Frequently asked questions

It depends on one number: how many pages you print a month. Above about forty, or if you print color at all, buy a refillable ink tank printer — the Epson EcoTank ET-2800 is our default pick. Below about twenty, buy a mono laser like the Brother HL-L2460DW.

No. No printer sold today needs a subscription in order to print. Subscriptions are an optional supply service that manufacturers market hard at purchase and during setup. Every printer on this site prints normally with supplies bought outright. The longer answer.

On the prices we read, the Canon PIXMA MegaTank G3270 at about 0.3 of a cent a black page. The full ranking, with every supply price and rated yield, is on the cheapest printers to run.

Not necessarily, and this is the most important caveat on the site. Cost per page is a rate; what you spend is that rate times your volume plus the printer’s price. Below roughly twenty to forty pages a month a cheaper mono laser usually wins the total despite costing several times more per page.

Ink tank if you print color at all, or more than about forty pages a month. Laser if your printing is black text and arrives in unpredictable bursts, because toner cannot dry out and the machine is cheaper to buy. The comparison with three-year totals.

A refillable ink tank all-in-one. School printing is higher volume than parents expect, frequently in color, and always needed by tomorrow. At about 1.1 of a cent a color page nobody in the house has to ration printing. Our homework picks.

A small mono laser. A dorm printer sits unused for weeks and then has to work at midnight, which is the one condition inkjets handle worst. The dorm-room picks.

If you print anything longer than one page, yes — and it matters most on a cheap-to-feed printer, where paper costs more than ink. It halves your paper use permanently and removes the most annoying manual step in home printing. It is the one feature we argue for unconditionally.

Supply price divided by the manufacturer’s rated page yield. For a color page we add one such term for each of the three color channels, because that is what an ISO color page draws. The method, with a worked example.

Because every rated page yield in existence assumes a test page with about 5% coverage, which is less ink than most real documents use. Treat our figures as a floor and as a fair basis for comparing printers, not as a forecast of your bill.

It depends entirely on the format. Refillable bottle ink is under a cent a page — about 0.4 of a cent for Epson 522. Laser toner is a few cents. Published figures put cartridge ink at about 7.5 cents a page for black. The full breakdown.

High-yield, essentially always. On the same Brother printer, the standard cartridge works out at about 5.1 cents a page and the high-yield at about 3.3 cents, because much of a cartridge’s price is the cartridge itself and that cost spreads over more pages.

Because we have no price feed. Every buy button reads “Check price on Amazon” and the retailer’s own page is the price of record. Where a dollar figure appears in a calculation, it is labeled with its source and the date we read it, and presented as arithmetic as at that date rather than a current price.

Any refillable ink tank printer, because ink arrives in a bottle with no chip to authenticate. On cartridge printers it depends on the specific model and its firmware, and it can change with an update. The brand-by-brand position.

A check inside the printer that verifies a cartridge is the manufacturer’s before allowing normal operation, enforced by the cartridge chip and the printer’s firmware. How it works.

Brother has publicly denied it, stating that its firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink. Allegations to the contrary circulated widely in early 2025 and were reported by Tom’s Hardware and TechRadar among others. We treat it as an unresolved dispute and set out both sides with sources on its own page.

The printer will not. The plan cartridges may, because they belong to the subscription service rather than to you. Buy retail cartridges before you cancel, not after — this is the most common complaint in the category.

No. Toner is a dry powder with no solvent to evaporate and there is no print head to clog. It is the single strongest argument for a laser in a household that prints unpredictably. The full answer.

No, and we will never imply that we do. We have no lab, no units in hand and no measured print samples. Our work is documentary and arithmetical: published specifications, published rated yields, prices we read and dated, and the division done in public. Our editorial policy states this in full.

Because a rating with no test behind it is a number with nothing underneath it. There are none anywhere on this site, including in the structured data where readers would never see them.

Because we have no customers to quote. This is a publisher rather than a service business, and a page with no testimonials is better than a page with invented ones.

Affiliate links, principally Amazon. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. The reason you can check that it does not steer the recommendations is that our picks keep pointing at the cheaper machine. The full disclosure.

Ryder M., who runs it for Magoo Media Group. There are no credentials listed because none were provided, and inventing one would be the easiest thing here to catch. About the site.

Product availability, supply prices and manufacturer ink policies are re-checked quarterly, and every page carries the date its figures were read. Corrections get a dated note on the page rather than a silent edit.

Email contact@tankandtoner.com, or use the contact form. Telling us which page and which figure makes it much faster to fix. Corrections are the most useful thing you can send us.