The printer with the cheapest ink is the Canon MegaTank G3270: about 0.3 of a cent a mono page and 0.8 cents for an ISO color page, from large GI-21 bottles, with a pigment black thrown in. The Epson EcoTank ET-2800 is fractionally dearer at 0.4 and 1.1 cents and has far wider bottle availability. The budget pick is the EcoTank ET-2400 at $189.99, which runs on the identical bottles for the identical cost per page.
Which printer has the cheapest ink?
A refillable ink tank printer, and among the models we cover the Canon MegaTank G3270 is cheapest: roughly 0.3 of a cent a mono page and 0.8 cents for an ISO color page on our arithmetic. Every bottle-fed printer beats every cartridge printer by a wide margin — published ranges put cartridge inkjet ink at about 7.5 cents a page in mono and about 20 cents a page in color. The container, not the brand, is what decides it.
How we picked, and what we refuse to do
This page ranks on one number and shows its work. We have no lab and no units in hand, so every figure here is arithmetic on published inputs, never a measurement and never an estimate.
- The supply price comes from a named source with a date. Either the manufacturer’s own US store or a named retailer, read on 27 September 2026, and listed at the foot of this page.
- The yield is the manufacturer’s own ISO rating. ISO 19752 for mono and 19798 for color, which is a 5% coverage test page. Your real cost will be higher, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.
- Cost per page is price divided by yield. That is the whole method, and it is the same method for every printer so the comparison is fair. The method in full.
- Where we cannot source a price, we publish nothing. The HP Smart Tank 7001 is bottle-fed and would otherwise belong on this page, but HP’s own support page and US store both failed to return a bottle price when we checked, so it has no figure and is not ranked here.
Every ink and toner supply we have priced, ranked
| Supply | Rated yield | Price we read | Per page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canon GI-21 pigment black ink bottle | 6,000 pages | $17.99 | ~0.3¢ |
| Epson 502 black ink bottle | 7,500 pages | $24.99 | ~0.3¢ |
| Epson 552 black ink bottle | 6,700 pages | $23.99 | ~0.4¢ |
| Epson 522 black ink bottle | 4,500 pages | $17.99 | ~0.4¢ |
| Brother TN920UXXL ultra high-yield toner cartridge | 18,000 pages | $241.49 | ~1.3¢ |
| Brother TN920XXL super high-yield toner cartridge | 11,000 pages | $204.29 | ~1.9¢ |
| Brother TN830XL high-yield toner cartridge | 3,000 pages | $98.29 | ~3.3¢ |
| Canon 125 black toner cartridge | 1,600 pages | $96.95 | ~6.1¢ |
Black supplies only, so the column compares like with like. Prices read on 27 September 2026 from the sources at the foot of this page; yields are each maker’s own ISO ratings. Per-page figures are our arithmetic.
Two things stand out. The four bottle-fed inks occupy the top of the table and all of them are under a cent a page, which is the point of this page. And the cheapest toner — a business-class Brother cartridge at about 1.3 cents — is still several times the dearest bottle. Toner is cheap for a cartridge and expensive for ink.
Color is where the gap becomes absurd
| Ink set | Per ISO color page |
|---|---|
| Canon GI-21 bottles | ~0.8¢ |
| Epson 502 bottles | ~1.2¢ |
| Epson 522 bottles | ~1.1¢ |
| Epson 552 six-color set | ~1.4¢ |
| Cartridge color inkjet, published range | about 20 cents a page |
Our arithmetic: black bottle price divided by its rated yield, plus the color bottle price divided by its rated yield, at ISO 19798 coverage. Color laser is excluded because four cartridges plus a drum make a single comparable figure misleading — see the color laser page.
An ISO color page is a 5% coverage test page, and a real photograph or a page of solid color is many times that. The ratio is what survives: at heavier coverage every number in that table grows, and the gap between the bottles and the cartridges grows with it.
When “cheapest ink” is the wrong question
Cheap ink does not mean cheap printing, and on this site we would rather say so. Three cases where the cheapest ink is not the right purchase.
If you print very little. At twenty pages a month, the difference between 0.3 of a cent and 3.3 cents a page is a few dollars a year, and the hardware premium for a tank printer may never pay back. A cheap mono laser can be the lower total. Total cost of ownership, which is the better question.
If you print only black text, in volume. A business-cartridge mono laser costs more per page than any bottle but prints at 48 pages a minute, arrives dry, and never clogs. For a business running paperwork that is worth more than the ink saving. Laser cost per page.
If the printer will sit unused for months. Cheap ink you have to clear out of a blocked nozzle is not cheap. Bottle-fed printers handle this far better than cartridge ones because recovery costs nothing, but a laser removes the problem entirely. Low-maintenance picks, with the honest laser argument.
What about third-party ink?
It is cheaper still, and we do not publish figures for it, for two reasons. Yields on compatible ink are not independently rated the way ISO figures are, so there is nothing honest to divide. And print quality and warranty cover both vary, which means the saving is not like-for-like.
The relevant point for this page is that bottle-fed printers do not need third-party ink to be cheap — they are already under a cent a page on the manufacturer’s own supplies. The pressure to use compatibles comes from cartridge printers, which is also where firmware is most likely to reject them. How printer DRM works · the legitimate ways to spend less on ink.