest in our safety and known-risks guidance.

What is an inkjet printer?

An inkjet sprays liquid ink onto paper one microscopic droplet at a time from a printhead, where a laser fuses powdered toner with heat. Inkjets print colour and photos well and cost little to buy. The catch is the ink: small cartridges, or refillable tanks holding up to 2 years of bottle ink — the fork that drives every cost question here.

Here’s the thing: the printer body matters far less than how it is fed. An inkjet and a laser both put marks on a page, but their economics diverge at the consumable. A laser melts toner powder and shrugs off idle weeks; an inkjet sprays wet ink and clogs if it sits. Among inkjets, the split that matters is cartridge versus tank — the same printhead technology, two wildly different cost-per-page outcomes. That is why the best-inkjet question is really a how-do-you-print question wearing a hardware costume. We map the cartridge-versus-tank fork across the whole catalog in our type-versus-type tradeoffs analysis.

Which brand is best for an inkjet printer?

No brand wins outright. Epson leads on bottle-fed cost, its EcoTanks rated near 7,500 colour pages of in-box ink. Canon matches it on supertanks and edges ahead on 6-colour dye photos. Brother is the freedom pick — owners report it accepts cheap third-party ink. HP makes capable hardware but locks its cheapest models to Instant Ink. Pick the strength, not the logo.

The brand differences are real, and they are about ink control more than print quality. Consumer Reports tracks inkjet reliability and owner satisfaction across the majors, and the pattern in our own synthesis is that the brand fights divide buyers as much as the specs do. The fight is always about ink, never the print. Brother's edge is the clearest example — a long-term Work Smart owner reports it's not picky about 3rd party ink cartridges, the opposite of the firmware lock that drives owners off HP. So the best brand is the one whose stance on ink — cheap bottles, open cartridges, or a tightly controlled ecosystem — matches what you are willing to live with.

Work Smart 1360

Document feeder

Which inkjet printer is most reliable?

Reliability hinges on the match between the printer and how often you print, not the brand. The top failure across all 4 majors is the idle clog: leave any inkjet dark for weeks and the printhead nozzles dry, burning a cleaning cycle on the next job. Printed weekly, it is reliable; printed twice a year, it is not — and a laser is the safer answer.

Honestly, the reliability question is mostly the clog question in disguise. The hardware on a mid-tier inkjet rarely fails outright; what fails is the printhead when ink dries in it. The fix is a habit, not a different machine — run a colour page about once a week and the nozzles stay wet across every brand. A buyer who prints in steady bursts gets years of trouble-free pages from a supertank or a cartridge machine alike. A buyer who prints sporadically is the one who calls every inkjet unreliable, and they are usually right — for their habit, the right tool is a laser, not a better inkjet.

Who makes the best all-in-one inkjet printer?

It splits by use. For cheap weekly pages, an Epson EcoTank all-in-one. For an office that scans and prints two-sided, a Brother Work Smart 1360 with a 20-sheet ADF and auto-duplex at 16 ppm. For photos, a 6-colour EcoTank Photo. The best all-in-one is the one whose extra functions you will use — paying for an ADF you never touch is wasted money.

The office answer earns its own pick because its extras are the whole point. A Brother Work Smart 1360 ships office hardware rare at its price — This printer includes automatic duplex (2-sided) printing, a 20-sheet single-sided document feeder — and runs Engineered to print at fast speeds of up to 16 pages per minute (ppm) in black and up to 9 in colour. That is the best all-in-one for a desk that scans contracts and prints two-sided; our best office inkjet printers roundup ranks the field, and our Brother Work Smart 1360 review weighs the office features against the cartridge cost.

Photographs are the one job that breaks the cost-first ranking, so they get a dedicated winner. A document supertank prints fine 4×6 snapshots, but gallery-grade colour needs more inks. The Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 runs a six-colour set that reviewers single out for saturated prints — Epson's Claria ET Premium 6-color ink delivers breathtaking detail and vibrant colors — and supports the borderless output photo buyers want: Challenge your artistic boundaries with edge-to-edge printing. If photos are the point, this is the best inkjet printer for the job; our best photo inkjet printers roundup lines up the six-ink field, and our Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 review covers the colour-calibration learning curve.

Add it up and the best inkjet printer is a question with four right answers, settled by one decision: what do you actually print? Print documents weekly and want cheap pages — a bottle-fed supertank. Print rarely and want a low sticker — a budget cartridge all-in-one, eyes open about the cost-per-page. Run an office — a Brother with an ADF and duplex. Print photographs — a six-colour photo tank. The wrong answer is paying for a feature your habit will never use, or buying a clog-prone inkjet for a desk that should run a laser. Name your volume first; the best printer falls out of it.