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Updated September 2026: prices, ink and toner costs, and availability re-verified against Epson’s, Canon’s, Brother’s, and HP’s own current listings, plus current retail stock at Walmart, Staples, and Best Buy.
The Epson EcoTank ET-2850 is the best home printer for the school year right now, at $199.99: it has the cheapest ink on this page, the only auto-duplex printing, and — since Epson cut its price by $150 — the lowest total five-year cost too. The Canon MegaTank G3270 used to win that math outright. It 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.
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. |
The Ledger: Six Axes, One Tally
Weighted toward the two things that actually decide a printer’s cost of living with it — cost per page and upfront price make up 45 of 100 points — with speed, features, duplex, and real-world availability filling the rest. 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 |
| Upfront price (15) | 3 | 6 | 12 | 15 |
| 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 |
| Buy-it-today availability (15) | 5 | 15 | 12 | 12 |
| Tally | 55 | 81 | 49 | 44 |
Two of those axes 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 scored on whether we could actually find each printer in stock, sold by the retailer itself rather than a marketplace reseller: Epson and Canon’s own stores, plus Staples for Brother and Best Buy for HP. Canon loses points here specifically because its own store won’t sell you one. 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.
The Real Five-Year Cost, All Four Printers
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, which is generous to Canon and Epson (both ship enough for months of typical use) and roughly fair to the other two.
| Canon G3270 | Epson ET-2850 | Brother HL-L2405W | HP DeskJet 4255e | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Printer price | $248.99 | $199.99 | $139.99 | $109.89 |
| Ink/toner for 6,000 pages | $23.99 | $19.99 | $196.58 (2× TN830XL) | $897.25 (25× HP 67XL) |
| 5-year total | $272.98 | $219.98 | $336.57 | $1,007.14 |
| Cost per 1,000 pages (ink only) | $4.00 | $3.33 | $32.76 | $149.54 |
The cheapest printer to buy — the HP, at $109.89 — finishes dead last by roughly $670, and that’s before you factor in that it’s 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.
Epson EcoTank ET-2850: the new value leader
Epson dropped the ET-2850 from $349.99 to $199.99 on its own store, and that single move flips the verdict on this page. It already had the cheapest ink here — a $24.99 bottle of 502 black rated for 7,500 pages, working out to $3.33 per 1,000 pages — and the only automatic duplex printing in this lineup, at 10.5 ISO ppm printing one-sided and 6.0 ISO ppm printing both sides. At the old price it was the expensive upgrade; at the new one it’s simply the printer to buy.
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 $23.99 GI-21 black bottle rated for 6,000 pages, or $4.00 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, which lands at $32.76 per 1,000 pages — 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 genuinely sold at Best Buy and Staples, just not what HP is currently pushing.
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 — the price cut settles it. The Brother HL-L2405W is the right call for black-text-only households that want to stop thinking about ink, and the Canon MegaTank G3270 is still worth chasing down at Walmart if the ET-2850’s $199.99 is a stretch. 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.
