Duplex printing is a printer putting ink or toner on both sides of a sheet without you turning it over. It is the least glamorous feature on the spec sheet and one of the two that saves real money.
#ad — buy links are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no cost to you. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of October 17, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record. Cost-per-page figures are arithmetic on supply prices we read on 27 September 2026 — here is the method.
What is duplex printing?
Duplex printing is printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. In automatic duplex printing a mechanism inside the printer, called a duplexer, pulls the half-printed sheet back and runs it through again to print the reverse. Manual duplex means the printer prompts you to turn the stack over yourself.
What a duplexer actually is
It is a short extra paper path, usually in the back of the machine or built into the rear door. The sheet comes out far enough to be gripped, the rollers reverse, and the sheet goes back in the other way round so the print engine can mark the second side. On a laser this happens fast and the page is dry on arrival; on an inkjet the printer may pause a moment to let the first side dry before it flips.
You will see it on specification pages as “automatic duplex”, “auto two-sided” or just “duplex printing”. If the page says nothing at all, assume manual: the driver will still offer two-sided printing, but it will print the odd pages, stop, and ask you to reload them.
Why it matters more than it sounds
You have two running costs, not one. Supplies are the famous one; paper is the one nobody counts. A duplexer halves the second. At a sheet of plain letter paper costing around a cent, a household printing 150 pages a month saves roughly nine dollars a year in paper alone — modest in isolation, and it arrives alongside three other benefits that are not about money:
Half the paper to store and carry. A ream lasts twice as long, which anyone who prints course readings will feel immediately.
Documents that read properly. Reports, manuals, recipes and school hand-ins are designed to be read two-sided.
Half the bulk. Thirty pages of reading fits in a bag instead of a folder.
No standing at the printer. Manual duplex means waiting, reloading and getting the orientation wrong at least once.
Duplex printing on the machines we cover, as published
Printer
Automatic duplex printing
List price
Brother HL-L2460DW
Yes
$179.99
Brother DCP-L2640DW
Yes
$209.99
Brother MFC-L2820DW
Yes
$279.99
Brother HL-L3220CDW
Yes
$284.99
Epson EcoTank ET-2850
Yes
$349.99
Epson EcoTank ET-2800
Not published
$239.99
Epson EcoTank ET-2400
Not published
$189.99
Canon imageCLASS LBP6030w
No
Not published
As published on each manufacturer's own specification page and recorded in our registry on 27 September 2026.
How to turn duplex printing on
Open the print dialog and find the two-sided setting. On Windows it is usually under Printer Properties or Preferences; on macOS it is in the Layout or Two-Sided section of the print sheet.
Choose the binding edge. “Long edge” is what you want for anything read like a book; “short edge” flips like a notepad and is almost never what you meant.
Set it as the default. On both systems you can set two-sided printing as the default for that printer, which is the only way it actually gets used every time.
If the option is missing, the driver may be the basic one. Install the manufacturer’s full driver rather than the generic class driver and look again.
Is it worth paying extra for?
On a laser, no, because you barely can: the duplexer is standard on every laser we cover and the cheapest of them is $179.99. On a tank printer it is a real decision — Epson charges roughly $110 more at list between the ET-2800 without it and the ET-2850 with it. That gap takes a long time to recover in paper at household volumes, so buy the duplexer for the convenience and the readable documents, not as a saving. Put your own numbers in.
Specifications and running costs side by side, for the printers discussed on this page.
#ad — the price buttons are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no cost to you. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of October 17, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
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
Cheapest automatic duplex printer we cover
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.
Product photograph supplied by Amazon for this listing. We do not have this model in hand and have not photographed it ourselves.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of October 17, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
~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
Brother publishes automatic two-sided printing on this machine at a $179.99 list price, which is the cheapest duplexer in our registry. Up to 36 pages a minute, dual-band wireless, Ethernet and USB, and about 3.3 cents a page on the TN830XL cartridge.
Mono only, no scanner. If every page you print is a document, that is not a compromise — it is the whole machine spent on the part you use. Our duplex laser picks.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of October 17, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
~0.3¢ per mono page · ~1.2¢ per color page
Based on a Epson 502 black ink bottle rated at 7,500 pages at $24.99, 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 502 black ink bottle — rated 7,500 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), $24.99 at Epson US, checked 27 September 2026
Epson 502 color ink bottle — rated 6,000 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), $16.99 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.
Automatic two-sided printing, which the ET-2800 and ET-2400 lack
Uses 502 ink, whose black bottle is rated higher than the 522 black
Lowest cost per mono page of the EcoTanks we cover
What you give up
Noticeably dearer than the ET-2800 at list price
Still no document feeder
502 color bottles are rated lower than 522 color, so heavy color use narrows the gap
$349.99 at list, and the reason to pay the difference over an ET-2800 is precisely the duplexer: Epson states automatic two-sided printing on the ET-2850 and does not on its cheaper sibling. A flatbed scanner, wireless, and refillable 502 tanks.
Roughly 0.3 of a cent a mono page and about 1.2 cents an ISO color page. Being an inkjet, it wants printing every week or two. Our auto-duplex tank picks.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of October 17, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
~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.
50-page document feeder, so scanning a stack is one action
Auto duplex printing at 36 pages per minute
Same TN830 toner family as the HL-L2460DW, with the same cost per page
What you give up
Mono only
Thirty dollars more than the print-only model for hardware you may not need
Toner is far dearer per page than bottle ink
$209.99 at list for the same 36-page-a-minute engine with a flatbed scanner, a 50-page automatic document feeder, Ethernet and dual-band wireless. The duplexer is the part that matters for anyone printing long documents or school work.
About 3.3 cents a page on the TN830XL, and the DR830 drum is rated at approximately 15,000 pages. Note that the feeder scans one side at a time — duplex scanning is a different feature.
Printing on both sides of a sheet. Automatic duplex printing means the printer flips the sheet itself using an internal paper path called a duplexer; manual duplex means it prints one side and asks you to reload the stack.
+−What is a duplexer in a printer?
The short extra paper path that pulls a half-printed sheet back into the machine and feeds it through the other way round. It usually lives in the rear door and has no supplies or maintenance of its own.
+−Is duplex printing the same as double-sided printing?
Yes. Duplex is simply the technical word for two-sided.
+−Does duplex printing save money?
It halves your paper, not your ink or toner. At a cent a sheet and 150 pages a month that is around nine dollars a year — small, but it comes free on every laser we cover.
+−Does duplex printing use more ink?
No. The same marks go on the same number of sides, so supply use is unchanged. Very thin paper may show more ink through from the other side, which is a paper choice rather than a printer one.
+−Which is the cheapest printer with automatic duplex printing?
Of the machines in our registry, the Brother HL-L2460DW at $179.99. For a duplex all-in-one with a scanner, the DCP-L2640DW at $209.99.
