Ink Tank vs. Laser: Which Type of Printer Saves You More Money?

Total Cost of Ownership

The full universe of printers covers a lot of territory, from portable photo printers to floor-standing behemoths. For purposes of this discussion, we'll stay with desktop models, which range in cost from roughly $100 up to no more than $2,000, although that's purposely a high ceiling to make sure we're including all the ones we're interested in. (A $1,000 maximum would cover the lion's share.)

Because low-cost ink—and the low running cost that translates to—is the key feature that makes ink tank printers so attractive compared with lasers, it makes sense to start by comparing costs. But it's important to remember that what really matters is the total cost of ownership, which includes the initial cost of the printer and the cost of ink over the printer's entire life.

The tricky part is that a low running cost won't necessarily save you money in the long run. If one printer saves you 1 cent per page compared with another, for example, but it costs $100 more, you have to print 10,000 pages before you've saved enough to make up for the initial difference in price. The math breaks down thus:

10,000 pages x $0.01 in savings per page = $100 in savings

At that 10,000-page tipping point, either printer would have the same total cost of ownership. Print more, and you'll begin to save money. Print less, and choosing the printer with cheaper ink (or toner) will have cost you money instead.

We show an example of how to compare the total cost between two printers in more detail in How to Save Money on Your Next Printer. The basic process is the same for any two models you're considering, but keep in mind that you may have to make some adjustments. Printing on both sides of a tabloid-size (11-by-17-inch) page, for example, takes four times as much ink or toner as printing on one side of a letter-size page. And with both lasers and ink tank printers, you can print a substantial number of pages—often several thousand—using just the ink or toner that comes with the printer, so don't forget to take those pages into account.

Because the actual savings between one printer and another will depend entirely on how much you print, there's no guaranteed winner between any two models unless one is both cheaper to buy and cheaper to run. That also means there's no winner between technologies.

Winner: Tie

Initial Price

Comparing the initial price between lasers and ink tank printers is a little complicated. Each technology is available in both monochrome and color versions, and each of those four categories (color and mono lasers, plus color and mono ink tank printers) is also available in both single-function and all-in-one (AIO) versions.

Given all those variations, it doesn't make sense to compare the full range of prices for lasers with the full range for ink tank printers. The table below breaks down the comparisons by category, in necessarily broad strokes.

Ink Refill/Toner Cartridge Price

The raw cost of ink or toner refills by itself, without factoring in how many printed pages you're paying for, really shouldn't matter much. But it does, to some people at least. Just ask anyone who refused to buy a low-priced laser instead of a cartridge-based inkjet when those were the only two choices because the toner cartridges "cost too much."

The fact that the toner was more economical—printing, say, 10 times as many pages for only three times the cost—didn't matter. If you're comparing lasers to ink tank printers, however, the reverse is true, with ink refills costing less than toner.

Winner: Ink Tank

Per-Page Cost

Far more important than the cost of an ink or toner refill is the cost per page. Each bottle of ink and each toner cartridge has a page-yield rating, based on test pages developed by the International Organization for Standards (ISO). These pages may or may not use the same amount of ink per page that pages you print use on average, so you won't necessarily get the same yield as the rating. However, since all major manufacturers use the same test pages to rate yield, you can use the ratings to compare relative yields per refill—and relative costs per page—between printers. In other words, higher numbers in ratings should translate to higher numbers in real-world use as well, even if the actual page count differs.

The simplest calculation for cost per page is for a mono printer, with only one ink or toner color:

cost per page = cost of the refill / yield

For a color printer with four inks—cyan, yellow, magenta, and black—the cost per mono text page is the same. For a color page, you first divide the cost of each color ink, including black, by that color's yield, and add the result for all four colors together.

The math gets a little more complicated with printers that have additional colors, but the basic approach is the same. Divide the cost of each color by the yield for that color, and add all the results to get the cost per page.

