Colorful, Accurate Inkjet Printers for Your Documents and Photos

BETWEEN TODAY'S REMOTE-WORKPLACE DEMANDS and a looming tax season, you likely have a lot of paperwork on your hands. You need a reliable printer to quickly crank out hard copies of important documents.

- HUNTER FENOLLOL

The inkjet printer is one of the most ubiquitous everyday devices found in any home. Beyond text reports, these excel in graphics for printing colorful photos and images. But with hundreds of models in-store and online, finding the right printer can be daunting. That's why we've compared the three best printers we tested in the past year. While their up-front cost might be pricey, they are a worthy investment for their versatile feature sets, superior colors, and high performance marks in our lab tests.

HOW WE TESTED

After connecting each printer to the same WiFi network and performing a print-head alignment, we began our testing. To evaluate each inkjet printer, we looked at three core areas: print speed, color accuracy, and sharpness. Our test prints included a 10-page black-and-white Word document, an image test key (made up of reference colors, a series of fine lines, and two photos), and the cover from a previous issue of Popular Mechanics. We used two 8.5x11-inch paper types: a 24-pound bright-white paper for the text document and a 61-pound matte photo paper for the images.

Measuring print speed was as simple as timing each printer while it processed a 10-page Word document from the time we hit send to the finished job. To assess the quality, we compared text blackness and fill levels around the character edges. We magnified the fine lines on the test key to evaluate each printer's sharpness, looking for jagged lines or edges with light ink filling. Lastly, we assessed color accuracy by using a colorimeter to measure and compare the color values (cyan, yellow, and magenta) from the same point on each printed page to the digital source file's properties.