Should I buy a monochrome or a color laser printer?
Monochrome, for almost every household. It costs about $100 less at list price, has one cartridge instead of four, and prints a page for a fraction of what a color laser does. Buy a color laser only if you need occasional color that must stay crisp after months of idleness — and if you want cheap color, buy an ink tank instead.
This is one of the easier comparisons on the site, because the answer is lopsided. The interesting part is not mono against color laser; it is that the buyer asking the question usually wants color, and the color laser is rarely the cheapest way to get it.
The comparison, on the machines we cover
| Brother HL-L2460DW (mono) | Brother HL-L3220CDW (color) | |
|---|---|---|
| List price | $179.99 | $284.99 |
| Speed published | Up to 36 ppm | Up to 19 ppm black and color |
| Cartridges to buy | One | Four |
| Starter supply | Starter black rated at 700 pages | Four cartridges, 1,000 pages each |
| Black cost per page | ~3.3¢ on TN830XL | ~3.2¢ on TN229XL |
| Color cost per page | No color | Not published - see note |
| Auto duplex | Yes | Yes |
| Connectivity | Dual-band wireless, Ethernet, USB | Wireless |
Specifications and list prices as published by Brother USA on the dates in our registry. We publish no complete color-laser cost per page because we could only confirm the price of the black TN229XL cartridge - a figure built on three unconfirmed prices would be a guess with a decimal point.
Note the speed row, which surprises people. The color laser is roughly half the speed of the mono machine in black as well as in color, because a color engine has four times the work to coordinate. You pay $105 more and print black pages at half the rate.
What each one costs to run
On black pages the two are closer than the price gap suggests: about 3.3 cents on the mono machine and about 3.2 cents on the color one, both on high-yield cartridges. The gap opens up on two fronts.
- Four cartridges instead of one. Even if no color page is ever printed, a color laser has four supplies with four expiry paths and four prices to track.
- Color pages themselves. Published industry figures put color laser at between 12 and 15 cents a page against around 5 to 8 cents a page for mono, attributed to Toner Buzz rather than measured by us. That is roughly double, per page.
- Higher-volume cartridges exist only on the mono side. The TN920 family goes to 18,000 pages at about 1.3 cents. There is no color equivalent at that cost per page in the range we cover.
When a color laser is genuinely the right buy
There is a real case and it is narrower than the marketing suggests. You want it when all three of these are true at once: you need color sometimes rather than often, the printer will sit unused for weeks at a time, and the color output has to be crisp and smudge-proof rather than photographic.
That combination describes a small home office that prints mostly invoices and occasionally a presentation, or a household that prints school paperwork in bursts. Toner cannot dry out, which is the one thing an inkjet cannot promise — why that is. If your pattern is weekly or more, the case collapses.
When monochrome is obviously right
If you print documents. That is most people: letters, forms, tickets, homework, statements, contracts. A mono laser does that faster, cheaper and with one supply to think about, and the money saved buys several years of toner.
The common objection is “but what if I need color once?”. The honest answer is that one color page at a print shop costs less than the difference in cartridge prices, and a mono laser plus a print shop beats owning a color laser for anyone who means “once” literally. Our picks: best monochrome laser printers.
Our verdict
Buy mono unless you have a specific, recurring need for laser color. If you want color at home and the printer will be used regularly, buy an ink tank instead of either — it is cheaper to buy than a color laser and prints color for a fraction of the cost. If you want color and the printer will be neglected, the color laser is the one machine that handles that — the Brother HL-L3220CDW breakdown is the detail on the one we cover, and we have picks for it.