The best art printers: From premium to portable

The best art printers will help you fully realise your work from the comfort of your home or studio. To help you choose the right one, we've tested models from both Canon and Epson. paying attenrtion to colour reproduction and clarity, value, design and overall performance. We've also factored in the compatible inks, as well as the archival quality (how well those inks will keep before fading) and versatility in terms of larger formats or heavy fine art media.

We've selected the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 as the best art printer overall, but there's stiff competition from others. Read to find out which art printer is best for you.

Quick list

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Best overall art printer

30-second review: The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 is my pick as the best art printer overall for its broad range of strengths and gorgeous results. With support for Wi-Fi, USB and Ethernet connectivity, plus a host of third-party services to make your printing process that much easier, it's easy to recommend the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300. The image quality is, of course, its greatest strength, and at its price point it stands a head above the rest.

Pricing: The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 generally retails for around $900 / £700. Its ongoing costs are quite low thanks to its clever ink usage.

Features: With its 10-colour ink system, results are gorgeously vibrant and accurate to its source material, and the ink usage is fairly economical, which is a boon, considering it's a little on the pricey side. After setting up, it's easy to get started, as the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 comes with a host of pre-programmed profiles for a wide range of papers.

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Best budget art printer

30-second review: The Epson Expression Premium XP-6100 is a compact, mid-range multifunction printer that's easy to use and incredibly quick. Its sleek design and simple wireless setup make it ideal for home use; print speeds are quick, even for colour-heavy jobs, and photo quality is surprisingly high for a printer in this price range. 

Pricing: At just $129.99 / £119.99, the Epson XP-6100 is a great budget option. The real downside is the cost of replacement inks, which we worked out at around 16p a print, which is slightly more expensive than other printers on this list. So while the XP-6100 is cheaper upfront, it could be more costly in the long run, depending on how much use it gets. Still, 

Features: In our Epson XP 6100 review we found that it does the basics well – scanning, copying and printing – but also has pre-installed templates to help you get more from these features. It's best used as one of the best all-in-one printers, but it can easily be used to print off art, though the compact size means you're limited to A4 prints.

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Best premium

30-second review: If money is no object, then the Epson SureColor SC-P5000 should be top of your shopping list. You can print up to A2+ and panoramic prints. I'll take the heaviest fine art media in its stride. And its print quality is quite exceptional. It prints on a wide variety of paper sizes and can switch from cut to roll media automatically to keep things easy when you're printing at scale. Note, though, that it's very heavy at 52kg.

Pricing: As of writing, the Epson SureColor SC-P5000 retails for $1,995 / £2,295, but on the plus side, its ongoing running costs are very competitive. This by far the most expensive option on our list. But if you're printing exhibition work and high-end art prints for customers, then it should ultimately pay for itself. 

Features: The SC-P5000 has an internal colour calibration sensor, and that, combined with a set of 10 Epson UltraChrome HDX pigment inks, means that it can reproduce 99 per cent of the Pantone solid coated colour range. 

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Best portable art printer

30-second review: This tiny printer is small enough to slip into a shoulder bag, and is primarily great for printing lab-quality photos directly from your camera, which is great for scrapbooking and collecting reference photos. As such, it's a fun way to take your digital art on the go. It's also a great way to paint and collect references when out and about so digital plein air painters will love it. I'd suggest this be used with one of the larger home printers on my list. Take a look at our buying guide to the best portable printers for more like this.

Pricing: The Canon SELPHY CP1300 is a nicely affordable option, retailing at $100 / £119, with relatively low ongoing cost, considering its form factor.

Features: This printer uses dye sublimation for quality prints and each only takes less than a minute to print. The small LCD screen enables you to set prints from the machine itself or use the Cannon app, which works with Apple devices. The Canon Selphy CP1300 can also be used to print off art directly from your iPad or other tablet. The app can be a little temperamental and the printer has a tendency to auto-crop areas of the image, which could be frustrating when printing art from a tablet.

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Best mid-tier art printer

30-second review: The Epson EcoTank ET-8550 is a fantastic art printer, and it's second only to the number one printer on our list as an excellent all-rounder. It will print wide format 13- x 19-inch pictures, though if that's overkill for you, there's the slightly cheaper ET-8500 that reaches up to 8.5- x 11-inch pictures. The ET-8550 supports A3 prints, which is pretty essential for creatives. If the price puts you off, consider the savings on ink, and this art printer also includes a built-in scanner and copier. I particularly like the compact design, too.

Pricing: When you factor in that it does all this with a reasonale list price of $749 / £649 and offers affordable running costs (one ink tank prints around 3,400 pages), this is a printer that will be ideal for the largest number of creatives out there, from photographers to crafters and artists.

