Best printers under $500

Who it is for: the household that wants color printing, scanning and copying, and wants the ink bill to stop being something it thinks about.

We are leading a $500 page with a printer that costs a fraction of the cap, on purpose. For a normal household, most of what sits above this on the ladder is paper handling you will not use: a document feeder you do not need because you scan one sheet at a time, a wired port you do not need because the printer lives beside the router, a fax modem you will never plug into anything. What this machine gives you is the part that recurs, and it gives you the best version of it on the whole site.

Canon rates the GI-21 black bottle at 6,000 pages and each GI-21 color bottle at 7,700 pages, which is about 0.3 of a cent a mono page and 0.8 cents for an ISO color page — the lowest running cost in our registry on both kinds of page. It also uses a pigment black rather than a dye black, which resists water on plain paper and smudges less under a thumb. Spend what you save on bottles and you have bought years of ink.

Honest cons. Canon does not publish automatic two-sided printing or a document feeder for this model on the pages we read, so a double-sided document means feeding each sheet twice. There is one paper input, no Ethernet, and Canon’s own US store would not return a price, so our list figure came from a retailer listing. The G3270 in detail.

Who it is for: a home office or small business that genuinely scans stacks of paper and prints on both sides.

If the budget exists because you have real work to do, this is where it goes. It is the only machine we cover inside the cap that publishes an automatic document feeder, automatic two-sided printing, a 250-sheet tray, wired Ethernet and fax together — and it still runs on refillable 502 bottles at about 0.3 of a cent a mono page. Epson rates it at 18 ISO pages a minute black and 9 color.

The honest test for whether you need this instead of our top pick is one question: in the last month, did you scan anything longer than three pages? If not, the feeder is the whole premium and you will not touch it.

Honest cons. Epson lists it at $499.99, so it sits right at the cap and the live price above is the figure that decides it. Nine ISO color pages a minute is slow if color is most of your volume, and an inkjet feeder is slower than a laser one. The full cost-to-run breakdown.

Who it is for: anyone printing more than roughly 200 black pages a month, for whom the cartridge is the expense rather than the printer.

This is the cheapest body that reaches Brother’s business cartridge ladder, and that is the only hardware upgrade on this page that keeps paying you back. The TN920XXL is rated at 11,000 pages for $204.29 — about 1.9 cents a page against 3.3 cents on household toner — and the DR920 drum is rated at approximately 45,000 pages rather than 15,000. Brother lists it at $329.99 with 48 pages a minute and 350 sheets across a cassette and a multi-purpose tray.

Honest cons. Print only — no scanner, no copier — and black only. A replacement cartridge is a $200-plus purchase even though each page off it is cheap. Brother’s own store showed it out of stock when we last checked, without marking it discontinued, so confirm availability. The HL-L5210DW in full.

Who it is for: the reader who wants the EcoTank range specifically, for its bottle availability, at the lowest price it starts at.

Epson’s EcoTank line made refillable bottles mainstream, and this is where it begins: print, scan and copy in color on 522 bottles at about 0.4 of a cent a mono page and 1.1 cents an ISO color page, for $189.99. Those are the same bottles the more expensive EcoTanks use, so the cost per page does not improve as you move up the range — which is the single most useful thing to know when shopping this budget.

The practical reason to pick this over our top pick is supply: 522 bottles are stocked almost everywhere, which is worth something on a machine you intend to keep for years.

Honest cons. No automatic two-sided printing, no document feeder, one paper tray, no Ethernet, and a lower scanner specification than the dearer EcoTanks. The black is a dye ink rather than a pigment, so it is less water-resistant on plain paper than the Canon above. Our ET-2400 page.

Who it is for: someone printing color onto card, labels or anything that gets folded, cut or stacked immediately.

A color laser fuses dry toner onto the sheet, so the page is finished when it lands in the tray. No drying time, no smudge where a blade drags, no curl on coated stock. Brother lists this at $284.99 with automatic two-sided printing and 19 pages a minute in both black and color, on the TN229 and high-yield TN229XL family.

Honest cons. This is the expensive end of color per page on this list: the TN229XL black is about 3.2 cents and a color page costs considerably more, with four cartridges plus a drum to replace instead of one. No scanner. Buy it for dry output, never for cheap color. The comparison that settles it.

Who it is for: anyone whose printing is black text that has to come out immediately, however rarely.

The cheapest machine on this page that we would recommend without caveats, and for a lot of readers the right one. Brother lists it at $179.99 with 36 pages a minute, automatic two-sided printing, dual-band Wi-Fi, Ethernet and USB. Toner does not dry out, so it survives being ignored for a season, and the high-yield TN830XL works out at about 3.3 cents a page.

Honest cons. Black only, so no color at all, and no scanner. The box ships a 700-page starter cartridge rather than a full one, and the DR830 drum is a separate purchase rated at only about 15,000 pages. The full breakdown.