One issue to watch out for: Make sure you're comparing equivalent numbers. One such wrinkle surrounds laser printers: The toner cartridges for some lasers include the photosensitive material that transfers the toner to the page in the cartridge, while others have a separate imaging unit that lasts through more than one cartridge, and adds to the cost per page. In those cases, you need to add the cost of the imaging unit to the cost of the toner to have an apples-to-apples comparison. The math is the same as for toner cartridges:

additional cost per page = cost of the replacement / yield

All that said, the comparison between lasers and ink tank printers shows little overlap between them in cost per page. Using the costs that applied at the time we reviewed each laser and ink tank printer in our database, here's how the costs per page break down.

In short, every ink tank printer we've seen has a notably lower cost per page than any laser for color pages. For mono pages, most also have lower per-page costs than lasers, giving ink tank technology a strong edge for cost per page.

Winner: Ink Tank

Hidden Running Costs

Printers have additional running costs beyond the ones that the cost-per-page calculation covers. Paper, for one, usually gets left out because most printing is done on plain paper that costs the same for any printer. If you're printing photos on photo paper, however, estimate what percentage of your printing will be on that more expensive paper and add that in, because photo papers for different printers can vary tremendously in price. All printers also have parts that sometimes have a rated life in pages, and these sometimes need replacement on unpredictable schedules. These parts range from what's usually called a "maintenance tray" for collecting waste ink in an inkjet model, to rollers and fusers in a laser one.

One key hidden cost for all inkjets is the ink that gets used up on housekeeping tasks, most notably for cleaning nozzles. Modern inkjets, including ink tank printers, will rarely force you to spend time cleaning with manual commands. Instead, they clean the nozzles themselves, pushing ink through them and using sensors to check for clogs and confirm there aren't any. (The ink winds up in the maintenance tray.)

This self-cleaning is a big improvement over having to clean out clogs yourself, but it also consumes ink. That's a key reason why even if you never print in color, you can use up all your color ink, then find out in some cases that your printer will refuse to print anything until you add more ink. (The other key reason is that some printers add cyan, yellow, and magenta dots even to monochrome text, to make it a darker black or adjust it to be a more neutral black.) If you don't print very often, or print only a few pages a week most weeks with an ink tank model, you can easily wind up getting far lower yields than if you print, say, 100 pages almost every day. And if you leave your printer off for extended periods to save the ink, you may wind up with clogged nozzles that you have to clean manually.

Lasers don't have this problem because they don't have nozzles to clog. I've left lasers sitting for months, and they always work immediately when I turn them on. And while some can print photos well enough for brochures and handouts, no one would use them for photo printing on expensive paper. So, on both of these key hidden running costs, they come in ahead of ink tank printers.

Winner: Laser

Text and Line Graphics Quality

Virtually any laser or ink tank printer will give you highly readable, reasonably well-formed text on plain paper at 10- and 12-point font sizes. But toner still has the advantage over ink of being fused to the top surface. Ink tends to be absorbed by the paper, which can reduce the contrast between black text and white paper, and it tends to spread a least a little at the edges. At smaller font sizes—particularly 4 to 6 points—this can make text from ink tank models hard to read. The same is true for detailed line graphics.

Some ink tank printers do better on this score than others, but any laser picked at random will usually do a better job overall at producing crisp, readable text and line graphics on plain paper. Switching to pricier papers specifically designed for inkjets can boost an ink tank printer's text quality and line graphics to at least match a laser, but the different paper types have a noticeably different feel than standard plain paper.

Winner: Laser

Color Graphics Quality on Plain Paper

Lasers (color models, specifically) tend to deliver more vibrant color than ink tank printers when using plain paper, for the same reason that they tend to deliver darker blacks for text. The toner is fused to the paper's surface, rather than being absorbed into it, as with ink. Either technology can show an assortment of issues like banding and dithering patterns in fills, which vary from printer to printer and can even vary from one quality setting to another with the same printer.

