Tank printers exist to make ink stop mattering, and they succeed: at a fraction of a cent a page, the ink is no longer the expense. Paper then is, and automatic two-sided printing is the only feature on the specification sheet that halves it.
How we picked
We only listed a printer here if the manufacturer publishes automatic two-sided printing on its own product page for that model. Where a specification page did not state it, we have recorded that as not stated rather than assuming a duplexer exists, which is why the comparison table below has a “not stated” entry rather than a guess.
Beyond that we ranked on ink family, because that is what decides the cost per page, and then on the hardware you get for the difference in price.
Why duplex matters more on a tank printer
On a cartridge printer, paper is a rounding error next to ink. On a tank printer the relationship inverts. A black page of 502 ink costs about 0.3 of a cent. A sheet of plain letter paper costs somewhere around a cent. The paper is now the larger number, by a factor of three or more.
That is the whole argument for a duplexer on this kind of printer, and it is almost never made, because the people writing about duplexers are usually thinking about cartridge machines where the ink still dominates.
The models that do not duplex
The cheap end of the range prints one side only. Epson does not list automatic two-sided printing on the ET-2800 or the ET-2400, and Canon’s specification page for the MegaTank G3270 did not state it either, so we do not claim it for that model.
All of those are still excellent printers and two of them are the ones we recommend most often across this site. They are simply printers where a double-sided document means picking the stack up and putting it back in.
Manual duplexing is a real option
Every printer will print odd pages, wait for you to flip the stack, and print the even ones. It is tedious and it jams more often, and for two or three double-sided documents a month it is completely fine.
The break-even is not financial so much as behavioral: a duplexer you have means every long document comes out two-sided by default, and a flip you have to perform means most of them do not. If nobody in the house will do the flipping, the duplexer pays for itself in paper you were going to waste.
The other thing you buy with the duplexer
| Ink family | Black yield | Black price | Mono per page | Color per page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epson 522 (ET-2400, ET-2800, ET-4800) | 4,500 pages | $17.99 | ~0.4¢ | ~1.1¢ |
| Epson 502 (ET-2850, ET-4950) | 7,500 pages | $24.99 | ~0.3¢ | ~1.2¢ |
| Epson 552 (ET-8550, six colors) | 6,700 pages | $23.99 | ~0.4¢ | ~1.4¢ |
Our arithmetic: bottle price divided by Epson’s rated yield, at the ISO 5% coverage standard. The color figure adds one per-page cost for each of the three color channels. The method in full.
Note the direction of travel. The duplexing models run on 502, whose black bottle is rated higher and costs less per page than 522 — but whose color bottles are rated lower, so heavy color printing narrows the gap and can close it. If you print mostly text, the duplexers are cheaper twice over.