Should I buy an inkjet or a laser printer?
Buy a mono laser if you print black text under roughly forty pages a month: it costs less to buy and toner cannot dry out. Buy a refillable ink tank inkjet if you print color at all, or more than about forty pages a month — its ink costs roughly an eighth as much per page.
This is the oldest question in home printing and it is usually answered badly, because the two technologies are not better and worse than each other. They fail differently, and which failure you can live with depends on how you print.
How we decided this
By computing three-year totals rather than arguing about characteristics. For each side we took the supply, its manufacturer-rated page yield, and a price from a named source, then multiplied out at several monthly volumes and added the printer’s own price. The crossover point falls out of the arithmetic rather than out of an opinion.
Where the answer flips
| Pages a month | Brother laser, supplies | EcoTank, supplies | Who wins the total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | $12 | $1 | Laser, easily — it is cheaper to buy and the ink saving is pennies |
| 25 | $29 | $4 | Laser, comfortably |
| 50 | $59 | $7 | Close — reliability and color should decide it |
| 100 | $118 | $14 | Ink tank |
| 250 | $295 | $36 | Ink tank, decisively |
Supplies only in the middle columns, over three years, at the rated yields and prices we read on 27 September 2026. The Brother lists at $179.99 and the ET-2800 at $239.99, so add that $60 difference to the laser’s advantage at the top of the table. Run your own volume.
Read the 250-pages row and the 10-pages row together and the whole argument is visible. At the top, the supply difference over three years is a few dollars and the cheaper machine wins. At the bottom, the supply difference is many times the price of either printer.
How the two technologies actually differ
Liquid versus powder
An inkjet sprays liquid ink through microscopic nozzles. A laser fuses dry toner powder onto paper with heat. Almost every practical difference between them follows from that one distinction.
| Inkjet | Laser | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per black page | ~0.4¢ (refillable tank) | ~3.3¢ (high-yield toner) |
| Color | Yes, and cheap on a tank printer | Expensive, and needs four cartridges |
| Photographs | Yes, genuinely good | No |
| After months idle | May need a head clean; can clog | Prints normally |
| Speed | Modest | Up to 36 pages a minute |
| Small text on plain paper | Can spread slightly along fibers | Crisp |
| Water and smudge resistance | Dye ink is vulnerable; pigment is better | Fused toner is very resistant |
| Size and weight | Compact | Bulkier, because of the fuser |
The clogging question, without the drama
Ink at an unused nozzle can dry and block it. Printers fight this with automatic cleaning cycles, which consume ink that never reaches paper — so a long idle period costs you ink even though you printed nothing.
Printing one page every couple of weeks prevents nearly all of it, and on a tank printer that maintenance costs a fraction of a cent. The reason it is still a real argument against inkjets is that people who print rarely are exactly the people who will not remember to do it.
A laser has no equivalent failure mode. The full answer on that.
A note on cartridge inkjets
Everything above compares a laser with a refillable tank inkjet. A cartridge inkjet is a third thing and it loses to both: published figures put it at about 7.5 cents a page for black and about 20 cents a page for color, which is dearer than laser toner as well as dramatically dearer than bottle ink.
It is also where supply lock-in lives, because the cartridge carries a chip. Why that matters.
The decision, in three lines
- Color matters to you? Refillable ink tank. The comparison is not close.
- Black text, and you print regularly? Either works; the tank printer costs less to run and the laser is faster and more robust.
- Black text, and you print rarely? Mono laser. Cheaper to buy, and it will work in six months without being thought about.