We trust you're better equipped than ever to shop for your best-fit inkjet! The top inkjets we've tested in PC Labs span a variety of usage cases: home- and small-office printing (color and monochrome alike), photo printing, and mobile document printing. One will likely match your needs, but for more picks, check out our favorite printers overall (including laser printers alongside inkjets), our preferred AIO printers, and our top photo printers.

Ink costs for cartridge-based inkjets have long been a sore spot for both business and personal inkjet users. However, in the last few years, manufacturers have offered a choice of ways to pay less for ink. The most significant potential savings are with tank printers, most of which let you buy ink in large bottles and pour it into tanks in the printer. The savings come both from buying in bulk—the proverbial large "economy size"—and from eliminating expensive cartridges. Epson, Canon, and HP all offer tank-based printers with ink in bottles, ready to pour into reservoirs in the printer. Brother's tank inkjets use high-capacity cartridges that serve only to hold ink.

Don't get too focused on low ink costs. Tank printers cost significantly more to buy than equivalent traditional cartridge printers. For the lower ink cost to save money in the long run, you have to print enough to make up for the extra cost of the printer. When choosing between tank and cartridge printers, you'll want to compare total cost of ownership for the competing choices to see which is really more expensive.

An alternative way to save on ink is an ink subscription program. HP, Brother, and Canon all offer similar plans (HP Instant Ink, Brother Refresh EZ Print, Canon Pixma Print Plan). Each is available for only some printers, and details vary. That said, you're more likely to save with any of them if the number of pages you print is close to the number included with the plan. And since they charge the same per page for a full-page color photo as for a black-and-white text page with a single character on it, the higher the percentage of color output you print, the more you'll save.

Today's inkjets offer the same range of connection choices that lasers do. A few inexpensive models offer only USB, which makes them a good option if you need a personal printer to connect by USB cable to a single PC. Windows will also let you share USB printers on a network, but the better option is to pick a printer that can connect to the network directly.

You can connect to a network using either an Ethernet port, which many inkjets offer, or Wi-Fi, which all but the least expensive offer. Ethernet provides the most straightforward setup. In most cases, you only have to plug in the cable. Wi-Fi can be almost as easy to set up but often isn't. However, it has the advantage of letting you put the printer anywhere without stringing a cable to your router.

If you want to print wirelessly from a mobile device, note that you can do that even with printers that don't support Wi-Fi. As long as the printer manufacturer offers an appropriate printing app for your phone or tablet, you can print through a network to any printer on the same network as the device, including printers connected by Ethernet.

Most printers that support Wi-Fi also support Wi-Fi Direct (which some manufacturers give a different name) with or without Near-Field Communication (NFC). Wi-Fi Direct allows a direct peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection between the printer and a compatible device, with the printer acting as its own access point. For printers that offer NFC with Wi-Fi, the connection can be established simply by touching the device to a designated spot on the printer.