What a home printer actually costs to run
You can buy a decent inkjet for £70 and spend more than that refilling it over a year. The maths is not complicated once you know what to divide by what.
Here is a sentence that will save you an afternoon of comparison shopping: the printer that costs the most to buy is often the cheapest to run, and the printer that costs the least to buy is almost always the most expensive to run. That is not a trick. It is how manufacturers finance the hardware. The ink or toner is the product; the printer is the delivery system.
What makes up the cost of a page
Three things, in roughly this order:
- Consumable cost per page. How much ink or toner the page uses.
- Paper. Modest but not zero. A5 copy paper is pennies; photo paper is not.
- Electricity. Laser printers draw a lot briefly while heating the fuser; inkjets draw very little. Over a year it is a small factor for either.
Cartridge yield is the number manufacturers quote for the first one. A standard colour inkjet cartridge might be rated for about 200 pages; a "high-yield" or "XL" version might be rated for 400 to 600. A laser toner cartridge is usually rated for 1,000 to 2,500 mono pages, or 2,000 to 6,000 for the bigger office machines. Those numbers are based on a 5% page coverage standard called ISO/IEC 19752 (mono) and 24711 (colour). Five percent is a short printed letter with a bit of white space. A page of solid black bold text is nothing like 5%.
The four cost bands, roughly
Indicative bands only. Real cost-per-page depends on cartridge yield, page coverage, ink or toner price at purchase, and how often the printer sits idle.
No chart replaces looking up your specific cartridge. The point of the picture is that the choice between formats is bigger than the choice between brands within a format. If you print 20 colour pages a week on a cartridge inkjet, the format is your cost problem; buying the cheapest cartridge will not save you.
Working out your own number
Pull one receipt for a cartridge or toner, note the price, and look up the rated yield on the box or the manufacturer's site. Divide. That is your floor cost per page at 5% coverage.
Multiply by 2 or 3 if you print heavy-coverage pages (photos, maps, infographics). Multiply by 1.2 to 1.5 if you print mostly text with the odd image. Over a year, multiply by how many pages you actually print.
Example: a mono laser toner at £55 rated for 2,200 pages gives about 2.5p per text page. 500 text pages a year is £12.50 in toner, plus maybe £4 in paper. Not scary.
Same exercise with a tri-colour cartridge for an entry inkjet: £22 rated for 200 colour pages. 11p per page at 5% coverage. A page with a photo on it can push past 50p. If you print 200 colour pages a year, your consumable spend is £22 best case, closer to £60 realistic. The printer cost less.
Where ink-tank machines fit
Refillable ink-tank inkjets (sometimes called supertank, EcoTank, MegaTank or Smart Tank by different makers) replaced cartridges with large bottles that top up reservoirs. The pay-off is a dramatically lower per-page cost; the catch is a higher up-front price, often £200 to £400. Over three to five years of regular printing they come out cheapest for a colour-capable home printer by some margin. Over a year of light printing, they do not: you have paid for pages you will not print.
Third-party cartridges and refills
You can save money with compatible cartridges and refill kits, and plenty of people do it without trouble. Two warnings, both honest:
- Compatible cartridges can trigger firmware checks on some printers. Keep the original packaging and the receipt in case you need to argue.
- A leaking refill ruins a print head. If you are refilling, do it on newspaper and wash your hands.
Hidden costs nobody mentions
- Idle cleaning cycles. Inkjets run small automatic cleans. If you print rarely, you spend ink on cleans rather than pages. A machine that lives dormant can empty a cartridge through cleaning alone.
- Paper jam remedial work. When a jam tears, you may lose a page of ink or toner that never made it to you.
- Firmware "updates" that disable third-party ink. Be careful about allowing updates if you rely on compatibles.
Independent reviews, such as those on Which?, test cost per page under controlled conditions. Their numbers are the best starting point when you are comparing specific models.
The practical takeaway
Decide the volume before the model. If you will print mostly text, a mono laser is unbeatable. If you will print colour at any volume, an ink-tank inkjet is the sensible long-term choice. If neither applies and you print rarely, buy the cheap cartridge inkjet with eyes open, keep spare XL cartridges, and print something small every fortnight so the ink does not dry up. More on that in our printer problems guide.