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The best home printer for the school year is the Canon MegaTank G3270 for most families: at $159.99 on Canon’s own store it pairs the lowest upfront price of any refillable-tank printer with black-text costs around $3 per thousand pages. Households that print homework in black and white only should get the Brother HL-L2405W laser instead, and the $109.99 HP DeskJet 4255e — the kind of cheap cartridge inkjet that ends up in most back-to-school carts — turns out to be the most expensive machine on this page once you run the five-year numbers.
That’s the pattern this comparison keeps returning to: with printers, the sticker price and the ownership cost point in opposite directions. So instead of ranking spec sheets, we priced five years of school-year printing on all four machines using each manufacturer’s published supply prices and page yields. One printer’s ink works out to roughly thirty times more expensive per page than another’s.
Our picks at a glance
- Best overall: Canon MegaTank PIXMA G3270 — tank-printer running costs at a cartridge-printer price; the value pick isn’t close.
- Best for black-and-white homework: Brother HL-L2405W — 30 pages a minute, no ink to dry out, mono only.
- Best upgrade: Epson EcoTank ET-2850 — auto two-sided printing and the cheapest black page here, if you can stomach $349.99 upfront.
- Only with a subscription: HP DeskJet 4255e — fine economics inside Instant Ink, punishing economics outside it.
The four printers, side by side
| Printer | Type | Price (as verified) | Black speed | Auto duplex | Consumables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canon MegaTank G3270 | Color ink tank AIO | $159.99 (Canon store, reg. $248.99) | ~11 ipm | No | GI-21 bottles |
| Brother HL-L2405W | Mono laser, print-only | $139.99 (Staples) | Up to 30 ppm | No | TN830 / TN830XL toner |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 | Color ink tank AIO | $349.99 (Epson store) | Mid-pack inkjet | Yes | 502 bottles |
| HP DeskJet 4255e | Color cartridge AIO | $109.99 (Staples) | 8.5 ppm | No | HP 67 / 67XL cartridges |
What does each printer really cost per 1,000 pages?
This is the table printer boxes never print, and it’s our own arithmetic from each maker’s published numbers. Per Epson’s supply listings, a 502 black bottle costs $24.99 and yields about 7,500 pages. Per Canon’s spec sheet, a GI-21 black bottle yields about 6,000 pages and sells for $17.99 at Target. Per Brother’s supply pages, TN830 toner is $60.99 for roughly 1,200 pages and the TN830XL is $98.29 for roughly 3,000. And per Castle Ink’s cartridge guide, HP 67XL cartridges yield about 240 black or 200 color pages, with a genuine XL pair running $50 or more.
| Black text, per 1,000 pages | Canon G3270 | Epson ET-2850 | Brother HL-L2405W (XL toner) | HP DeskJet 4255e (XL carts) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supply cost | ~$3.00 | ~$3.33 | ~$32.76 | ~$104+ (est.) |
| What that buys it | Cheapest refill | Biggest bottle | Speed, zero clogs | Low sticker price |
Read that top row again. The two tank printers land near three dollars per thousand pages. The laser lands near thirty-three. The cartridge inkjet lands north of a hundred — our estimate from Castle Ink’s pair pricing and HP’s own yields, and it gets worse if you buy standard-size cartridges. Epson’s marketing claim of “up to 90% savings” versus cartridge ink, per its EcoTank product page, is one of the rare spec-sheet boasts the math actually supports.
The five-year school-year scenario
Assume a family prints 100 black-text pages a month — homework packets, permission slips, reading logs — for five years: 6,000 pages. To keep it apples-to-apples we charge every printer for all 6,000 pages at its supply rate and ignore the starter supplies in the box. That’s generous to HP (TechRadar notes its cheap inkjets ship with “very little inbox ink”) and stingy to the tanks — Epson says the ET-2850’s included ink alone lasts up to two years at 150 pages a month.
| 5-year total (printer + supplies) | Canon G3270 | Brother HL-L2405W | Epson ET-2850 | HP DeskJet 4255e |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Estimated cost | ~$178 | ~$337 | ~$370 | ~$790 (est.) |
| Cost ranking | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th |
The cheapest printer to buy finishes last by more than four hundred dollars. The HP only escapes that math inside its Instant Ink subscription — the printer ships with a three-month trial per HP’s retail listing — which is why our verdict on it is conditional rather than negative.
Canon MegaTank G3270: the best home printer here for most families
The G3270’s case is simple: it’s the only printer here that’s cheap to buy and cheap to run. Canon’s spec sheet rates its GI-21 bottles at 6,000 black and 7,700 color pages, the bottles cost less than a single set of brand-name cartridges, and the current $159.99 price on Canon’s store undercuts even the HP’s regular positioning once you add a year of cartridges to the latter.