However, the more vibrant color for color lasers is the most consistent difference between the two. Note, though, that printing color graphics using a mono laser is often disappointing, since different colors can translate into identical shades of gray

Winner: Color Laser

Color Graphics Quality on Specialty Papers

When using specialty papers designed to show off inkjet printing to its best advantage, almost any ink tank printer, including those that aren't marketed for graphics and photos, can deliver far more impressive output than lasers can manage on any kind of paper. That translates to vibrant color, smooth fills and gradients, and notably good contrast.

Winner: Ink Tank

Photo Quality

Any ink tank printer will almost certainly deliver better-looking photos than any laser, but be aware of some nuances to that. If you're looking for photos that are good enough for material like a one-page handout or a trifold brochure—a level of quality that's sometimes called "business photo quality"—many color lasers can do the job nicely on appropriately heavyweight stock. Not all can, which means you'll have to evaluate your printer carefully, but getting the right color laser can let you skip the cost and chore of farming out that sort of print job to a print shop.

If what you need is high-quality photos, however, an ink tank printer (or any inkjet, actually) is what you need. Some do a better job than others, but just about any will print better photos than any laser.

Winner: Ink Tank

Water and Fade Resistance

Water and fade resistance basically translates to retaining quality over time, and, yes, part of that comes down to how your print reacts to spills and actual immersion in water. This is another area where the toner, as a solid substance fused to the surface of the paper, has the advantage. It simply will not smear from a water spill from the moment the paper comes out of the printer, and it resists fading better than either pigment-based or dye-based ink. It also stands up to highlighters without smearing.

Ink, in contrast, tends to smear easily when the page first comes out of the printer. (Knowing that, we let inkjet prints sit for a full 24 hours before we run our smear tests.) What we've found in our water-fastness tests is that color inks usually smear easily when they get wet, and if left to dry on their own, they tend to show water stains. Black inks for the same printers tend to have less obvious smearing than the color ink, and many smear just enough to see a smudge, without harming readability. Some black inks also hold up well to a highlighter, while others don’t. More generally, for both water resistance and fade resistance, toner scores highest, pigment inks come in second, and dye inks come in last.

Winner: Laser

Print Speed

If you look at speed ratings, you could easily conclude that, with the exception of a few slow ink tank models, there's no real difference in speed between lasers and ink tank printers. The ratings we've seen for the printers we've tested in recent years run from 21 to 52 pages per minute (ppm) for mono lasers, 19ppm to 30ppm for color lasers, and 3.9ppm to 30ppm for ink tank printers.

Our real-world timing tests, however, consistently show that laser printers closely match their rated speeds at least when printing text documents, while inkjets, including ink tank printers, don't. In addition, when you set any inkjet to print using a high quality mode—which you'll often want to do for graphics or photos, especially if you're using an expensive specialty paper—it will slow down even more.

Winner: Laser

Paper Types

One of the big advantages of any inkjet compared with lasers is that there's a much wider variety of paper types, particularly for printing graphics and photos. That said, there's more variety available for lasers than you might realize. In addition to variations on plain paper, including laser paper and papers with heavier weights and brighter whites than cheap copy paper, you can also find precut label sheets, precut business cards on cardstock, glossy paper (potentially useful for photos and graphics), transparencies (yes, the kind you use in an overhead transparency projector), and even laser versions of transfer paper for temporary tattoos.

Choices for ink tank printers include inkjet versions of all of the above (except for laser paper) and a lot more. Because inkjets are the go-to print technology for graphic artists and photographers, up to and including professionals, there's a long list of special-purpose papers for enhancing both photos and graphics.

Winner: Ink Tank

Paper Handling and Connectivity

Most paper-handling issues, from paper capacity to tray count to auto-duplexing, are addressed reasonably well with either lasers or ink tank models, at least within the range needed for a desktop printer. The same applies to connectivity. Almost any printer today will include both USB and Wi-Fi as connection options, usually adding Wi-Fi Direct for mobile printing and scanning, and it's easy to find both lasers and ink tank printers that also offer Ethernet.

Winner: Tie