Count the color pages you printed last year. For most households the honest answer is a mono laser plus somewhere to send the rare color job - and the money saved is not small.
#ad — buy links are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no cost to you. How this site is funded. We do not display live prices, so every button sends you to Amazon’s own page for the current one. Cost-per-page figures are arithmetic on supply prices we read on 27 September 2026 — here is the method.
Do I need a color printer?
Probably not, if you are honest about volume. Most households print black documents and a handful of color pages a year, and a mono laser does that faster, cheaper and with a supply that keeps. Buy color only if you print it regularly — and then buy a refillable tank printer rather than a cartridge one.
The test that settles it
Think back over the last year and count the pages you printed that genuinely had to be in color. Not pages that happened to contain a logo — pages where black and white would have failed. School poster, recipe card with a photo, a map, a conference handout, a few photographs.
Fewer than about twenty a year: buy a mono laser. Send the rare color job to a print shop or a friend; it will cost a few dollars a year and you will have saved more than that on the printer.
Twenty to a few hundred a year: this is the hard case, and the deciding factor is how the printing is spread. Regular color each month suits a tank printer; bursts months apart suit a color laser, because nothing dries out between them.
More than that, or photographs: buy a refillable tank printer. Color on cartridges at that volume is the most expensive printing anybody does at home.
What a color page actually costs
Our arithmetic on the color-capable printers we cover
Printer
Technology
List price
Mono page
ISO color page
Canon PIXMA MegaTank G3270
Refillable ink
$248.99
~0.3¢
~0.8¢
Epson EcoTank ET-2800
Refillable ink
$239.99
~0.4¢
~1.1¢
Epson EcoTank ET-2850
Refillable ink
$349.99
~0.3¢
~1.2¢
Brother HL-L3220CDW
Color laser
$284.99
~3.2¢
Dearer - four color cartridges
Brother HL-L2460DW
Mono laser
$179.99
~3.3¢
Cannot print color
Cost per page is our arithmetic on genuine supply prices read on the dates in our registry and manufacturer-rated ISO yields. We publish no single ISO color figure for the color laser because we could not price its full cartridge set from a citable source on the date we checked.
The pattern is consistent and it is the whole reason this site exists: refillable color is cheap, toner color is expensive, and cartridge color is worse than either. If you need color often, the technology decision matters far more than the brand.
The costs of buying color you do not use
Ink that dries up unused. A color inkjet that prints twice a year will spend ink on head cleaning and may clog anyway. That is money leaving the printer with no pages to show for it.
Four supplies instead of one. On a color laser, each of the four cartridges has its own price and its own expiry of usefulness. One empty color can stop a mono job on some machines.
Slower output. The color laser we cover runs at 19 pages a minute against 36 on the mono model at a lower price.
More printer for the same money. At any given price, the mono machine has better paper handling, a bigger tray or a document feeder — because it is not spending the budget on color.
If photographs are the reason
Photographs are not a color printing question, they are a photo printing question, and the answer is different: a six-color ink set, borderless printing and photo paper. Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 is the only machine we cover built for that, at a $749.99 list price and about 1.4 cents an ISO color page. Our photo tank picks and the photo use-case page cover it properly.
For everything else, take the count you made at the top of this page seriously. The commonest expensive mistake in home printing is buying color capability on a cartridge machine for a job that turns out to be twelve pages a year. How to choose a printer runs the rest of the decision in order.
Specifications and running costs side by side, for the printers discussed on this page.
Cost-per-page figures are our own arithmetic: supply price divided by the manufacturer’s rated page yield, using prices read on 27 September 2026 and yields rated at the ISO 5% coverage standard. They are not measured by us and they are not current prices. Every input, and the working · run the numbers for your own printing
The picks in detail
Best if the answer is no
Brother HL-L2460DW
If you print black text and nothing else, this is the printer to buy. It cannot dry out, it duplexes, and Brother does not block third-party toner.
Illustrative photograph of this kind of printer. We do not have this model in hand and this is not a photograph of the unit.
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~3.3¢ per mono page
Based on a Brother TN830XL high-yield toner cartridge rated at 3,000 pages at $98.29, priced on 27 September 2026.
Brother TN830XL high-yield toner cartridge — rated 3,000 pages (ISO/IEC 19752), $98.29 at Brother USA, checked 27 September 2026
Yields are manufacturer-rated at the ISO 5% page-coverage standard, not measured by us, and real-world cost runs higher. Prices are not live: this is arithmetic on a price we read on the date shown, not a current price. How we calculate cost per page.
