Alice
Printables are some of the most popular digital downloads sold online, providing professional-grade graphic design for home crafters. With printables, you can easily create stunning diaries, planners, journals, stickers, artwork, colouring pages and more – all with your home printer. However, not all printers are made for art quality printing, and will struggle to produce consistent results on large amounts of printables, blocks of colour or intricate designs. To make your choice easier, we’ve surveyed printers from across the market to find you the best printer for printables available in 2022, in the categories that matter: speed, paper handling, print quality and cost.
Product Comparison Table: Best Printer for Printables
| Title | Price | Rating (Amazon) | Best in class | Buy | |
 | Epson Expression Home XP-5100 Wireless Color Photo Printer | $ | 4 stars | Best value | Amazon |
 | Canon Pixma iP8720 Wireless Printer | $$$ | 4.5 stars | Best print quality | Amazon |
 | Epson Surecolor SC-P600 Professional Photo Printer | $$$$$ | 4 stars | Best for large format | Amazon |
 | Epson EcoTank ET-2720 Wireless Colour SuperTank Printer | $$ | 4.5 stars | Most ink efficient | Amazon |
 | HP InkJet Pro 8710 All-in-One Wireless Printer | $$ | 4 stars | Best overall | Amazon |
Epson Expression Home XP-5100 Wireless Color Photo Printer
The Epson Expression Home XP-5100 Wireless Color Photo Printer has a lot of excellent features going for it, that all add to its suitability for producing excellent quality printables. Built-in auto duplex (double-sided) printing allows you to maximise printable space, while a borderless capability allows you to make professional-looking printables with no ugly white lines around the outside. With a 150-sheet capacity tray, you won’t have to reload paper too often either. The 4 Claria ink cartridge set produces great quality prints, plus allowing you to make savings by only replacing individual cartridges as they run out. The print speeds are fast, too: 140 ISO ppm in monochrome, or 7.5 ISO ppm in color. As for connectivity, the printer allows connections via iPad, iPhone or Android tablet with WiFi, or laptops with WiFi direct and USB 2.0. You can even have the printer detect if ink is low and order you more, via Amazon’s Dash Replacement service – although an Amazon account is required.
Pros
- Low price
- Large paper tray
- Fast print speeds
- Range of connectivity options
Cons
- No USB cable included
- Amazon Prime needed for Dash Replacement
Verdict
The Epson Expression Home XP-5100 Wireless Color Photo Printer combines features of all the other printers on this list, to produce, in our view, the best value printer for printables. Many of the features are usually reserved for more expensive machines, such as duplex and borderless printing. However, some features – such as Dash Replacement or USB connection – require elements not included on purchase, which could push the price up.
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Canon Pixma iP8720 Wireless Printer
The Canon Pixma iP8720 Wireless Printer lives up to Canon’s reputation for producing excellent quality art printers. With a 6 colour ink system, including gray ink, you can expect incredible quality and amazing detail on your black & white and color printables. The max resolution is a professional-standard 9600 x 2400 dpi, delivered through a high performance full-lithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering (FINE) system with a patented print head capable of firing ink droplets as small as one picoliter. It also supports borderless printing, on sizes up to 13 x 19 inches, and has a max speed of 14 images per minute (ipm) in black, and 10.4 ipm in colour – that’s enough to produce a 4” x 6” printable in approximately 36 seconds. Best of all, ChromaLife100+ ink technology promises printables that last up to 300 years when stored in an archival-quality photo album. Print quality aside, connection is available via built-In WiFi, the PIXMA Printing Solutions (PPS) app, AirPrint, Google Cloud Print and Hi-Speed USB.
Pros
- Superior resolution for professional-quality prints
- High-yield cartridges available
- Sophisticated ink technologies
- Wireless connectivity options
Cons
- Heavy and bulky
- Not the cheapest to buy or run
Verdict
If money is less of a concern – either in inks or initial cost – compared to print quality, the Canon Pixma iP8720 Wireless Printer is a great fit. With the highest resolution out of any of the printers on our list, this machine is guaranteed to produce exceptional quality, long-lasting printables that’ll impress even the most discerning crafter. However, the high price of inks could make this model unworkable for those on a budget.
