Every printer here prints color for under $300. What separates them is the price of a color page, and the spread between the best and the worst is enormous.
#ad — buy links are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no cost to you. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of November 12, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record. Cost-per-page figures are arithmetic on supply prices we read on 27 September 2026 — here is the method.
The color printer to buy under $300 is the Epson EcoTank ET-2800, for a household that prints, scans and copies in color: $239.99 and about 1.1 cents an ISO color page. If the per-page number is all that matters, the Canon MegaTank G3270 is cheaper still at about 0.8 cents. The budget pick is the EcoTank ET-2400 at $189.99, which prints the same color pages for less hardware money.
What is the best color printer under $300?
The Epson EcoTank ET-2800 at $239.99 for most buyers: refillable bottles instead of cartridges, color printing, scanning and copying, and about 1.1 cents an ISO color page. The Canon MegaTank G3270 is the cheapest to run at roughly 0.8 cents a color page; the Brother HL-L3220CDW at $284.99 is the only color laser that fits, and is the right answer only if you need dry output.
How we picked
Every printer in this band prints color, so the specification sheets are not where the difference is. These are the questions that actually separate them.
What does a color page cost? We compute it from published bottle or cartridge prices and the maker’s rated yields. The spread inside this page is roughly an order of magnitude, which is why it is the first criterion.
Is the color wet or dry when it lands? Toner is finished; ink needs a moment. That decides whether you can fold, stack or handle the page straight away.
Is the black ink pigment or dye? Pigment resists water on plain paper. Only the Canon publishes it at this price.
Can the supply be refused? A bottle has no chip to authenticate, so no firmware update can reject your ink. How that works.
The spread in color page costs is the whole story
People shop this band on the printer and then live with the ink. These are our figures for a rated ISO color page, which is a 5% coverage test page and therefore the floor rather than your real cost. The ratios are what survive heavier coverage.
Cost of an ISO color page on the printers here
Printer
Supply
Per ISO color page
Canon MegaTank G3270
GI-21 bottles
~0.8¢
Epson EcoTank ET-2800 / ET-2400
522 bottles
~1.1¢
Epson EcoTank ET-2850 / ET-3850
502 bottles
~1.2¢
Brother HL-L3220CDW
TN229 toner family
Several times the above
Cartridge color inkjet, published range
Cartridges
about 20 cents a page
Our arithmetic on dated published supply prices divided by rated ISO yields — the method in full. We publish no figure for the HP Smart Tank 7001 because HP would not give us a bottle price.
Read that table as a multiplier on whatever you print. A hundred color pages a month is roughly a dollar a month on the Canon and considerably more than a dinner on a cartridge printer, every month, for the life of the machine.
When the expensive color is the right color
There is a real case for the color laser despite its per-page cost, and it is not print quality. It is that toner is dry: card stock does not curl, labels do not smear, a stack of folded programs can go straight into envelopes, and the machine does not care if it sits unused for two months. If your color printing is occasional and physical — cards, labels, signs — the HL-L3220CDW is the better tool and the cost per page barely matters at that volume. Our cardstock picks · our label picks.
If the color you care about is photographs
None of these is a photo printer in the strict sense. A four-color tank printer makes a perfectly good family snapshot, but skin tones and neutral greys are where four channels struggle, and the machine that solves it — a six-color EcoTank Photo with a grey channel — is far above this cap. The photo-printing picks, with the honest version of that trade.
Specifications and running costs side by side, for the printers discussed on this page.
#ad — the price buttons are affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no cost to you. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of November 12, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
Cost-per-page figures are our own arithmetic: supply price divided by the manufacturer’s rated page yield, using prices read on 27 September 2026 and yields rated at the ISO 5% coverage standard. They are not measured by us and they are not current prices. Every input, and the working · run the numbers for your own printing
The picks in detail
Cheapest color pages under $300
Canon PIXMA MegaTank G3270
The cheapest cost per page of any printer we cover, and the pigment black is the reason to pick it over an EcoTank if your prints get handled.
Product photograph supplied by Amazon for this listing. We do not have this model in hand and have not photographed it ourselves.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of November 12, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
~0.3¢ per mono page · ~0.8¢ per color page
Based on a Canon GI-21 pigment black ink bottle rated at 6,000 pages at $17.99, priced on 27 September 2026.
The color figure adds one per-page cost for each of the three color channels, because an ISO color page draws from all of them.
