The Best Wide

May 16, 2023

Most people never need to print on anything wider than letter- and legal-size pages, which is why most printers are limited to handling a maximum paper width of 8.5 inches. For those who need larger sizes, however, there's a universe of wide- format printers—from models that can sit or your desktop (if you're willing to give up that much space), to floor-standing behemoths that can print on rolls of paper several feet wide. Also known as large-format printers, these devices are primarily tools for professional photographers, graphic artists, architects, and the like. But the smaller models print at tabloid size (11 by 17 inches) or supertabloid size (13 by 19 inches), and are relatively common for offices and even for photo enthusiasts at home.

We've outlined our top picks below for both offices and homes from among the wide-format printers we've tested, along with some of the pros and cons for each. Below that is a discussion of the key issues to consider when shopping for one, followed by a spec comparison of our top choices.

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The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-7310 Wireless Wide-Format Printer is a single-function printer for up to tabloid-size (11 by 17 inch) paper, with the bonus of letting you print on single sheets up to 13 by 47.2 inches. So, it's technically supertabloid-size, but just barely. Two 250-sheet drawers offer a combined 500-sheet capacity for up to tabloid size, so you can keep two different sizes or types of paper loaded. A single-sheet manual feed lets you print on other types and sizes as needed, without a lot of loading and unloading trays. The printer also supports both borderless printing and auto-duplexing (two-sided printing) for pages up to tabloid size.

Supertabloid and larger pages are limited to being fed one sheet at a time, but being able to print at the larger sizes at all is a big plus. The WF-7310 is also surprisingly light for its level of paper handing, at 29.8 pounds. Even better, its output quality was in the top tier for a business inkjet across the board.

The WF-7310 can fit nicely in any office that needs to print at up to tabloid size, whether it also needs occasional output at larger sizes or not. It's a particularly good choice for smaller offices and even home offices that print relatively few pages. For them, the balance of a low initial price and relatively expensive ink in cartridges will still save money in the long run when compared with more-expensive tank-based printers that offer less-expensive ink.

The Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 earns the "photo" designation in its name largely thanks to its Photo Black and Gray inks added to the usual cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. This design choice makes it easier to deliver good color accuracy in color photos, and more subtle shading in black-and-white prints. More important, the extra inks pay off, with photo output in our tests that we deemed gorgeous, all the more so for the ET-8550's ability to print borderless prints at up to supertabloid (13-by-19-inch) size. It also delivered high-quality text and graphics, making it suitable for a general-purpose home printer, including for light-duty use in a home office, and it includes a flatbed for scanning at up to legal size.

The ET-8550 is primarily a home printer for photo enthusiasts, or an inexpensive option for semi-pro photographers or small businesses who want to print small quantities of marketing material at up to supertabloid size. In any of these capacities, it can also serve as a light-duty office AIO. The emphasis here is on light, though, due to the 100-sheet paper capacity in its main tray, plus a 20-sheet insert for snapshot-size photo paper. The initial list price is high for its feature set, but for those who print enough, the savings in running cost thanks to the tank-based design and inexpensive ink can save money in the long run.

The Brother MFC-J5340DW is the least-expensive AIO we've tested that can print on tabloid-size paper. It's also smaller and lighter than most, which makes it relatively easy to find space for in a small office. It delivers good output quality, fast speed, and plenty of extras, like being able to print from and scan to mobile devices. The catch? The low price, small size, and low weight are all thanks to having only one 250-sheet drawer and a single-sheet bypass tray. Both support up to tabloid-size paper and automatic duplexing, however. That can easily be all you need if you only occasionally switch paper sizes, and if you usually need to print only one- or two-page documents in the sizes you use less often.

One potentially important issue for the MFC-J5340DW is that scanning is limited to a letter-size flatbed and a 50-page ADF that doesn't allow duplexing and can handle only up to legal-size paper. That rules out the printer for offices that need to scan tabloid-size documents as well as print them, but lots of offices can do without that. For small and home offices where printing at tabloid size is essential but scanning at tabloid size isn't, the low price and compact size of the MFC-J5340DW can make it exactly the right solution.

The Epson EcoTank Pro ET-16650 combines a low cost per page (CPP) with a robust level of paper handling and performance that's often missing in tank-based inkjets. The 550-sheet capacity, split among two 250-sheet drawers and a 50-sheet tray, lets you keep up to three types or sizes of paper loaded at all times. And the 2-cent CPP for standard color pages, as well as for monochrome text, is low enough to be particularly attractive if you print many pages in color.

