There are plenty of inkjet printers on the market with many different designs and capabilities and this is a great thing because when going shopping for one there’s plenty to choose from. But then again, it’s definitely harder to pick a certain one out of the whole bunch. So how do you choose the best photo inkjet printer for your own needs? Well, it’s important to follow a couple of guidelines and give a few questions a bit of thought before you go out shopping.




The best place to start is establishing what you’re going to need it for. If you only print photos you might be interested in a standalone photo printer with higher photo quality and a higher number of inks. If you’re buying it for a home office then you may be better off choosing a multifunction printer (like a Canon Pixma MP490) that offers copying, printing, scanning and decent quality photo printing as well.

If you’re a professional always on the go that needs to print out photos at certain fairs and events a compact portable photo printer with a optional battery like the Epson PictureMate Zoom (PM 290) is exactly what you’re looking for. Whichever printer it is stick to the features you actually need.

Print speed is also a pretty important detail. If you’re using the printer in an office and expect it to throw out a high number of prints in a short amount of time you may be better off choosing a laser printer. But some of the new inkjets also offer good printing speeds (especially for draft mode text).

Some main advantages of inkjets are : low initial price tag, support for many types of media to print on, technology that allows you to refill ink cartridges with no problem at all if you don’t want to pay more on originals (even though quality does have to suffer a lot – consider yourself warned). If you have over two computers in the household and would like to use the printer for all of them, some sort of networking capabilities like Ethernet or wireless may be useful. This is rarely important outside an office however, because it’s easy to share a printer even through USB.

As a general idea, brand may also play an important part in choosing the best photo inkjet printer. Right now the most commonly sold brands in the US are Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark.

Special needs were obviously not included in what was mentioned above. Users that would like to print photos at larger formats should be looking for a large format printer that allows it. A good thing to also study is the maintenance cost after purchase. Some models of printers have very expensive consumables. This means that you may pay $50 at the beginning to purchase the printer and then discover that replacing the ink for it may cost you as much as buying a new printer. Carefully study that before you make a selection.

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