The compromises are real but livable. There’s no automatic two-sided printing — the dealbreaker to know about if your household prints long double-sided packets — no document feeder, and the 100-sheet paper tray needs weekly refilling in heavy use. Print speed is a modest 11 pages per minute. It’s the right machine for a family that prints steadily and wants to stop thinking about ink; it’s the wrong machine for someone scanning stacks of paperwork.
Brother HL-L2405W: the homework machine
If everything your household prints is black text, the calculus changes. The HL-L2405W prints up to 30 pages a minute per its retail spec — nearly three times the Canon — wakes from weeks of idleness with no clogged nozzles, and toner never dries out. That reliability is the laser’s quiet superpower for school use: it works identically in September and in May.
Two honest cautions. Per-page toner cost is roughly ten times the tank printers’ — fine at homework volumes, noticeable if you print heavily — and this is a print-only, black-only machine: no scanning, no copying, no color science-fair charts. Buy the standard $60.99 TN830 cartridge only if you print rarely; the XL’s 3,000-page yield is the sane per-page price.
Epson EcoTank ET-2850: the long-haul upgrade
The ET-2850 has the cheapest black page in this comparison — about $3.33 per thousand from a $24.99 bottle rated at 7,500 pages — plus the feature the Canon lacks: automatic duplex printing. Epson also ships it with up to two years of ink in the box by its own estimate, which softens the $349.99 sticker considerably in real-world terms.
The problem is that upfront price. Our five-year math has it costing roughly double the Canon in total, and you only claw that back at print volumes well beyond a typical family’s. It earns its keep for high-volume households, home offices that double as homework stations, and anyone for whom double-sided printing is non-negotiable. Casual printers should keep the $190 difference.
HP DeskJet 4255e: only with the subscription
The 4255e isn’t a bad printer — it’s a bad deal at retail cartridge prices. HP 67-series cartridges yield as little as 120 black pages in standard size per Castle Ink’s guide, which is how a $109.99 printer becomes our estimated $790 five-year machine. Speed is also the slowest here at 8.5 pages per minute black.
Inside HP’s Instant Ink subscription — the printer includes a three-month trial per its retail listing — the picture changes: you pay for a monthly page allowance rather than cartridges, and light, unpredictable printing can pencil out reasonably. Buy it only if you’ve honestly decided you’ll keep the subscription; if you know you’ll cancel subscriptions, this is the one printer on this page we’d steer you away from.
How we compared
We limited this comparison to current, widely stocked models and built the cost tables from primary published sources: Epson’s, Canon’s, and Brother’s own product and supply listings, current retailer pricing at Staples and Target, cartridge yields from Castle Ink’s HP 67 guide, and category context from TechRadar’s home-printer testing. The per-1,000-page and five-year tables are our own arithmetic from those figures, with assumptions stated inline; manufacturer yields are ISO-style estimates, so treat every number as a comparison tool rather than a promise. We don’t claim hands-on testing, and no manufacturer had input on our picks — our process is documented on our editorial standards page.
Frequently asked questions
Is an ink tank or a laser printer better for school work?
Ink tanks win on cost per page and color; lasers win on speed and set-it-and-forget-it reliability. If your printing is mostly black text and you hate troubleshooting, choose the laser. If color pages happen weekly, the tank printer costs less to live with.
Do ink tank printers dry out if you rarely print?
They can — infrequent use risks clogged printheads on any inkjet, and clearing clogs burns ink. If your household goes weeks without printing, a laser avoids the issue entirely. Printing a page or two weekly keeps inkjet nozzles healthy.
Is HP Instant Ink worth keeping after the trial?
It depends entirely on your volume matching a plan tier. Subscribers who print near their allowance each month do fine; the trouble starts when you cancel and return to retail cartridges, which our math prices at over $100 per thousand black pages on the 67XL. Decide on the subscription before buying the printer, not after.
What about printing photos for school projects?
Both tank printers handle occasional glossy prints acceptably; the mono Brother can’t print them at all. If photo quality is a priority rather than a bonus, that’s a different comparison — dedicated photo-oriented tanks like Epson’s six-color models exist for exactly that job.
Bottom line
Buy the Canon MegaTank G3270 and let the five-year math do the arguing — no other printer here is cheap on both ends of the transaction. Choose the Brother HL-L2405W if your printing is black-text-only and you value never thinking about it, step up to the Epson EcoTank ET-2850 for duplex printing and serious volume, and take the HP DeskJet 4255e only as a committed Instant Ink subscriber. Setting up the rest of the homework station? Our student laptop comparison and home-office monitor guide cover the screen side, our dorm mini-fridge face-off handles the dorm room, and the rest of our coverage lives in Tech & Electronics.
