The printer is not what you pay for. The ink is.

The price of the printer is not the price of the printer

A home printer costs less than dinner out, and that should make you suspicious. It is not generosity: it is the oldest arrangement in retail — give away the razor, sell the blades.

The number that decides is not the one on the shelf edge. It is what the machine will cost you over the two years you actually use it, and inside that, the ink almost always weighs more than the printer. Which is also why this is one of the most heavily discounted categories in November: a discount on the part that does not make the money is the cheapest discount there is.

The page count is measured on a page you will rarely print

The page figure on a cartridge is not invented. There is a standard behind it — ISO/IEC 24711 for inkjet, 19752 and 19798 for laser — and it is measured on pages with 5% coverage: a sheet about as full as a short letter.

What follows is a simple inverse rule: double the ink on the page, halve the pages. A 1,500-page cartridge does 750 pages of documents with headers and tables, and 375 once there is a chart on the page. Nobody is lying — the measurement is just of a page almost nobody prints.

• The test prints continuously. Your printer switches on and off, and most run a nozzle-cleaning cycle on waking that spends ink without printing anything. The less often you print, the larger the share of your ink that goes that way.
• The cartridges in the box are usually setup cartridges, and they are not full. They exist to install the printer and calibrate its ink levels, and they run out sooner than a cartridge you buy. When you weigh the deal, assume you are buying a set of replacements straight away.
• Black and colour run out at different moments, and many printers refuse to print at all when one colour is empty — even in black and white. That is worth checking before you buy, not after.

The sum that decides: what one page costs

It is a single division and you can do it standing in the aisle: price of the cartridge divided by its declared pages. Then, if you print real documents rather than short letters, divide again by two.

• Do it for every cartridge the printer takes. A machine with four separate cartridges is cheaper when one colour runs out; one with two (black and colour) throws away the cyan that was still full when the magenta finished.
• Compare the XL version. High-capacity cartridges cost more and almost always less per page: it is the one case where the big pack really is the cheaper one, and the only way to see it is that division.
• Multiply by what you print in a year. Two hundred pages a year and two thousand are different decisions: below a certain volume, an expensive printer that prints cheaply never pays itself back.
• Count the cost of not printing. An inkjet left idle for weeks dries at the nozzles, and clearing them spends ink. If you print rarely, that is a cost you pay in ink thrown away.

Four families, four uses

• Ordinary cartridges. The machine costs very little, the page costs a lot. It makes sense if you genuinely print little and want the occasional page in colour.
• XL cartridges. Same machine, bigger refills: the simplest way to lower your cost per page without changing printer. Check the model takes them before you buy it.
• Refillable tanks. Much more at the till, very little per page: ink comes in bottles and one refill is worth thousands of pages. They pay for themselves above a certain volume — and it is the division above that tells you where that point is, not the person selling it.
• Laser. Toner is a powder: it does not dry, it needs no cleaning, and a laser printer left idle for three months starts again as it was. For text it is the cheapest and the fastest; for photographs it is not. Black-and-white is affordable, colour much less so.

There is no best family. There is the right one for how many pages you print and what is on them, and those two questions come in that order.

Side by side

And then there is the price

In November printers are among the most discounted things you will see, and now you know why: the discount is on the part that does not make the money.

• Before you look at the discount on the printer, look at the price of its cartridges. A big percentage off a machine that then prints expensively is a discount that costs you money.
• Check the exact model code. Manufacturers keep the same commercial name across versions, and two near-identical machines can take different cartridges — which is the thing that decides your next two years of spending.
• On third-party refills, check the specific model. Some manufacturers push firmware updates that stop non-original cartridges working, including after you have bought. It is not a fault, it is a choice, and it changes the sum you did.
• On ink subscriptions, read what happens when you cancel. Usually the cartridges you were sent stop printing: the price per page is true for as long as you keep paying.
• Ask what the discount is calculated against. UK guidance is clear that a “was” price must be one the item was genuinely sold at, recently enough to mean something — and on Amazon the typical price paid over the past 90 days often sits beside the current one. We always say which one we are using.

It is the same check we run before publishing. If a price does not pass it, the deal does not go out — which is why some days we publish less.