Printer specs, explained

Two numbers decide what a printer costs you, and every manufacturer publishes both: the ISO page yield of a cartridge or bottle, and its price. Divide the price by the yield and you have the cost of one page. That single division is the reason this site exists, because the two numbers live on different pages of every maker’s website and are never shown together.

Worked through: a black consumable that holds 3,000 ISO pages and costs $98.29 gives 98.29 ÷ 3000 = $0.0328, or 3.3¢ a page. A bottle that holds 7,500 ISO pages and costs $24.99 gives 0.33¢. Same page, same paper, ten times the money.

For a colour page we add the chromatic inks to the black: the cost of a full cyan, magenta and yellow set divided by its yield, plus the mono figure. That is what a page using every ink costs. Across the 43 printers here with a sourced black consumable, a mono page runs from 0.30¢ on the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 to 15¢ on the HP DeskJet 2855e, and a colour page from 0.95¢ on the Canon PIXMA G6020 to 33¢ on the HP DeskJet 2855e.

All of it is an estimate. It assumes the ISO test page, the maker’s own yield claim, and a list price that moves. It is still the most useful number in the purchase, because it is comparable across every brand.

A page yield is measured against a standardised test document — ISO/IEC 24711 for inkjet cartridges and bottles, ISO/IEC 19752 and 19798 for mono and colour laser toner. The test page covers roughly five percent of the sheet with ink. That is a business letter, not a photograph and not a page of dense tables.

So the yield is a comparison standard, not a promise. Print pages heavier than the test and you will get fewer; print a photograph and you will get a great many fewer. What makes it valuable is that every manufacturer measures against the same document, so the ratio between two printers holds even when the absolute number does not.

Two yields are worth separating. The consumable’s yield is what a replacement gives you. The in-box yield is what shipped with the printer, and on laser printers it is routinely a fraction of the full cartridge — several here ship a 700-page starter against a 3,000-page replacement, which is why the first toner purchase arrives sooner than people expect.

Refillable tanks (18 printers here) take ink from bottles into reservoirs built into the printer. Nothing is thrown away but the bottle, which is why a page costs a fraction of a cent. The printer costs more up front.

Cartridges put the ink in a disposable housing, often with the print head and a chip attached. That is convenient, wasteful and expensive. The worst case is the tri-colour cartridge (4 printers here), which holds cyan, magenta and yellow in one body: run out of any one and the whole thing is binned with the other two inks still in it.

Toner is a dry powder fused onto the page with heat. It cannot dry out, cannot smear and cannot clog, which is why a laser that has sat unused for six months still prints. Mono toner sits between tanks and cartridges on cost; colour toner is the most expensive class here by a wide margin.

Ribbons and film are what the portable photo printers use. Dye-sublimation lays down colour in passes plus a protective coat; instant film develops chemically inside the packet. Both give a per-print cost you can know exactly, because the media is consumed one sheet at a time whatever the image.

Cost per page on its own does not answer the question people actually have, which is whether the expensive printer is worth it. Cost to own does: take the purchase price and add the supplies for however many pages you will print.

This site shows two horizons. 5,000 pages is a round number most households reach eventually. 200 pages a month for three years — 7,200 pages — is a working home office. Both assume 4 mono pages for every colour page on a colour printer, which is a guess, and one we would rather state than hide. Mono printers use the mono figure alone.

The bars on the cards and comparison pages draw the purchase price and the supplies as two segments of one bar. When the supplies segment is longer than the price segment — which happens well before 5,000 pages on a cartridge printer — the sticker price was not the price.

Some printers check the chip in a cartridge and refuse anything that is not the manufacturer’s own. On the models sold under a supplies programme, that refusal is permanent and is a condition of enrolling during setup — along with a requirement that the printer stay connected to the internet. 8 of the 50 printers here carry that commitment, and each is marked with an ink-lock chip on its card and detail page.All 8 are HP models sold under HP+. The requirement is HP’s own published term rather than our reading of owner complaints: HP's own HP+ programme page lists “Original HP Ink Cartridges — Required to operate” in its own comparison of an HP+ printer against the same printer unenrolled. Read 24 September 2026; HP has changed these terms before, so the date matters.

