September is when the household printer comes back to life. After a summer switched off, it is suddenly needed for timetables, permission slips, revision notes and the endless forms a new school year brings. It is also the moment supermarket aisles and online deals push cheap printers at prices that look too good to miss. The trouble is that the sticker price tells only half the story: the real bill arrives later, every time you hit print.
There is only one way to avoid a nasty surprise: look at what a single page costs, not what the machine costs. Over a thousand pages a year, the gap between the technologies often dwarfs the price of the printer itself.
The price on the box matters less than the cost per page
Working out the cost per page needs one simple sum: the price of the cartridge or toner divided by the number of pages it claims to produce. That figure, the yield, is measured against international standards (ISO/IEC 24711 for inkjet cartridges, ISO/IEC 19752 for mono laser toners), so the manufacturers' numbers can be compared like for like across models.
A worked example makes it concrete. A black inkjet cartridge at around £26 rated for 240 pages works out at roughly eleven pence a page; a laser toner costing about £70 and rated for 3,000 pages drops under three pence; the bottled ink of a refillable tank comes in below a penny. That is the number that tells you what the machine will really cost you over two or three years.
Inkjet, laser or tank: the page-by-page match
Set side by side, the three technologies tell very different stories. Inkjet is cheap to buy and dear to run; a mono laser flips the bill the other way; a refillable tank starts expensive and then all but wipes out the cost per page.
The picture changes dramatically with how much you print, though. Put your pages a month into the tool below and compare the yearly bill for an inkjet against a laser.
To place yourself without doing the maths, three profiles cover almost every household:
- If you print little and irregularly, a mono laser is the calmest option: the toner will not dry up and lasts for years.
- If you print a lot, colour included (school projects, coursework), a refillable tank pays back its higher price quickly.
- If you need decent photos and colour, inkjet still wins, provided you use it regularly.
Three prints a month, inkjet's worst case
The awkward truth about inkjet printers is that they treat occasional users worst of all, which is exactly how most households behave. Liquid ink dries in the print heads if it sits unused, so the machine runs its own cleaning cycles to keep the nozzles clear, burning through ink even when you have printed nothing.
The consequence is real: fire up the printer three times a month and you can find the cartridges empty with almost nothing to show for it, because much of the ink went on maintenance. Laser toner is a powder rather than a liquid, so it does not dry out and stays ready after weeks of neglect.
- Pick a mono laser if you mostly print text at irregular intervals.
- Move to a refillable tank if you print many pages every month, colour included.
- Avoid a cartridge inkjet if you print little: the ink dries between uses.
- Do not let the shelf price decide: that number hides what the consumables cost over time.
Wi-Fi, your phone and ink subscriptions
Home printers now connect over Wi-Fi with no cable to the computer. On an iPhone, AirPrint is built into the system: open the share menu and pick the printer. On Android, the path is Settings, then Connected devices and Printing. If the printer sits far from the router and coverage wobbles, moving the router or adding a repeater or a mesh Wi-Fi system usually fixes it.
Be wary, though, of the ink subscriptions manufacturers push: you pay a monthly fee for a set number of pages, and cartridges arrive before they run dry. Convenient, but with a catch worth knowing before you sign up.
Good to know: with ink subscriptions the cartridges stop working at the end of the billing cycle if you cancel, even when they are still part full, and the printer has to stay connected to the internet. Treat one as a subscription to review every year.
The four numbers to check before you pay
Before reaching for the cheapest model on the shelf, it pays to look at four figures. They are the same ones you would weigh up when comparing your home broadband or mobile plans, where the opening price matters less than the cost over time.
- The page yield, with the ISO standard quoted: it is the denominator of the cost per page.
- The price of the replacement consumable, not just the price of the machine.
- The cost per page, from dividing the consumable price by the yield: it is how you compare different models.
- Your real monthly volume, the honest one, not the figure you picture at the start of term.
Do those four sums properly and the right printer more or less chooses itself: usually it is the one that costs a little more on the shelf and far less on every page.