Features: It's easy to set up the ET-8550 and it supports Wi-Fi, USB and Ethernet connectivity, plus a mobile app enables you to manage prints and ink orders. Overall it's the quality of the photo and art prints that really impresses us, unlike standard printers that use CMYK the EcoTank ET-8550 makes use of grey and deep photo quality black ink for prints that have real impact.

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Best art printer for large prints

30-second review: If you're a professional artist or looking to sell art prints on craft stores like Etsy or your own site then the Canon PIXMA PRO-200 comes recommended. This printer delivers lovely sharp prints that dry almost straight away. And it's versatile; working with sets of eight inks, it's capable of printing on anything from standard paper to heavier fine art media. It's costly, but you'll get a corresponding jump in quality when it comes to colour reproduction. It's a relatively speedy printer, too. And it goes up to A3+, which as the name suggests is larger than A3 at 330mm x 483mm (13" x 19"). It'll also do panoramic prints up to 990cm wide.

Pricing: The Canon PIXMA PRO-200 currently retails at  $549.99 / £459, making it good value if you print regularly and want to control output quality in-house, rather than outsource.

Features: This compact yet powerful A3+ dye‑based photo printer boasts eight ChromaLife 100+ inks, including dual greys for stunning monochrome and vibrant colour reproduction. It delivers gallery‑worthy borderless prints up to 13 × 19 in in as little as 90 seconds, with results that are touch‑dry straight from the printer. And connectivity is versatile: USB, Ethernet, Wi‑Fi, plus a 3‑inch LCD makes navigation and ink‑level monitoring effortless.

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Best for archival quality

30-second review: This art printer can deliver some excellent results, including panoramic prints to cut sheets up to 17 by 22 inches (though this requires a roll feeder that's bought separately). If you're looking for professional results from your prints, and want them to last and not fade, then the Epson SureColor SC-P900 is the best on this list for that archival quality, just be aware of the extra costs involved.

Pricing: The Epson SureColor SC-P900's compatible inks do make for a more expensive printer in the long run, plus at $1,349 / £870 it's a fairly expensive printer already. Also, note that the ink supplied with the printer won't last long. This is, to be fair, the only downside to a professional art printer that's actually nicely sized and suitable for home use.

Features: The Epson SureColor SC-P900 is easily set up and comes with connectivity to Mac and PC, as as well an on-printer LCD touchscreen to help you manage your prints. And the print results speak for themselves: photos and art prints are deep and colours rich and vibrant, as this printer uses an UltraChrome 10 ink system to deliver a vast array of tones. These inks are: Cyan, Light Cyan, Vivid Magenta, Vivid Light Magenta, Yellow, Gray, Light Gray, Violet, Photo Black, and Matte Black. This does make it a little more expensive to run than some on this list. 

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Best art printer for blueprints

30-second review: Architects and engineers will need different things from a printer than artists and graphics designers. And so if you want to print crisp, large-scale line work such as blueprints and building plans, the HP DesignJet Studio is the printer to go for. This printer is also somewhat of a rarity; an aesthetically pleasing model that was clearly designed with design studios in mind.

Pricing: Retailing at $3,025-$3,425 / £1,330-£1,715 depending on size, this a very expensive printer, and the running costs are also pretty high.

Features: This dye-based A1 plotter also has great eco-credentials because it's made with as many recycled materials as possible, using low and renewable energy construction processes. Note, though, that it only has a basic set of CMYK inks and will struggle with smooth gradients and photographic quality, so it's not really suitable as an all-purpose art printer.

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How to choose the best art printers

Art printers can be very expensive, so choosing the right one for your needs really is a question of balancing quality with budget. To put it bluntly, if you're still a hobbyist or student, spending a lot of money on top-end art printers is probably going to be overkill. On the other hand, professional designers will find that an expensive printer pays off over the long term, because better quality prints will keep clients happy, or make it easier to sell your prints online for a higher price. Also, think carefully about whether you need to print at A4, A3, A3+ or A2, because that will have an impact on budget too, and what sort of wired and/or wireless connectivity will best work with your workflow and setup.

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How we test the best art printers

To decide which models are best suited for this guide, we combine real-world testing with professional and customer reviews to make sure we're offering well-rounded and balanced recommendations.

In the best art printers, we expect to see fantastic colour accuracy, fast print times, quick drying and low ongoing costs, as well as a low cost to begin with. We want to see versatility, meaning a printer can not only handle different mediums like photography and type, but also different paper sizes and media.

Lastly, we want to see good-quality inks and ink systems to ensure everything you print comes out flawlessly and true to the original image.

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FAQs

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