Dual-band wireless (2.4 GHz / 5 GHz), Ethernet or USB
Subscription
None required
What we like
Toner does not dry out, so it is ideal if you print in occasional bursts
Automatic two-sided printing at 36 pages per minute
Brother has publicly denied blocking third-party toner with firmware
What you give up
Black only - no color at all
Cost per page is roughly ten times a tank printer's
The 700-page starter cartridge runs out fast; budget for a TN830XL
If you print documents, forms, letters and homework in black, this is the printer and the decision is easy: $179.99 at list, up to 36 pages a minute, automatic duplexing, dual-band Wi-Fi and Ethernet, about 3.3 cents a page on the TN830XL.
Buying mono is not only cheaper, it is simpler: one supply instead of four, and a supply that cannot dry out while the printer sits. Our monochrome picks.
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~0.4¢ per mono page · ~1.1¢ per color page
Based on a Epson 522 black ink bottle rated at 4,500 pages at $17.99, priced on 27 September 2026.
The color figure adds one per-page cost for each of the three color channels, because an ISO color page draws from all of them.
Epson 522 black ink bottle — rated 4,500 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), $17.99 at Epson US, checked 27 September 2026
Epson 522 color ink bottle — rated 7,500 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), $17.99 at Epson US, checked 27 September 2026
Yields are manufacturer-rated at the ISO 5% page-coverage standard, not measured by us, and real-world cost runs higher. Prices are not live: this is arithmetic on a price we read on the date shown, not a current price. How we calculate cost per page.
Among the lowest cost per page of any printer sold for home use
Refillable bottles, so no chipped cartridge can be locked out by firmware
Comes with enough ink in the box to last most households a long time
What you give up
No automatic two-sided printing, so paper costs twice what it needs to
Flatbed scanner only - no document feeder for multi-page scans
Inkjets still need to be used occasionally or the print head can clog
If you genuinely print color — school projects, photos, anything a client sees — buy color that is cheap to run rather than cheap to buy. Refillable 522 bottles put an ISO color page at roughly 1.1 cents, against tens of cents on a cartridge printer.
$239.99 at list, prints scans and copies. No auto duplexer, no feeder, and it is an inkjet so it needs using every week or two.
A color laser that will not dry out between jobs. Buy it for occasional color that has to be crisp, not for cheap color - a tank printer wins on cost by a wide margin.
Illustrative photograph of this kind of printer. We do not have this model in hand and this is not a photograph of the unit.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. We do not show live prices; Amazon’s page is the price of record.
~3.2¢ per mono page
Based on a Brother TN229XL black high-yield toner cartridge rated at 3,000 pages at $96.29, priced on 27 September 2026.
Brother TN229XL black high-yield toner cartridge — rated 3,000 pages (ISO/IEC 19798), $96.29 at Brother USA, checked 27 September 2026
Yields are manufacturer-rated at the ISO 5% page-coverage standard, not measured by us, and real-world cost runs higher. Prices are not live: this is arithmetic on a price we read on the date shown, not a current price. How we calculate cost per page.
Color laser output does not dry out during long idle spells
Auto duplex printing
Four separate cartridges, so one exhausted color does not mean replacing the set
What you give up
Color toner is expensive per page next to any ink tank printer
Four cartridges to replace instead of one
Slower than the mono lasers at 19 pages per minute
The awkward middle case: you need color occasionally and the printer will sit unused between times. A color laser solves it, because toner does not dry. Brother lists this one at $284.99 with automatic duplexing and the TN229 cartridge family at about 3.2 cents a black page.
Color pages cost considerably more than on a tank printer and there are four cartridges to buy rather than one bottle set. It is the right machine for a specific pattern, not the cheap way to print color. The comparison in full.
Only if you print color regularly. Most households print black documents and under twenty color pages a year, which is cheaper to send to a print shop than to buy and feed a color printer for.
+−Is a mono laser printer enough for a family?
For homework, forms, letters and reading material, yes — and it is faster and cheaper per page than any color machine. Families printing school projects and photographs regularly want color as well.
+−Do I need a color laser printer?
Only in one specific case: you print color occasionally and the printer sits unused in between. Toner does not dry out, so a color laser handles that pattern where an inkjet struggles. For frequent color, a tank printer is far cheaper per page.
+−Is color printing expensive?
It depends entirely on the technology. A refillable tank printer prints an ISO color page for roughly 0.8 to 1.1 cents. Color toner costs several times that, and color cartridges more again.
+−Can a black and white printer print color photos in grayscale?
Yes, as gray tones — useful for a reference print or a draft, and perfectly readable. What it cannot do is reproduce color, so anything where the color carries meaning needs a color machine.
