Best Color Inkjet Printers of 2026

Six thousand black pages and 7,700 in color: that is Canon's rating for a single set of ink in the MegaTank G3270, and no other printer here runs anywhere near that long between fills. For a household that goes through a ream a month, the higher sticker price stops mattering fairly quickly.

We think the refill routine matters more than the spec sheet suggests. There are four bottles, one per tank, and filling is a pour rather than a cartridge swap in the middle of a job, with nothing left to throw away afterward. Output at 4800 x 1200 dpi is solid for documents and fine for casual photos, the 1.35-inch square LCD is small but gets you through copies and network setup, and the 100-sheet tray is standard for this class.

Two omissions shape who should buy it. There is no automatic duplex, so a two-sided document means flipping the stack by hand, and color pages come out at 6 ppm, matched only by the EcoTank below. The wireless is the other thing to plan around: joining a network can take a few attempts, and a USB cable or the router's 2.4 GHz band is the usual fix.

If your day involves as much copying and scanning as printing, this is the machine to start with. The Brother MFC-J1410DW fits a 20-sheet document feeder, automatic duplex printing, and a 150-sheet tray into a body about 15 inches wide, which is small enough to share a desk with a monitor.

The feeder is what we appreciate most. Stack a multi-page form, press copy, and walk away, which is the sort of job a flatbed-only machine turns into ten separate lifts of the lid. Text prints at 16 pages a minute and color at 9, and the 2.7-inch touchscreen puts scan-to-cloud destinations such as Google Drive and Dropbox a couple of taps from the home screen, with no computer in the loop.

Where it sits in this lineup: it is the least expensive route here to a proper document feeder and two-sided printing together. The business machines print faster and hold more paper, and the photo printer below does better on glossy stock, but neither does both jobs from a desk-sized box. Setup over Wi-Fi was straightforward for us, and the touchscreen walks you through the network step instead of burying it in a menu.

Two paper trays sound like a small convenience until you have pulled a stack of letter paper out to print a single 4x6. The Envy Photo 7975 keeps a photo tray loaded alongside its 125-sheet main tray, so snapshots and homework stop competing for the same feed.

That is the detail that sells it for us, because the rest is a competent all-in-one: borderless prints on glossy stock at up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi, a 35-sheet feeder for copying and scanning, automatic duplex, and 15 black or 10 color pages a minute. HP builds this one around photos rather than around documents that happen to contain a picture, and the 2.7-inch touchscreen makes the everyday jobs quick to start.

Where it earns its price over the cheaper cartridge printers is the photo workflow: no paper swapping, no fiddling to get an edge-to-edge print, no second machine on the shelf. Choose it over the OfficeJet Pro when photos matter more than faxing and a 225-sheet tray, and over the MegaTank when the second tray is worth more to you than the cheaper page cost.

Fax, Ethernet, a 225-sheet tray, a document feeder, and 20 pages a minute in black: the OfficeJet Pro 8139 reads like the checklist for a small office that has finally outgrown a bargain printer.

Speed and paper handling are the arguments. Twenty black pages a minute, ten in color, and a first page out in about 18 seconds means a 40-page report does not own the afternoon, and the 225-sheet tray swallows a full ream so you are not topping it up every other day. Ethernet is the quiet advantage: one cable and the printer stops being a network conversation.

It is the machine we hand to a home office that faxes or wires in. For a household printing homework and the occasional return label, it is more printer than the job needs, and the cheaper cartridge models here will do the same work without paper capacity you will never fill.

Twenty-eight black pages a minute and 26 in color puts the MFC-J5010DW in a different class from everything else on this page; the next fastest machine here prints black at 20.

The paper handling matches the speed. A 250-sheet tray takes a full ream, and the 50-sheet feeder scans both sides of a duplex original in a single pass, so a contract does not get fed through twice and a queue of jobs does not turn into a queue of people.

Ink comes as high-yield cartridges rather than refillable tanks. Brother includes a black cartridge rated at 1,800 pages in the box, which suits a business that measures supplies in months rather than in bottles poured at the desk.

What it asks in return is floor space: 30.9 pounds on a 17-inch frame, so it wants a table of its own rather than a shelf. And it costs as much as the HP office machine. What we are paying for is throughput, which is worth it when two people print to it all day and wasted when one person prints a few pages on Tuesday.

At 9.3 pounds and about 14 inches across, the EcoTank ET-2900 is the smallest tank printer here. It will sit on a bookshelf beside the router without anyone registering that it is a printer at all.

Epson's EcoFit bottles are keyed so each one only fits its own tank, which turns a refill into a two-minute job with nothing to clean up, and the boxed ink is rated for 3,600 black and 6,500 color pages. Resolution is quoted at 5760 x 1440 dpi, generous for a machine this size: graphics and snapshots come out smooth and text is clean. The 1.44-inch color screen handles copies without sending you to a computer.

The catch is that it prints one side at a time. There is no automatic duplex, so a two-sided handout means feeding the stack twice, and color runs at 6 ppm, the slowest in this group alongside the MegaTank. What you get in exchange is the lightest, most compact tank machine here, with a running cost the cartridge printers cannot approach.