For printing, the ET-16650 can handle pages up to supertabloid size (13 by 19 inches) and print edge to edge (borderless, or "full bleed") at up to tabloid size (11 by 17 inches). It also supports auto-duplexing (two-sided printing). For scanning, including copying and faxing, it offers a 50-sheet, tabloid-size auto duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) to automatically scan both sides of each page in the stack. It also scored well in both performance and output quality in our tests, and its 46.1-pound weight is on the light side for its level of paper handling.

The Epson EcoTank Pro ET-16650 is a tempting choice for any office that needs to print lots of color and monochrome pages in sizes up to 13 by 19 inches as well as scan multi-page documents at sizes up to 11 by 17 inches. Its three trays will make it even more attractive to medium-size offices or workgroups with up to heavy-duty print needs and the need to continually switch back and forth between different paper types and sizes.

The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C8690 is an inkjet AIO that delivers the level of paper handling, connectivity, speed, and more that was once available only in floor-standing lasers. It measures 22.5 by 24.1 by 34.1 inches (HWD) and weighs nearly as much as some people, at 101 pounds. And that's just the base model, with one 250-sheet drawer for up to tabloid-size paper and a multipurpose tray that can hold another 80 sheets as large as supertabloid size. You can also add up to three 500-sheet drawers, for a total capacity of 1,850 sheets in five trays, as well as a combination cabinet and printer stand.

The printer doesn't skimp on scan, copy, or fax features, either, offering both a tabloid-size flatbed and a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that's rated for 40 images per minute (ipm) for duplex (two-sided) scanning with one image on each side of a page. When copying, the fast scan speed helps the ADF keep up with the printer, which is rated at 24 pages per minute (ppm) for both black and color printing for single-sided pages, or 16ppm for duplex (two-sided) pages. It scored a little better than that in our tests, and it also delivered near-laser-quality text and good-quality photos as well.

So who would want a 101-pound behemoth paper eater? Like the high-end lasers it's meant to challenge, the WF-C8690 is aimed at midsize to large offices, departments, and workgroups, which could have in the neighborhood of two dozen (or more) people using it for printing, scanning, copying, and faxing. With that in mind, it also offers features of particular interest in a large office, like private printing—which lets you send a sensitive document to the printer from your desktop, but not print it until you enter a PIN on the front panel. Even with all that, its core attraction is still its paper handling. The potential for having up to five trays adds up to a suitably high paper capacity for a large office, as well as the option to keep multiple types and sizes of paper loaded at all times.

The Canon Pixma TS9521C Wireless Crafter's All-In-One Printer is a capable wide-format home AIO by any standards, thanks in part to a five-color ink system that uses a second black ink to boost quality for photos and graphics. But what makes it stand out among wide-format printers is its crafting features, including support for 12-by-12-inch paper for scrapbooking and square photos. It also comes with assorted built-in printable patterns and templates, and the ability to print homemade greeting cards on up to 74-pound-weight card stock.

Just as important, the crafting features are built on a solid printing foundation. Paper handling for printing includes a 100-sheet front tray for up to letter size, and a 100-sheet rear tray for tabloid size (11 by 17 inches) and larger, up to 12 by 26.61 inches. For scanning, there's a letter-size flatbed and an automatic document feeder (ADF) that can hold 20 letter-size or five legal-size pages. The ADF doesn't offer automatic duplexing, but the printer does, and both copying and scanning offer manual duplexing, which lets you flip a scanned stack of pages over for a second run and automatically interfiles the pages in the right order.

The obvious best fit for the TS9521C is as a home printer for anyone who can take advantage of the various crafting features. But not caring about those features isn't a reason to overlook it if you need tabloid-size output. Even if you never use any of them, the TS9521C can handle all the standard home printing tasks, whether you need a snapshot-size photo, a business letter, a tabloid-size chart to bring into the office, or a large photo at suitably high quality to frame and hang on your wall.

