This is the page the rest of the site keeps pointing at: every printer we cover, ranked strictly by what a page costs, with the supply, the rated yield, the price and the date behind each figure. It is also the page with the most important caveat, so read to the end of it.
How we picked
Mechanically. There is no editorial judgment in the ranking on this page: for every printer we cover we took the supply it uses, the manufacturer’s rated page yield for that supply, and the price we read on a named source, and divided. The order is the order that arithmetic produces.
Two printers are excluded from the ranking because we could not source a supply price for them, and one is included at the bottom as a warning rather than a recommendation. Where an input was missing we left a gap instead of estimating.
The full ranking
| Supply | Printers | Rated yield | Price | Per page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canon GI-21 pigment black ink bottle | Canon MegaTank G3270 | 6,000 | $17.99 | ~0.3¢ |
| Epson 502 black ink bottle | EcoTank ET-2850, ET-3850 | 7,500 | $24.99 | ~0.3¢ |
| Epson 552 black ink bottle | EcoTank Photo ET-8550 | 6,700 | $23.99 | ~0.4¢ |
| Epson 522 black ink bottle | EcoTank ET-2400, ET-2800, ET-4800 | 4,500 | $17.99 | ~0.4¢ |
| Brother TN830XL high-yield toner cartridge | Brother HL-L2460DW, DCP-L2640DW | 3,000 | $98.29 | ~3.3¢ |
| Brother TN830 standard-yield toner cartridge | Brother HL-L2460DW, DCP-L2640DW | 1,200 | $60.99 | ~5.1¢ |
| Canon 125 black toner cartridge | Canon imageCLASS LBP6030w | 1,600 | $96.95 | ~6.1¢ |
Yields are manufacturer-rated at the ISO 5% coverage standard; prices read on 27 September 2026 from the sources at the foot of this page. Every figure is supply price divided by rated yield — the method and the caveats.
The top and bottom of that table differ by roughly twentyfold. That is the single most useful number on this site: a twenty-times spread in running cost across printers that sit on the same shelf, none of it printed on any box.
And for color
| Printer | Per color page |
|---|---|
| Canon MegaTank G3270 | ~0.8¢ |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2400 / ET-2800 / ET-4800 | ~1.1¢ |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 / ET-3850 | ~1.2¢ |
| Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 | ~1.4¢ |
| Color laser (industry range, not ours) | between 12 and 15 cents a page |
| Cartridge inkjet (industry range, not ours) | about 20 cents a page |
The bottom two rows are Toner Buzz’s published figures, quoted for context and not measured by us. The gap between bottle-fed ink and everything else is widest on color.
The two printers we cannot rank
The HP Smart Tank 7001 is bottle-fed and its HP 32XL black bottle is rated at about 6,000 pages per HP’s own support pages — but we could not read a confirmed bottle price from HP on the date we checked, so there is no cost per page for it anywhere on this site.
The Epson EcoTank ET-3850 and ET-4800 both have cost-per-page figures, because they share ink families with printers we did price — but neither had a published list price where we looked, so they do not appear in any total-cost-of-ownership comparison.
The caveat that matters more than the ranking
The cheapest printer to run is not always the cheapest printer to own. Cost per page is a rate; what you pay is that rate multiplied by your volume, plus the printer. At low volumes the printer dominates and the rate is close to irrelevant.
| Printer | 25 pages a month | 200 pages a month |
|---|---|---|
| Canon MegaTank G3270 | about $3 | about $22 |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2800 | about $4 | about $29 |
| Brother HL-L2460DW | about $29 | about $236 |
| Canon imageCLASS LBP6030w | about $55 | about $436 |
Supplies only, mono pages, over three years at the rated yields and prices above. Now add the printer's own price to each row: at 25 pages a month the cheaper machine wins the total, and at 200 the running cost decides it.
At twenty-five pages a month the entire three-year supply difference between the best and worst tank printer here is a few dollars, and the Brother’s lower purchase price wins the total comfortably. At two hundred pages a month the picture inverts and the tank printers win by a wide margin.
So this page tells you the rate. Only you know the volume. The calculator puts the two together in about thirty seconds, and it is the more useful of the two pages.
What these figures leave out
- Paper — about a cent a sheet, which on the top four rows is more than the ink. Automatic duplexing halves it, which is why a duplexer matters more on a cheap-to-feed printer than on an expensive one.
- The drum on a laser — a separate consumable rated around 15,000 pages on the Brother models.
- Maintenance ink on an inkjet — print head cleaning uses ink that never reaches paper.
- The printer itself, which is the term that flips the ranking at low volume.