A household can shrug off a cartridge bill. A business notices it, because it recurs, arrives as an invoice, and scales with how well the business is doing. That is why the argument for refillable ink is strongest here — and why supplies subscriptions are marketed hardest here too.
How we picked
We started from the four things a business actually asks a printer for: a document feeder, automatic two-sided printing, a wired network port, and a cost per page that does not need managing. Then we read each manufacturer page and recorded which of the four it publishes.
We did not rank on pages per minute. A small business printing a hundred pages a day is not waiting on the printer; it is waiting on whoever has to reload the paper and replace the supplies.
The four things, and who has them
| Printer | Feeder | Auto duplex | Ethernet | Mono per page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epson EcoTank ET-4950 | Yes | Yes | Yes | ~0.3¢ |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 | No | Yes | No | ~0.3¢ |
| Canon MegaTank G3270 | No | Not stated | No | ~0.3¢ |
| Brother DCP-L2640DW (laser) | Yes, 50-page | Yes | Yes | ~3.3¢ |
Features only where the manufacturer publishes them. Cost per page is our arithmetic on supply prices and rated yields, not a measured figure.
The fourth row is there on purpose. A mono laser with a fifty-page feeder costs $209.99, has every office feature on the list, and costs roughly eight times as much per page. For a business printing black text only, that is frequently the better buy, and we would rather say so than pretend every business needs a tank printer.
The number that decides it
Tank printers win on supplies and lose on purchase price. The crossover depends entirely on volume, and business volumes are high enough that it usually arrives quickly.
| Pages a month | EcoTank 502 ink | Canon GI-21 ink | Mono laser toner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 250 | $30 | $27 | $295 |
| 500 | $60 | $54 | $590 |
| 1,000 | $120 | $108 | $1179 |
Supplies only, black pages only. Purchase price, paper and drum replacement are excluded.
At a thousand black pages a month the supplies difference over three years is larger than the price of the printer, several times over. Add any color at all and the gap widens sharply, because color toner is the most expensive way to put color on paper that we have priced.
Why the subscription pitch lands hardest here
Supplies plans are sold on predictability, and a business genuinely does value a predictable line item. The structural problem is that a plan bills for an allowance rather than for pages, so a quiet month costs the same as a busy one, and the cartridges belong to the service rather than to you.
A refillable tank printer gives you the predictability a different way: the supplies cost so little per page that the line item stops mattering. Buying supplies versus renting them, and the printers with no plan attached at all.
What a tank printer is bad at
Sitting idle. An inkjet that has not printed for three weeks can want a head clean, and it will want it on the morning a client needs something. If your business prints in occasional bursts separated by weeks, a laser is the more reliable machine and the difference is not close. The page where we argue against tank printers.