The Pixma Pro-200 is Canon's least-expensive professional-grade wide-format photo printer. Unlike more expensive models, it can't accept roll paper for banners and panoramas, but it can print on media up to 13 by 39 inches, including supertabloid (13-by-19-inch) size. It also offers features that include automatic nozzle clog detection and a low running cost for its class. Canon says the printer's eight ChromaLife100+ CLI-65 inks are formulated to provide a wide gamut (range of colors) in magenta and reds as well as deliver deep blacks and more accurate color reproduction in dark blues and reds. The result is clearly visible in prints that are nothing short of gorgeous. Quite simply, both color and grayscale images are better looking than you'd expect from a $600 printer.

The Pixma Pro-200 fills a gap between high-end desktop photo inkjets aimed at home use and expensive large-format photo printers aimed squarely at professionals. It's a potentially compelling choice for anyone who wants gallery-level output quality at an affordable price. For serious photo enthusiasts, as well as photo and graphics professionals who are on a tight budget—and can do without roll support for wider banners and panoramas—it's an easy pick.

Although we call the Epson SureColor P700 a "dedicated photo printer," that's really shorthand for the fact that it's designed for both professional photographers and graphic artists. That target market absolutely requires state-of-the-art quality, and the P700 delivers it in spades. Much of the credit goes to its 10-color ink system, which delivers a much larger gamut (range of colors) to work with than printers with fewer ink colors can offer. It also includes a light gray ink, which helps improve subtle shading in both color and grayscale prints. All that really matters, of course, is the final results, which in this case are images that offer vibrant color, dark blacks, and top-tier color accuracy.

Pros also often need banners and panoramas in custom sizes that require printing on rolls of paper, which the P700 addresses as well. In addition to offering borderless printing on cut sheets ranging from 3.5 by 5 up to 13 by 19 inches, it can hold up to 13-inch-wide rolls for printing a banner or panorama as large as 13 by 129 inches. That's 10 feet, 9 inches long by 13 inches wide of exquisite panorama images.

If you need this printer, you know it. You're a professional photographer, graphic artist, or graphics designer who insists on gallery-level output quality, needs to print at sizes as large as 13 inches wide, and may need the ability to print banners or panoramas using roll paper.

Buying a wide-format printer isn't all that different from buying one strictly for letter and legal sizes—which for purposes of this discussion, we'll call letter-size printers. Some buying issues are identical regardless of printer size. Connection options, performance, output quality, and the arguments for choosing a laser versus an inkjet, among other considerations, are all problems you'll have to solve for any printer purchase.

But there are also some differences. To begin with, it's a given that a wide-format printer will be bigger and heavier than an otherwise identical letter-size model, simply because it has to handle bigger sheets of paper. It will also be more expensive. Whether you're shopping for an office or photo printer, it's not hard to find nearly identical twins from the same manufacturer whose only differences aside from size, weight, and price is that one is limited to 8.5-inch wide paper and the other can handle 11- or 13-inch wide paper.

Beyond that, some of the considerations you're familiar with for letter-size printers apply a little differently for tabloid- and supertabloid-size models. In particular, both paper handling and the calculation of running cost are complicated by the likelihood that you'll be printing on letter-size pages as well as larger ones.

You can find more on the buying considerations that apply to all printers, including wide-format models, in our guide to the best printers, as well as our tips for choosing between inkjet and laser printers. Here, we'll focus on the issues that are specific to the subset of wide-format printers that's of interest to most people: tabloid- and supertabloid-size printers both for office needs and for home use, including for photo enthusiasts. Some of the higher-end photo printers included here deliver high-enough quality to be of interest to professional photographers as well, but we are not including floor-standing models, or any printers that are designed to produce prints at sizes larger than 13 inches on their shortest side.

Simply talking about the printers in this roundup is complicated by the fact that most are designed to handle multiple paper size equivalents, based on varying standards followed by different countries. In the US, tabloid, or ledger-size, is 11 by 17 inches. The equivalent ISO paper size used in much of the rest of the world is A3 size, or 297 by 420 millimeters (mm), which works out to roughly 11.69 by 16.54 inches. Any printer that can print on either size paper will also print on the other, which is why you'll see the same printer referred to as tabloid-size, ledger-size, or A3 size. A similar issue crops up with supertabloid size versus A3+ and Super B. In that case, however, all three are 13 by 19 inches.

