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Published July 21, 2026. Prices and specs checked October 9 and 10, 2026.
The best home printer here depends on how much you print. The Epson EcoTank ET-2850 has the cheapest ink on this page and the only auto-duplex printing. It is not the cheapest to own. Epson’s own store lists it at $349.99 and out of stock, checked October 10, 2026, which puts its five-year total at $369.98. The Canon MegaTank G3270 wins that math at $271.98.
The Canon still has cheap ink, but Canon’s own store now lists it as no longer available, and the only place we found it in stock and sold directly was Walmart, at $248.99 — not the $159.99 clearance price still floating around comparison sites. Print only black text and want to stop thinking about ink entirely? The Brother HL-L2405W laser is the better $139.99. The $109.89 HP DeskJet 4255e is the cheapest printer to buy and, on retail cartridges, the most expensive one to own by a wide margin.
I’ve owned both kinds of home printer over the years, cartridge inkjets and a mono laser. The inkjet always looked like the bargain at the register. That stopped around the third set of cartridges. Leave an inkjet idle for a few weeks in a humid summer and the first page tends to streak. A laser just prints. The box never shows the refill math, so this page is built on it.
Four Claims, Checked Against Each Maker’s Own Page
Before the numbers, four claims worth verifying — because two of them changed the shape of this comparison.
| Claim | What we checked | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| The Canon MegaTank G3270 is a current, buyable printer | Canon’s own store page for the G3270 reads “Sorry, this item is no longer available,” with no add-to-cart option and no successor named. Best Buy’s listing shows “Unavailable from this seller.” Walmart’s listing is sold and shipped by Walmart directly, in stock, at $248.99. | Buyable — but not from Canon, and not near the $159.99 price still quoted around the web. |
| The HP DeskJet 4255e is HP’s current pick in this class | HP’s own product page for the 4255e is titled “HP DeskJet 4255e is Now the HP DeskJet 4355, AI-capable.” HP has moved its own marketing to the newer 4355. The 4255e itself is still sold new at Best Buy and Staples. | Still sold, but it’s the outgoing model, not HP’s current one. |
| Epson’s EcoTank ink saves “up to 90%” over cartridge ink | Our own math below puts the ET-2850 at $3.33 per 1,000 black pages against the HP DeskJet 4255e’s $149.54 on genuine 67XL cartridges at today’s retail prices — a 97.8% saving. | True, and understated if anything. |
| The Brother HL-L2405W ships with a “starter” toner cartridge | Brother’s own product page lists the in-box cartridge as a “Starter Black Toner Cartridge (700 pages‡)” — the identical yield Staples lists for a full-price standard TN830 cartridge, not a reduced starter size. | Real, but it’s not a bonus — budget for the 3,000-page TN830XL almost immediately at any real print volume. |
Best Home Printer for the Money
Cost per page decides what a printer costs to live with, so it carries 30 of the 70 points here. Features, duplex and speed fill the rest. Purchase price sits in the five-year table below instead of the tally, because store prices on these models have moved since July. Disagree with a weight? Re-run it; every input below is sourced.
| Axis (points) | Canon G3270 | Epson ET-2850 | Brother HL-L2405W | HP DeskJet 4255e |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per 1,000 pages (30) | 26 | 30 | 10 | 0 |
| Print/scan/copy vs. print-only (15) | 15 | 15 | 0 | 15 |
| Auto duplex printing (10) | 0 | 10 | 0 | 0 |
| Print speed (15) | 6 | 5 | 15 | 2 |
| Tally (of 70) | 47 | 60 | 25 | 17 |
Two things are worth explaining. Cost per page is 30 points because it’s the number that compounds — a $4 gap per thousand pages doesn’t feel like much until you’ve printed a few thousand. Availability is checked separately, on one test: in stock and sold by the retailer itself, not a marketplace reseller. We checked Epson’s and Canon’s own stores, Staples for Brother and Best Buy for HP. On October 10, 2026, Epson’s own store listed the ET-2850 at $349.99 and out of stock. Canon’s own G3270 page carries a “no longer available” notice. We also checked all four models against the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s printer recall list before writing any of this. None of the four carry an open recall. The only current entry on that list is an unrelated Lexmark model.
Cheapest Home Printer to Run
Assume 100 black-text pages a month for five years — homework packets, permission slips, reading logs — for 6,000 pages total. Every printer is charged for all 6,000 pages at its current supply price. We ignore the ink or toner that ships in the box. That is generous to Canon and Epson, which both ship enough for months of typical use. For the other two it is roughly fair.
| Canon G3270 | Epson ET-2850 | Brother HL-L2405W | HP DeskJet 4255e | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Printer price | $248.99 | $349.99 | $139.99 | $109.89 |
| Ink/toner for 6,000 pages | $22.99 | $19.99 | $196.58 (2× TN830XL) | $897.25 (25× HP 67XL) |
| 5-year total | $271.98 | $369.98 | $336.57 | $1,007.14 |
| Cost per 1,000 pages (ink only) | $3.83 | $3.33 | $32.76 | $149.54 |
The Epson column works like this: $24.99 ÷ 7,500 pages × 6,000 pages = $19.99 of ink, plus Epson’s $349.99 list price, for $369.98. The Canon’s 6,000 pages take one $22.99 bottle ($22.99 ÷ 6,000 × 6,000), plus $248.99, for $271.98. Canon’s per-1,000 figure is $22.99 ÷ 6 = $3.83.
The cheapest printer to buy — the HP, at $109.89 — finishes dead last by roughly $670. It is also the slowest machine here. HP has an escape hatch: its Instant Ink 100-page plan runs $8.49 a month, which over five years plus the printer works out to about $619 — still the most expensive path on this page, just a less punishing one than buying retail cartridges.
