“Cheap toner” is a property of a cartridge, not of a printer, and the two are only loosely related. A perfectly ordinary printer with a high-yield cartridge can cost half what a cheaper printer with a low-yield one does, forever.
How we picked
We started from the cartridge rather than the printer. For each candidate we looked up every cartridge version it takes — standard, high-yield and value — along with the rated yield and the price of each, and computed the cost per page for all of them. Only then did we look at the printer.
The threshold we used is a high-yield cartridge rated at 3,000 pages or more. Below that, toner cost starts to dominate everything else about the machine, and no amount of hardware makes up for it.
The cartridges, priced
| Cartridge | Rated yield | Price we read | Per page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brother TN830XL high-yield toner cartridge | 3,000 pages | $98.29 | ~3.3¢ |
| Brother TN830 standard-yield toner cartridge | 1,200 pages | $60.99 | ~5.1¢ |
| Brother TN229XL black high-yield toner cartridge | 3,000 pages | $96.29 | ~3.2¢ |
| Canon 125 black toner cartridge | 1,600 pages | $96.95 | ~6.1¢ |
Yields are manufacturer-rated (ISO/IEC 19752 for mono, 19798 for color); prices read on 27 September 2026 from the sources at the foot of this page. Our arithmetic is supply price divided by rated yield — the method.
Note the first two rows. They are the same printer. Buying the standard TN830 because it is cheaper on the shelf costs you roughly half again per page, forever, and it is the single most common and most avoidable mistake in laser printing.
Why high-yield is always cheaper per page
Because a large part of a cartridge’s price is the cartridge: the housing, the drum interface, the chip, the packaging and the distribution. Those costs barely change when you put more toner in it, so a cartridge with two and a half times the toner does not cost two and a half times as much. The fixed cost gets spread over more pages.
The only reason to buy a standard cartridge is if you are about to replace the printer and want to spend as little as possible right now.
The consumable nobody mentions
Laser printers have a drum as well as toner. Brother rates the DR830 drum on the models we cover at approximately 15,000 pages, and it is bought separately. Most households will never reach it. Anyone printing a couple of hundred pages a month should include it in their sum, and almost no laser roundup does.
Both Brother models also ship with a starter cartridge rated at 700 pages. That is disclosed on the specification sheet rather than hidden, but it means your first real cartridge purchase arrives sooner than the headline yield implies. Budget for it.
Compatible cartridges, honestly
Third-party toner for these printers is widely sold and considerably cheaper. We do not publish cost-per-page figures based on it, because compatible yields are not rated to the ISO standard and we would be multiplying a real price by an unverified claim.
What we can tell you is that Brother is the brand most often recommended by people who want that option, that Brother has publicly denied blocking third-party supplies with firmware after allegations to the contrary, and that the company also declines to guarantee print quality with non-genuine supplies. All of that is set out with sources in our page on the dispute.
Cheap toner is still not cheap ink
Worth keeping in proportion. The cheapest toner on this page is about 3.3 cents a page. The ink in a refillable tank printer is about 0.4 of a cent. A laser with genuinely cheap toner is roughly eight times the cost per page of a tank printer, and that remains true however well you shop.
The reason to buy a laser anyway is reliability after neglect, and it is a good reason — just not a cost one. The comparison at several volumes.