In addition to these variations on names, you'll sometimes see tabloid and supertabloid models grouped together, without any obvious distinction between them, on the grounds that either can serve as a tabloid-size printer. When you're shopping, it's always a good idea to check for the actual maximum paper width the printer you're looking at can use—11 inches or 13 inches. It may keep you from overlooking a supertabloid-size printer hidden in a list labeled "tabloid printers," or save you from buying a supertabloid-size model—with its extra size, weight, and cost—when you need only tabloid-size.

Although most paper-handling issues are the same for any size printer, they apply slightly differently for tabloid- and supertabloid-size printers than for letter-size models.

For letter-size printers, having more one than paper drawer or tray is a useful convenience, both for increasing capacity and letting you switch between different types of paper easily. But if you print almost entirely on one type and size of paper, a single tray will often be enough.

Strictly speaking, the same holds true for a tabloid- or supertabloid-size printer. But with a tabloid-size model, odds are you'll want to use the same printer for both tabloid- and letter-size output, and will be switching back and forth between them repeatedly every day, which can make having at least two trays a necessity. For a supertabloid-size model, two trays may also be enough if you mostly use either tabloid- or supertabloid-size along with letter-size paper. Or, you may need a minimum of three trays, so you can devote one to each paper size.

In either case, note that some models offer extremely limited paper handling for the largest size paper they accept. We've seen supertabloid-size printers that offer two 250-sheet drawers for up to tabloid-size paper, but are limited to holding 20 sheets or less of supertabloid sheets. We've also seen printers whose supertabloid paper handling is limited to one sheet at a time, using a manual feed tray. Similarly, we've also seen printers that can print on paper as large as supertabloid-size, but offer duplexing (two-sided printing) only up to legal-size.

The moral of the story is that when shopping, you can't assume that every paper handling feature works with every size paper. You need to check the maximum capacity of each tray for each paper size, and check the kind of duplexing the printer offers for each paper size in each tray. Otherwise, a printer with automatic duplexing, say, may not duplex using the paper size you need.

The same basic rule applies to paper handling for scanning (including for copying and faxing). We've seen AIOs that can print at up to supertabloid-size but scan only up to tabloid-size (or even only up to legal-size). Here again, make sure the flatbed, ADF, or both can handle the size of paper you need it for. And if you need to scan in duplex, make sure the ADF duplexes with the size of paper you need duplexing for, as well.

In many ways, issues relating to running cost are the same for tabloid- and supertabloid-size printers as for letter-size models. In both cases, you shouldn't get too carried away by a low running cost. As a general rule, printers with low ink costs are more expensive than printers with high ink costs—as is true for comparable tank-based versus cartridge-based inkjets, for example. The number you should be looking at for comparisons is the total cost of ownership—the initial price plus the total cost you'll pay for number of pages you expect to print over the printer's lifetime.

Keep in mind that the standard calculation for cost per page (CPP)—which we quote in our reviews and discuss in detail in our guide to saving money on your next printer—doesn't apply to printing on photo paper. The calculation doesn't include paper cost, because plain paper will be the same price for any printer, which means it won't affect the relative cost from one printer to another for text and graphics output. However, photos need photo paper, which can vary significantly from one paper type to another, even for a single printer. To calculate costs for comparison, you'd have to factor in each of the available photo papers you would use for each printer you're considering, as well as the proportion of photos you'd print on each paper—an almost impossible task.

For printing on plain paper, computing the total cost of ownership can also take a little more arithmetic than you might like, but the basic concept is simple. Dividing the extra cost of a more-expensive-but-cheaper-to-run printer by the savings per page for that printer tells you how many pages you have to print before its total cost will be lower than for a less-expensive printer with more-expensive ink.

The added twist for a tabloid- or supertabloid-size printer is that standard CPP calculations are based on single-sided, letter-size pages. So to get the right cost for a tabloid-size page, you have to double the quoted standard CPP for each tabloid page. And because you'll probably be printing letter-size pages, too, you'll need estimate the number of each page size you'll be printing, calculate the total cost for each separately, and add the two to get the total ink cost. (And don't forget to count pages printed on both sides as two pages.) Supertabloid-size pages offer nearly a third more square inches to print on than tabloid-size pages, but how much additional ink you'll use will depend on how large the top, bottom, and side margins are.

Still not sure whether you really need a wide-format printer? To help find the right printer for your needs, take a look at our picks for the best printers, best laser printers, and best photo printers, as well as our guide to choosing between inkjet and laser printers.