These are not reviews. We do not have these printers on a bench and we are not going to imply otherwise. Each page is a cost-to-run breakdown built from the manufacturer’s own published specifications and supply prices we read and dated — plus a plain statement of who the machine suits and who should buy something else.
What is on each model page
- Cost per page, with every input visible. The supply, its rated yield, the price we used, the date we read it, and a link to the source.
- Total cost over time at a couple of realistic monthly page counts, because sticker price alone is close to meaningless in this category.
- Hardware facts — speed, duplexing, document feeder, connectivity — read from the manufacturer’s product page, with that page linked.
- Who should buy something else. Every page has this section. It is the most useful part.
How a printer gets onto this list
It has to be real, currently sold, and it has to make sense for somebody who refuses a subscription. In practice that means bottle-fed inkjets and mono lasers, and it is why the list is short rather than exhaustive: a roundup of forty printers is a roundup where nobody checked forty printers.
The starting list came from reading what independent publications actually recommend in this category, then verifying each model individually against the manufacturer’s own product page. Where a manufacturer would not show us a price, the page says so rather than substituting one from elsewhere and calling it a list price.
What you will not find here
No scores out of ten, no star ratings, and no claim to have put forty-seven printers on a bench. We have no units, no lab and no measured print samples, so a rating would be a number with nothing behind it. What we have instead is arithmetic you can reproduce and sources you can click. In a category where a competing roundup puts “Tested” in its title with no evidence of testing anywhere in four thousand words, we think showing the working is the more valuable thing.
Also absent: any implication that the photograph on a model page is that unit. It is not. Every image on this site is licensed stock, credited in our about page’s honesty note, and used to illustrate a category rather than to stand in for a printer we handled.
Keeping these pages current
A roundup recommending discontinued printers is worse than no roundup, and a cost-per-page figure built on a price from two years ago is worse than no figure. Every model page carries the date its inputs were checked, and the commitment in our editorial policy is to re-verify quarterly that each model is still sold and each supply price is still roughly right. When something changes, the page gets a dated note rather than a silent edit.
