About theprinterlist
Every printer publishes how many pages its cartridge is rated for, and somewhere else, what that cartridge sells for. Divide the second by the first and the same black sheet of paper costs 0.30¢ on one printer in this catalogue and 15¢ on another — a 50× spread that no box, shelf tag or product page carries. theprinterlist is 50 printers with that division already done.
The cheap printer is usually the expensive one
A purchase price is paid once. Ink is paid for as long as you own the machine, and the two move in opposite directions: the printers with the lowest sticker price are, with striking consistency, the ones whose cartridges cost the most per page. The catalogue’s own extremes make the point without any help from us. The HP DeskJet 2855e buys for $84 and prints at 15¢ a page; the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 buys for $599 and prints at 0.30¢. The $515 you saved at the till is gone by roughly page 3,500, and after that the cheap printer costs more every day you keep it. Run both to 5,000 pages at four mono pages for every colour page and the cheap one has cost ~$394 more in total.
That arithmetic is the entire reason this site exists. It is not difficult — it is one division — but it requires finding a page-yield figure and a consumable price that are almost never published together, for every printer you are choosing between, on the day you are choosing. Doing it once for 50 machines and keeping it current is a more useful thing to publish than another opinion about which printer is good.
How printers are sorted, and where the numbers come from
Each printer is filed by what it is — ink tank, inkjet all-in-one, mono laser, color laser, photo printer, and portable photo — and by the thing that actually generates the bill: whether its ink arrives as bottles, as separate cartridges, as one tri-colour cartridge, as toner, as a ribbon or as a film pack. Brand is a filter too, across 7 makers, but it is the least predictive field on the sheet; two printers from the same brand can differ tenfold in what they cost to run.
Print speeds, page yields, capacities, dimensions and weights are the manufacturers’ own published specifications. Consumable prices come from the maker’s store where it shows one and from a named retailer where it does not, and the URL each price was read from is recorded beside it in the data file. Feature badges are tested against structured fields rather than matched against marketing prose, because a search for the word “duplex” finds the printers that mention it, not the printers that do it.
One claim gets stricter treatment than the rest. Saying a printer will refuse third-party supplies for the rest of its life is a serious thing to assert, so the 8 machines marked that way all trace to HP's own HP+ programme page, read on 24 September 2026, and that date is shown because these terms have changed before.
What owners say, kept separate from what the maker says
33 of the 50 printers carry an owner section, distilled from public owner discussion, long-term published reviews and retailer review text, with its sources listed on the page. It sits under its own heading and is described as what owners report, never as a measurement, because nothing here has been on a bench.
The distinction is carried in the data rather than implied by tone: every entry records whether its pros and cons were written after reading owners or from the specification sheet alone. 18 are marked as the former and 32 as the latter, and the page says which. A sentence beginning “owners report” about a printer whose owners nobody has read is the easiest lie in this genre to tell, and the marker exists to make it impossible to tell by accident.
The gaps are left visible
7 printers here show no cost per page. Their yields are published but no genuine consumable price could be verified, and an invented one would poison the only number the site is for. The card shows the gap. Likewise 0 printers display a star rating: an average of real customers’ opinions has to be attributable to somewhere a reader can check, no such source publishes one for most home printers, and republishing a single retailer’s stars is not a substitute. A blank field here means nobody published the figure, not that we ran out of time.
The cost-per-page column has nothing to sell
Two people, between other things. No office, no test lab and no staff, and you will not find a reviewer’s byline on a printer page because there is no reviewer — there is a spec sheet, a price, a division, and a summary of what owners say.
No manufacturer pays for a listing, for a position in a sort order or for a kinder write-up, and none has been in touch. There are no retailer links, no affiliate tags and no commission on anything: the site earns nothing from what you buy, which is why the sorts are all measurables and none of them is a favourite. The 44 head-to-head pages are hand-picked comparisons people actually face rather than every possible pairing, because a thousand near-identical pages would be traffic bait and not much else.
How often any of this moves
The catalogue was last refreshed on 2026-09-24, and a refresh re-reads the consumable prices first because they move fastest — a cartridge that gains four dollars moves a cost-per-page figure and everything sorted by it. Specifications change only when a model is revised; models disappear quietly, which is harder to catch. Everything on the site is a snapshot dated to that day, and if a figure looks wrong to you it may well be.