Automatic two-sided printing is the only feature on a laser specification sheet that reliably pays for itself, because it halves the number of sheets you buy for the same number of pages. It is also commoner and cheaper than people expect — every Brother laser in our registry publishes it, from $179.99 up, and the printer on this page that does not have it is the one people buy because it looks like a bargain.
How we picked
We counted only printers where the manufacturer publishes automatic two-sided printing on its own specification page. Manual duplexing — printing the odd pages, picking the stack up, turning it over and printing the even ones — is something any printer can do and is not what anybody searching for this means.
Beyond that, we ranked on cost per page on the cartridge each model takes, because duplexing is a yes-or-no question and the supplies are where the money actually goes. We also checked whether the scanner duplexes, which is a separate feature and much rarer.
Which of these lasers duplex, and which do not
| Printer | List price we read | Auto duplex printing | Duplex scanning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brother HL-L2460DW | $179.99 | Yes | No scanner |
| Brother DCP-L2640DW | $209.99 | Yes | Single-sided feeder |
| Brother MFC-L2820DW | $279.99 | Yes | Simplex scanning only |
| Brother HL-L3220CDW | $284.99 | Yes | No scanner |
| Brother HL-L5210DW | $329.99 | Yes | No scanner |
| Brother HL-L6210DW | $349.99 | Yes | No scanner |
| Canon imageCLASS LBP6030w | Not published | No | No scanner |
List prices as published by each manufacturer on the date we read the specification page; Canon did not show us a printer price. Duplex scanning means the scanner can read both sides of a sheet in one pass, which none of these do.
The pattern is worth stating plainly: on Brother lasers, automatic duplex printing is standard rather than a premium feature, and it has been for a while. If you are comparing two lasers and one of them is cheaper because it lacks duplexing, you are not looking at a bargain — you are looking at a printer that will cost you twice the paper for the rest of its life.
What duplexing actually saves you
Paper is the running cost nobody budgets for, because it arrives in reams rather than as a line on a cartridge receipt. Our cost-per-page calculator uses a cent a sheet as its default plain-paper assumption, which is roughly what a ream of letter paper works out at. On that assumption, a thousand single-sided pages cost about ten dollars in paper; the same thousand pages duplexed cost about five.
Put that beside the toner. At about 3.3 cents a page on a TN830XL, a thousand pages of toner is roughly thirty-three dollars. Paper is therefore somewhere between a sixth and a third of your total cost on a laser, and duplexing removes half of that — a real saving, but not a dramatic one.
Duplex printing is not duplex scanning
These get conflated constantly, and the specification sheets do not help. Automatic duplex printing means the printer puts toner on both sides of a sheet without you touching it. Automatic duplex scanning means the document feeder reads both sides of a sheet in one pass. They are separate mechanisms with separate costs.
None of the lasers in our registry does duplex scanning. Brother publishes simplex scanning only on the MFC-L2820DW, and the DCP-L2640DW’s 50-page feeder reads one side at a time as well. If you have a stack of double-sided originals to digitize, that is a business-class scanner feature and it is not in this price band. Our laser all-in-one roundup goes through what the scanners on these machines will and will not do.
The printer here that does not duplex
The Canon imageCLASS LBP6030w is in our registry as a useful warning, and it earns its place on this page twice over. Canon did not publish automatic two-sided printing for it, and it takes the Canon 125 cartridge, rated at 1,600 pages at $96.95 on the listing we read — about 6.1 cents a page, the dearest of anything we cover.
It is frequently sold well below the price of a Brother equivalent, which is exactly the trap. A cheaper body, no duplexing and double the cost per page is three separate ways to spend more money, and it is the clearest case on this site for reading the cartridge before the sticker. The full arithmetic on that model.
Two-sided printing is often off by default
Buying a duplexing printer does nothing on its own. On most systems the driver defaults to single-sided, so the feature sits there unused while the owner assumes it is working. Set it in the printer’s default properties rather than per job — in Windows under the printer’s printing defaults, on macOS in the print dialog’s two-sided setting saved as a preset — and it stops depending on anyone remembering.
One caveat worth knowing: duplexing pulls each sheet back through the paper path, so very light or heavy stock is more likely to jam than it would single-sided. Keep card and labels in the manual feed slot and let plain paper duplex.