Canon GI-21 pigment black ink bottle — rated 6,000 pages (ISO/IEC 24712 (Canon default print mode)), $17.99 at Target, checked 27 September 2026
Canon GI-21 color ink bottle — rated 7,700 pages (ISO/IEC 24712 (Canon default print mode)), $12.99 at Target, checked 27 September 2026
Yields are manufacturer-rated at the ISO 5% page-coverage standard, not measured by us, and real-world cost runs higher. Prices are not live: this is arithmetic on a price we read on the date shown, not a current price. How we calculate cost per page.
List price
$248.99 at Office Depot, checked 27 September 2026
Supply type
Refillable ink bottles
Two-sided printing
Not stated on the spec page we read
Document feeder
None
Connectivity
Wireless
Subscription
None required
What we like
Lowest cost per page of any model on this site, mono and color
Pigment black ink smudges less on plain paper
Large 170 mL bottles, so refills are infrequent
What you give up
Canon's own store would not show us a price, so ours is a retailer listing
No document feeder
Canon's headline yields assume its default print mode, not draft mode
Who it is for: anyone printing color regularly enough that the per-page cost is the whole decision.
Nothing we have found prints a color page more cheaply. Canon rates the GI-21 color bottles at 7,700 pages each at $12.99, which with the black works out at about 0.8 cents an ISO color page. The pigment black is the bonus: water-resistant on plain paper, which dye inks are not.
Honest cons. No published automatic duplex or document feeder, one paper input, and Canon’s own US store would not show us a price. The G3270 in detail.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of November 12, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
~0.4¢ per mono page · ~1.1¢ per color page
Based on a Epson 522 black ink bottle rated at 4,500 pages at $17.99, priced on 27 September 2026.
The color figure adds one per-page cost for each of the three color channels, because an ISO color page draws from all of them.
Epson 522 black ink bottle — rated 4,500 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), $17.99 at Epson US, checked 27 September 2026
Epson 522 color ink bottle — rated 7,500 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), $17.99 at Epson US, checked 27 September 2026
Yields are manufacturer-rated at the ISO 5% page-coverage standard, not measured by us, and real-world cost runs higher. Prices are not live: this is arithmetic on a price we read on the date shown, not a current price. How we calculate cost per page.
Among the lowest cost per page of any printer sold for home use
Refillable bottles, so no chipped cartridge can be locked out by firmware
Comes with enough ink in the box to last most households a long time
What you give up
No automatic two-sided printing, so paper costs twice what it needs to
Flatbed scanner only - no document feeder for multi-page scans
Inkjets still need to be used occasionally or the print head can clog
Who it is for: the household that wants cheap color plus scanning and copying, and wants it to be simple.
This is the pick we give most people. color printing, scanning and copying on refillable 522 bottles at about 1.1 cents an ISO color page, for $239.99, with the widest spare-parts and bottle-availability situation of anything here. It is the safest purchase in the band rather than the cheapest to run.
Honest cons. No automatic duplex, no document feeder, flatbed only, and dye black rather than pigment. Full cost-to-run breakdown.
The cheapest entry into bottle-fed ink. It runs on exactly the same 522 ink as the ET-2800, so the cost per page is identical - you are only giving up some hardware.
Product photograph supplied by Amazon for this listing. We do not have this model in hand and have not photographed it ourselves.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of November 12, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
~0.4¢ per mono page · ~1.1¢ per color page
Based on a Epson 522 black ink bottle rated at 4,500 pages at $17.99, priced on 27 September 2026.
The color figure adds one per-page cost for each of the three color channels, because an ISO color page draws from all of them.
Epson 522 black ink bottle — rated 4,500 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), $17.99 at Epson US, checked 27 September 2026
Epson 522 color ink bottle — rated 7,500 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), $17.99 at Epson US, checked 27 September 2026
Yields are manufacturer-rated at the ISO 5% page-coverage standard, not measured by us, and real-world cost runs higher. Prices are not live: this is arithmetic on a price we read on the date shown, not a current price. How we calculate cost per page.
Identical 522 ink to the dearer ET-2800, so identical running cost
Small enough for a shelf or a shared family desk
What you give up
No automatic two-sided printing
Flatbed scanner only
Fewer hardware niceties than the ET-2800 for a modest saving
Who it is for: the cheapest honest route to color that is not a cartridge trap.
Identical ink to the ET-2800, so identical color economics at about 1.1 cents an ISO page, for $189.99. Buying color below this price almost always means buying a cartridge machine, and that is where the money goes afterwards.
