Guides
Each guide is a filter over the same catalogue, so nothing here can claim a printer we do not have or a number the specification does not support. Every list says which measurable it is ordered by — none of them is ranked by opinion.
Cheapest cost per page under $300
Purchase price is the number on the shelf edge; cost per page is the number you pay for the next five years. These are the printers under three hundred dollars whose black page costs least, computed from the ISO yield and list price of the consumable each one actually uses. The gap across this list is more than thirty to one.
28 printers · Ordered by computed cost per mono page, cheapest first.
Mono lasers for a home office
A mono laser is the right answer to one specific problem: printing black-and-white documents in bursts, from a machine that has been switched off for a month. Nothing dries out, the first page lands in seven or eight seconds, and the output cannot smear. What the recommendation usually leaves out is the toner bill, so it is in the table.
9 printers · Ordered by pages per minute, fastest first.
Tank vs cartridge: the break-even table
A tank printer costs more to buy and vastly less to feed. The question is how many pages it takes for that to pay off, and the answer is usually far fewer than people expect. This list puts every printer with a sourced consumable in one column: what it costs to buy, plus what five thousand pages of ink or toner costs on top.
43 printers · Ordered by total cost to own at 5,000 pages, lowest first.
Printing photographs at home
A four-ink office printer will print a photograph. It will not print a good black-and-white one, because it has no grey ink and has to fake neutral tones by mixing colours. The machines here carry six to ten inks, or use a dye-sublimation ribbon that lays colour down in passes. Print size and per-print cost matter more than pages per minute.
9 printers · Ordered by number of inks, most first.
Printers with no third-party ink lock
Some printers check the chip in a cartridge and refuse anything that is not the manufacturer's own — and on the models sold through HP+, that commitment lasts the life of the printer and is a condition of the warranty. It is the single most repeated complaint in owner discussions about modern printers. These are the ones in the catalogue that impose no such lock.
42 printers · Ordered by price, lowest first — not by cost per page, because a third of these have no sourced consumable price and ranking them on a number we do not have would invent one.
All-in-ones with a document feeder under $300
A flatbed scanner is fine for a passport page and miserable for a shoebox of receipts. A document feeder is the difference, and under three hundred dollars it is the feature most often missing. These have one — listed with how many sheets it holds, because a twenty-sheet feeder and a fifty-sheet feeder are not the same purchase.
13 printers · Ordered by feeder capacity, largest first.
The cheapest colour pages
Colour is where the cost spread gets absurd. A page that uses all four inks costs a little over a cent on the best tank printers here and close to twenty cents on a colour laser — and about a third of a dollar on a tri-colour cartridge machine. Same page, same paper, thirty times the money.
34 printers · Ordered by computed cost per colour page, cheapest first.
Printers that take bigger than letter
Most home printers stop at letter, and a surprising number stop at letter even when the box says legal. These take genuinely large sheets — a tabloid spreadsheet, an A3 drawing, a framed 13 by 19 photograph. Check the scanner separately: several of these print big and scan small.
6 printers · Ordered by price, lowest first.