Laser toner vs inkjet ink: which lasts longer?
Updated 2026-09-24
Toner lasts far more pages per cartridge than inkjet ink, and it also costs far more per cartridge — so the answer depends on which number you divide by which. A typical high-yield home laser cartridge holds around 3,000 pages, against a few hundred for a cartridge inkjet. But a refillable tank printer beats both by roughly eight to one, because its consumable is a bottle of ink rather than a plastic assembly.
Pages per cartridge is the wrong comparison
A laser cartridge holding 3,000 pages sounds enormously better than an inkjet cartridge holding 240. It is, but it also costs four or five times as much. Cost per page is the comparison that survives: a genuine high-yield home laser cartridge works out around three cents a page, and a small inkjet cartridge around fifteen.
Where the tank printers land
A refillable tank printer's black bottle holds several thousand ISO pages and costs under twenty-five dollars, which puts a black page between a third and a half of a cent. That is roughly eight times cheaper than the laser everyone recommends. The reason lasers still get recommended is not cost per page — it is that toner does not dry out.
Shelf life is the real laser advantage
Toner is a dry powder. A laser that has sat unused for six months prints correctly on the first page. An inkjet that has sat for six weeks may need cleaning cycles first, and those cycles consume ink. If your printing is genuinely occasional, a laser's higher cost per page is irrelevant because you are not printing many pages — and its reliability is worth everything.
Colour changes the answer completely
Colour laser toner is the most expensive consumable class in this catalogue. Four cartridges, and the colour ones hold fewer pages than the black, put a page using all four around nineteen cents — against a little over one cent on a refillable tank printer. If you print colour at all regularly, colour laser is the expensive choice by a wide margin.