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Epson Surecolor SC-P600 Professional Photo Printer
The Epson Surecolor SC-P600 Professional Photo Printer is the most expensive model on this list, but produces professional results to rival a print shop – even at paper sizes larger than A2 (up to 44”). It promises quality output, the deepest tones, an expanded blue colour gamut and less graininess; UltraChrome Pro 10 ink, the new F10 printhead and black enhance overcoat technology (BEO) guarantee clear finer detail and texture even in black areas. The resolution is lower than the Canon at 5760 x 1440 dpi, but the other technologies make the quality difference much less noticeable. Printables made by this machine will always come out true-to-colour. However, the most impressive feature of this printer is its large format, plus a huge range of supported media: fine art media, vellum and even poster board. The print speed may be relatively slow, though.
Pros
- High resolution for high print quality
- Supports large formats and unusual media
- Wireless connectivity
Cons
- Extremely expensive to buy and run
- Large and bulky
- Slow print speed
Verdict
Need to go bigger than A3+ and don’t mind paying for the privilege? The Epson SureColor SC-P600 is the most expensive to run out of any of the printers we surveyed (around $420 for the full set of cartridges at the time of writing), but the results are great, even in very large formats. The print speed is slow, however, and the price is truly exclusionary – plus the machine weighs a whopping 16kg. This is definitely a specialist machine for producing large printables, or printing them on unusual media.
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Epson EcoTank ET-2720 Wireless Colour SuperTank Printer
The Epson EcoTank ET-2720 Wireless Colour SuperTank Printer is fast, affordable and easy to use. As a multifunctional machine, it scans, prints and copies too. Its biggest innovation is being entirely cartridge-free; high-capacity ink tanks mean no more tiny, expensive ink cartridges. Instead, it uses Epson’s exclusive EcoFit ink bottles for easy replacement, eco-friendliness and big savings – each ink bottle replaces 90 conventional cartirdges. Epson promises up to 90% cost reduction on EcoFit ink bottles versus traditional cartridges, enough to print 4500 pages in black or 7500 in colour. Best of all, the printer comes with 2 years worth of ink in the box (4 bottles), so you can say goodbye to faded lines on your printables for the foreseeable future. Connectivity options include WiFi, hands-free voice activated printing and the Epson Smart Panel smartphone app. The primary downside is slow printing speeds, at approximately 5ppm.
Pros
- Exceptional ink economy for low costs-per-page
- Wireless connectivity
- High resolution for good quality prints
Cons
- Slow printing speeds
- WiFi connection fairly weak
Verdict
The Epson EcoTank ET-2720 Wireless Colour SuperTank Printer offers the lowest cost-per-page of all the candidates we reviewed, at a tiny 1 cent per sheet based on an average monthly yield of 150 pages. The ink technology in this machine is truly unique, and makes it an excellent choice for high-volume use, allowing you to go wild with printing as many printables as your heart desires. With the savings you’ll make on inks, you’ll have more than enough left to buy those downloads!
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HP InkJet Pro 8710 All-in-One Wireless Printer
The HP InkJet Pro 8710 All-in-One Wireless Printer is a multifunctional all-in-one model, meaning it can copy, scan and fax as well as printing. It also features wireless printing, allowing you to print from your laptop or smartphone, and Cloud printing via AirPrint. Print speeds reach a quite speedy 22ppm black or 18ppm for colour, so you won’t be waiting around for long; speeds are also boosted by a 50-sheet auto-document-feeder for two-sided (duplex) printing, and a tray capacity of 250 sheets. The resolution is high too, at 4800 x 1200 dpi with richly pigmented inks. However, the main selling point of the HP InkJet Pro is its inks, which promise quality on par with laser printing, at 50% of the price. Plus, this machine is eligible for HP’s popular Instant Ink program: when enrolled, your printer detects when ink is low and automatically dispatches more in the mail. The pricing tiers start at free for 15 pages a month and go up to $9.99 for 300 pages, making for much lower costs-per-page in the long run.
Pros
- High quality prints for an inkjet model
- Fast printing speeds and large tray
- ADF and duplex printing
- Wireless connectivity
- HP Instant Ink program
Cons
- Inkjet can cause bleeding or smudges while drying
Verdict
With the HP InkJet Pro 8710 All-in-One Wireless Printer, you won’t find yourself paying large amounts for ink, or watching the cartridge run out with no replacement – nobody wants to see fading lines on a brand new printable! The only drawbacks are common to all inkject printers. The inkjet method – saturating the page with ink to produce colour, sometimes leading to dullness and bleeding – can have problems, but we didn’t notice them with this machine. This is our top pick for the best printer for printables in 2022.