Prices are approximate, current as of publication, and change frequently — confirm the latest price with the retailer before buying.
Home Printer Cost per Page
The Epson EcoTank ET-2850 has the lowest cost per page here: a third of a cent for black text. Canon’s MegaTank G3270 is close behind. The Brother laser runs about ten times the Epson’s figure, and HP’s cartridge nearly fifty times. These are black-ink numbers, read October 9, 2026.
| Printer | Black refill | Refill price | Rated yield | Cost per page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 | 502 black ink bottle | $24.99 | 7,500 pages | $0.0033 |
| Canon MegaTank G3270 | GI-21 pigment black bottle | $22.99 | 6,000 pages | $0.0038 |
| Brother HL-L2405W | TN830XL toner | $98.29 | 3,000 pages | $0.0328 |
| HP DeskJet 4255e | HP 67XL black cartridge | $37.99 | 240 pages | $0.1583 |
Epson’s store lists the 502 black bottle at $24.99. Its ET-2850 page rates that bottle at 7,500 ISO pages, so $24.99 ÷ 7,500 = $0.0033 a page. Canon’s G3270 store page lists GI-21 black from $22.99 for up to 6,000 pages: $22.99 ÷ 6,000 = $0.0038. Brother’s TN830XL page gives $98.29 and 3,000 pages, for $98.29 ÷ 3,000 = $0.0328. HP’s store rates the 67XL at about 240 pages but showed no usable price. The $37.99 is Quill’s listing, and $37.99 ÷ 240 = $0.1583.
Now put those figures to work over a month of black text. At 100 pages, ink costs $0.33 on the Epson and $0.38 on the Canon. The Brother needs $3.28 and the HP $15.83. At 300 pages it is $1.00, $1.15, $9.83 and $47.49. At 1,000 pages the Epson spends $3.33. The HP spends $158.29, more than four 67XL cartridges a month. A few homework pages a week barely shows the tank-versus-laser gap. Anyone printing in the hundreds should stop buying cartridges.
Epson ET-2850 Price and Ink Cost
Epson’s own store lists the ET-2850 at $349.99 and out of stock, checked October 10, 2026. It has the cheapest ink here: a $24.99 bottle of 502 black rated for 7,500 pages, or $3.33 per 1,000 pages. It is also the only printer in this lineup with automatic duplex printing, at 10.5 ISO ppm one-sided and 6.0 ISO ppm two-sided. The price is the catch. Against the Canon’s $248.99, the Epson costs $101.00 more up front and saves $0.50 per 1,000 pages ($3.83 − $3.33). Closing that gap takes $101.00 ÷ $0.50 × 1,000 = 202,000 pages. Buy it for duplex and the ink, not to save money.
Honest caution: Epson backs it with a two-year warranty, but the second year requires product registration — skip that step and you’re down to one. Consumer Reports’ testing of the ET-2850 is the independent read worth pairing with the numbers here before you buy. Skip this if you need the absolute lowest sticker price today and can live with hand-feeding paper for years to come without duplex; the Brother or HP will cost less upfront.
Canon MegaTank G3270: cheap ink, if you can find one
The G3270’s ink economics are still genuinely good — a $22.99 GI-21 black bottle rated for 6,000 pages, or $3.83 per 1,000, second only to Epson. What’s changed is that Canon itself won’t sell you one. Its own store lists the printer as discontinued, Best Buy shows it unavailable, and the one retailer we confirmed had it in stock and sold it directly was Walmart, at the regular $248.99 rather than the promotional $159.99 that made the G3270 famous as a value pick.
No automatic two-sided printing, no document feeder, and print speed is a modest 11 pages per minute by Canon’s own rating. Skip this if you want to order it straight from the manufacturer, or you’re comparing it against the still-current $159.99 figure — that price is gone everywhere we checked.
Brother HL-L2405W: fast, reliable, mono only
If every page your household prints is black text, the calculus changes. At 30 pages per minute by Brother’s own spec, the HL-L2405W prints nearly three times faster than the Canon. And toner doesn’t dry out the way inkjet nozzles can during slow weeks. Standard TN830 toner runs $60.99 for 700 pages. The sane per-page choice is the TN830XL at $98.29 for 3,000 pages, or $32.76 per 1,000 pages. That is roughly eight times the tank printers’ cost, but predictable and clog-free.
Skip this if color pages happen more than rarely, or you need scanning or copying — this is a print-only machine, no exceptions.
HP DeskJet 4255e: only inside a subscription
At $109.89, the 4255e is the cheapest printer on this page to buy and, on retail cartridges, the most expensive by a wide margin — $1,007.14 over five years once you account for HP 67XL’s real yield of 240 black pages per $35.89 cartridge. HP’s own marketing has already moved on to the DeskJet 4355. The 4255e is what’s left in the channel, still sold new at Best Buy and Staples.
Instant Ink changes the math meaningfully: the 100-page monthly plan is $8.49, which brings the five-year total (printer plus subscription) to roughly $619 — still the priciest option here, but not the runaway loser retail cartridges make it. Skip this if you know yourself well enough to know you’ll forget to keep the subscription active; on retail cartridges alone, this is the one printer on this page we’d steer a family away from.
Buy the Epson EcoTank ET-2850 if you want duplex and the cheapest ink, and can find it in stock near Epson’s $349.99 list price. For the lowest five-year cost, the Canon MegaTank G3270 is still worth chasing down at Walmart. The Brother HL-L2405W is the right call for black-text-only households that want to stop thinking about ink. Buy the HP DeskJet 4255e only as a committed Instant Ink subscriber. For the rest of the homework station, our graphing calculator comparison and portable monitor breakdown cover the other big back-to-school purchases, and more comparisons live in Tech & Electronics.
