Best Photo Printers of 2026

Open the Liene M100 and there's a season of printing inside: three dye-sub cartridges and 100 sheets of 4x6 paper, enough to fill an album before you reorder anything. It also runs its own Wi-Fi hotspot rather than leaning on your router, and it holds five devices at once, which is the difference between one person printing and a whole table printing.

The prints are why it sits near the top of this set. The dye-sub engine lays down color that reads true to what's on the phone screen, skin tones especially, and the finish has the sealed, faintly glossy feel of a print-shop 4x6. Setting it up from an iPhone took us minutes, and the app's editing is basic without being annoying. On output alone it gets closest to the top pick of anything here.

Where it gets murky is the running cost, because the cartridges are proprietary and sold in bundles, and how many prints you get from one swings with how much color is on the page. Wi-Fi is the other soft spot; when it drops, connecting to the printer's own hotspot instead of your network is the fix. Buy it for the bundle and the group printing, and keep a spare cartridge on the shelf.

Twenty-eight inches deep, 32 pounds, and happiest on a table you don't plan to move: the PIXMA PRO-200S is furniture. It is also the least expensive way in this group to a borderless 13 x 19, which is the size a framed print actually is. If your photographs end up on walls rather than on the fridge, this is the pick.

Eight dye inks do the heavy lifting, and the difference shows in glossy color work: deep blacks, saturated reds and gradients that don't band across a big sky. Canon quotes 90 seconds for an A3+ print and 53 seconds for an 8 x 10, which is quick enough that a print session stays an errand rather than an evening. Two trays mean photo paper stays loaded while plain paper waits its turn.

Practical notes from living with it: the network side is the fussy part, so Ethernet or a USB cable is worth running if the Wi-Fi acts up, and it is a photo machine first, so documents crawl out at a couple of pages a minute. The custom size setting runs out to 13 x 39 inches and it will happily take canvas paper. Nobody needs that. Some people need exactly that.

Six bottles, 70 mL each, tipped in by hand and then forgotten about. The ET-8550 replaces cartridges with a refillable tank system, and on Epson's own figures a 4x6 costs a fraction of what a cartridge printer charges, so you stop rationing prints. Filling the tanks is a five-minute job the first time and a two-minute one after that, and the levels are visible through the front of the machine.

It's also the most versatile unit in this set. Six Claria inks, including a dedicated photo black and a gray, print up to 13 x 19, and there's a flatbed scanner and copier on top, so the drawing you print can be scanned back in and the school form gets copied while you're standing there. A 100-sheet tray and 16-page-per-minute documents make it a working printer rather than a photo novelty.

That combination is why it's our low-cost-ink pick. If you print a mix of photographs and paperwork and resent doing cartridge math, this is the machine that ends the math. Buy it somewhere with an easy return policy, though: a printer this expensive that arrives dead is a bad afternoon, and early failures are the recurring risk here. Run it hard in the first week.

Color is good rather than spectacular. The six-ink set beats any four-ink office printer, but glossy work from the eight-ink Canon has more punch. Where the Epson wins is volume: when the hundredth print costs about what the first did, you print the whole album instead of picking twelve.

Two trays is the detail that makes the Envy Photo 7975 liveable. Letter paper stays in the main tray, 4x6 photo stock stays in the photo tray, and nobody has to unload the printer to print a picture. Add a 35-sheet document feeder, automatic two-sided printing and a 2.7-inch touchscreen, and it's a family machine that happens to print photographs well.

That's the honest description. This is the best all-in-one in the group for a house that prints homework far more often than photographs and wants the photographs to look good when they happen. Borderless prints go up to letter size, which covers a birthday-party print or a school project. It's a four-ink machine, so expect clean, believable color rather than dye-sub depth.

Ink is the part to think through. It runs on HP 64 cartridges, and the three-month Instant Ink trial is the opening of a subscription rather than a freebie, fine if you print steadily and less so if the printer idles for weeks. Setup is the other wrinkle: the app walks you through it, but the wireless link is the weak part, and a USB cable solves it.

Print a frame from a video, then scan the finished print with the app and the video plays on your phone. The CP4100's AR feature is a party trick, and a genuinely good one for a birthday card or a grandparent's fridge door.

Underneath the trick is a competent 4x6 dye-sub with the largest starter kit here: 108 sheets and two ribbons in the box. It connects over Bluetooth or its own Wi-Fi hotspot, takes standard 4x6 paper, and delivers the sealed, dry-to-the-touch finish that dye sublimation gives you. The body is small enough to sit on a bookshelf between uses.

Where it lands for us: a solid first photo printer, and the one to pick if you want a long runway before buying supplies. The app is plain and the AR trick has a short shelf life, but the prints themselves are the equal of anything else here at 4x6, and the bundle means you're printing within minutes of opening the box.

The phone drops into the dock, charges while the printer works, and comes out with a 4x6 in hand. That's the whole idea, and it's a better one than it sounds: at a gathering where every phone is nearly dead, a printer with a charging dock is the only one anyone can use without hunting for a cable.

Output is 4PASS dye sublimation, three color passes plus a protective laminate, roughly 55 seconds a print, sealed and fingerprint-resistant when it lands. The dock is also the limit: it's built for phones, the tray takes 20 sheets, and it lives on a desk near an outlet rather than travelling.

Printing is the easy part, which is why it stays worth a look. Connect over Bluetooth or USB-C, pick a photo in the Kodak app, and the machine spits out a print while your phone tops up. Of everything here, this is the one we hand to a guest at a wedding.

It's an also-consider rather than a runner-up because of consistency. This is the printer in the group with the widest gap between how easy it is to use and how reliably it keeps printing, so buy it knowing that and run a full pack through it in the first week. The dock still makes a strong case for itself.

Two inches by three, sticky on the back: the PP01 prints the size that ends up in a journal, on a laptop lid or in a planner, and nothing else. That's the trade. It's the least expensive printer here by a wide margin, and what it buys you is small.

It also isn't the washed-out rectangle you might brace for at this size. Nelko uses an inkjet cartridge rather than dye crystals, and 600 dpi is high for a printer this small, so detail holds up better than the format suggests. Paper loads in a cassette and comes out with a peel-off backing, which means a print can go straight onto a page.

Living with it is easy. Bluetooth pairing from an iPhone or Android takes seconds, the app handles borders, filters and a bit of AI-assisted cleanup, and the body is about the size of a paperback. Twenty sheets and a cartridge come in the box, and the tray takes 30, which is more than one journal's worth. It has travelled in a tote bag without complaint.

The honest summary: it's the cheapest way here to get physical prints off a phone, and it's genuinely fun to use. Buy it for journals, planners and party favors; buy something else if you want a print to frame.