Honest cons. Lower scanner specification, no duplexer, no feeder, one tray. Our ET-2400 page.
A color laser that will not dry out between jobs. Buy it for occasional color that has to be crisp, not for cheap color - a tank printer wins on cost by a wide margin.
Product photograph supplied by Amazon for this listing. We do not have this model in hand and have not photographed it ourselves.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of November 12, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
~3.2¢ per mono page
Based on a Brother TN229XL black high-yield toner cartridge rated at 3,000 pages at $96.29, priced on 27 September 2026.
Brother TN229XL black high-yield toner cartridge — rated 3,000 pages (ISO/IEC 19798), $96.29 at Brother USA, checked 27 September 2026
Yields are manufacturer-rated at the ISO 5% page-coverage standard, not measured by us, and real-world cost runs higher. Prices are not live: this is arithmetic on a price we read on the date shown, not a current price. How we calculate cost per page.
Color laser output does not dry out during long idle spells
Auto duplex printing
Four separate cartridges, so one exhausted color does not mean replacing the set
What you give up
Color toner is expensive per page next to any ink tank printer
Four cartridges to replace instead of one
Slower than the mono lasers at 19 pages per minute
Who it is for: someone printing color onto card, labels or anything that gets folded and stacked immediately.
A color laser fuses dry toner onto the sheet, so output is finished when it lands in the tray — no drying, no smudging, no curl on coated stock. Brother lists this at $284.99 with automatic two-sided printing at 19 pages a minute in both black and color. It is the only color laser that fits this cap.
Honest cons. This is the expensive end of color per page: four cartridges plus a drum, and a color page costs multiples of what any tank printer here charges. No scanner. Buy it for dry output, never for cheap color. Color laser against ink tank.
#ad — we may earn a commission. How this site is funded. Prices as shown on Amazon as of November 12, 2026; Amazon’s own page is the price of record.
Cost per page: not published. We could not read a confirmed supply price for the HP Smart Tank 7001 on the date we checked, so there is no figure here. An unknown input means no number, not a guessed one. How we work this out.
List price
Not published where we checked on 27 September 2026
Supply type
Refillable ink bottles
Two-sided printing
Not stated on the spec page we read
Document feeder
None
Connectivity
Wireless
Subscription
Optional, and pushed hard
What we like
Bottle-fed rather than cartridge-fed, so there is no cartridge chip to lock out
High rated bottle yields, particularly on color
No Instant Ink plan is required to print
What you give up
We could not read a bottle price from HP on the date we checked, so there is no cost-per-page figure here
HP's Dynamic Security history on its cartridge printers is a reason many buyers avoid the brand entirely
Sold alongside heavy promotion of HP's subscription plans
Who it is for: a reader committed to HP hardware who still wants ink from a bottle.
HP’s Smart Tank line is the company’s answer to EcoTank: refillable HP 32XL black and HP 31 color bottles, rated by HP at about 6,000 and 8,000 pages respectively, with print, scan and copy. If you want to stay with HP without a cartridge in the machine, this is how.
Honest cons. We publish no cost per page for it, and that is deliberate: HP’s own support page and US store would not return a bottle price when we checked, so any figure would be invented. It also sits inside HP’s software ecosystem, which pushes an ink subscription you do not have to take. Why we publish no figure.
+−What is the cheapest color printer to run under $300?
The Canon MegaTank G3270, at about 0.8 cents an ISO color page from GI-21 bottles. The Epson EcoTank models on 522 bottles are close behind at about 1.1 cents.
+−Is there a color laser printer under $300?
One that we recommend: the Brother HL-L3220CDW at $284.99, with automatic two-sided printing and 19 pages a minute in color. Its cost per page is far above any tank printer, so buy it for dry output rather than for cheap color.
+−Do color ink tank printers dry out if you do not use them?
They can, like any inkjet, which is why we suggest printing something in color every couple of weeks. If a printer will genuinely sit unused for months, a laser is the safer machine.
+−Can I use third-party ink in these printers?
Bottles have no chip to authenticate, so there is nothing for firmware to reject — but third-party ink can affect print quality and warranty cover. Our figures all use the manufacturer’s own ink.
+−Why is there no cost per page for the HP Smart Tank?
Because HP’s own support page and US store did not return a bottle price when we checked, so any figure we published would be invented. We would rather publish nothing than a number we cannot source.