An ink subscription is a different thing that people conflate with it. You pay monthly for an allowance of pages and the cartridges arrive by post. They are metered by the service rather than sold to you, so when a plan ends they stop working — which is the single most-repeated complaint in owner discussion of cheap all-in-ones. For some printing patterns the maths is genuinely favourable. It is still a lease on ink rather than a purchase.

The practical advice owners give each other: decline the enrolment at setup if you want the option of compatible cartridges later, because it cannot be undone. And treat a firmware update on a printer you feed with third-party supplies as a decision rather than routine maintenance.

The printers here that impose no lock →

Print speed is quoted two ways and only one is comparable. ISO ppm is measured against the same standard document as the page yields. “Draft mode” figures — often two or three times higher — are measured with the printer producing output nobody would hand to anyone. Every speed on this site is the ISO figure.

The fastest printer here is the Brother HL-L2460DW at 36 ISO ppm. But for a household printing one or two pages at a time, first page out is the number you actually experience: the seconds between pressing print and paper appearing. A laser typically manages seven to nine seconds from ready. An inkjet is usually slower to start and then keeps pace once it is going.

Automatic duplex turns the sheet over inside the printer. Manual duplex means the driver prompts you to flip the stack, which is fine twice and tiresome at page twelve. It roughly halves print speed on every printer that has it.

An automatic document feeder pulls a stack through the scanner so you are not lifting the lid for every page. Capacity matters: a twenty-sheet feeder and a fifty-sheet feeder are different purchases. So does whether it scans both sides in one pass — only 3 printers here do, and anyone digitising double-sided paperwork discovers why that matters on the first stack.

On paper size, check the scanner separately from the printer. 6 printers here take paper wider than letter, and several of them print at 11×17 or 13×19 while their scanner stops at legal — so they cannot copy what they print.

Printer resolution figures are large and mostly unhelpful. A 4800 × 1200 dpi inkjet and a 600 × 600 dpi laser are measuring different things, and neither number predicts whether a photograph will look good.

What predicts it is the number of inks. A four-ink printer has no grey, so every neutral tone is mixed from cyan, magenta and yellow — which is why office printers produce black-and-white photographs with a colour cast. Six inks add a grey and a photo black and the cast disappears. Ten inks add light blacks and extra chromatic inks for a wider range still. The most inks here is the Epson SureColor P700 with 10.

The second thing that matters is pigment versus dye. Dye soaks into the paper and is more saturated on gloss; pigment sits on the surface, lasts far longer on display, and behaves properly on matte fine-art stock.

On a portable photo printer the media is sold as a matched pack — ribbon and paper together, or a film cartridge — so the cost per print is exact rather than estimated. Divide the pack price by the number of prints in it and that is the number, whatever the photograph looks like.

The cheapest here is the Kodak Dock Plus at 31¢ a 4×6. That is far more than a refillable tank photo printer costs per photo — but a tank printer will not fit in a bag, and its prints are wet when they emerge.

Dedicated photo printers are the other case. They publish no ISO page yields, because a standard test page has nothing to do with a photograph, so there is no cost per page for them here and no invented substitute. The honest figure is cost per print, and it depends entirely on the paper and the coverage.

The most common complaint about home printers of every brand is not print quality or ink cost. It is a printer that shows as offline: after a router reboot, after a firmware update, after nothing at all. A wired Ethernet connection removes the entire category of problem, and owners who have one are usually emphatic about it.

Where wireless is the only option, dual-band matters: a 5 GHz radio is far less crowded than 2.4 GHz in a block of flats. AirPrint and Mopria let a phone print with no app at all, which is worth checking for, because the alternative is the manufacturer’s own app and its enthusiasm for accounts.

On drivers: printing works everywhere, and scanning to a computer is where platform differences show up. Owners also report the same file printing with different colour from macOS and Windows on the same printer, which is a colour-management difference rather than a fault — matching the paper setting and profile on both is what fixes it.