From Joanna Stern and the Wall Street Journal:
Once upon a time, there was a tech columnist who bought a $150 printer with a model number so long it’s now her bank password.
The two lived as happily as a printer and a human could. She pulled jammed paper from its rollers, came to understand its sporadic grunts and fed it $40 color cartridges—even though she only printed black-and-white labels.
Nearly five years later, as the printer was on its last legs, she did the math. She spent $1,200 on ink—eight times the cost of the printer.
There it is, my tale of how I lost to one of the greatest rackets of the technology industry: cheap inkjet printers with expensive ink refills. The solution isn’t to stop buying printers. In fact, we need printers more than ever. Since living the work-from home life, printer purchases are up. During the first nine months of the pandemic, retail dollar sales of printers rose 51% compared with the year-earlier period, while unit sales climbed 8%, according to NPD.
“We thought the pandemic demand was going to be a flash in the pan, but it’s been strong ever since,” said Eric Dahl, senior director of marketing at printer-maker Brother International Corp. Executives at HPand Epson shared the same sentiment. Many printers continue to be sold out.
Even my top picks below might not be available at every retailer, though no models I mention are discontinued.
The real answer to our printing woes is to buy a newer kind of inkjet printer. It’s called an ink-tank printer, and it holds way more ink in tanks. Epson pioneered the category nearly six years ago with a $400 option. Now all the major printer makers have caught on, with prices starting at $200. For households that print a lot, these make the most sense.
Ink prices aren’t the only thing to consider. That’s why I did the unthinkable: I tested 10 ink-tank, cartridgeinkjet and laser models, evaluating them for speed, print quality and ease of use. All of them are all-in-ones: printer, scanner and copier. They all have Wi-Fi for easy wireless printing from most devices in your home.
With all the cheap plastic trays and pieces and confusing buttons and menus, there is still no such thing as a great printer, only tolerable ones. That said, here are my top picks.
Most tolerable ink tanks
An ink-tank printer is like Costco toilet paper. You get far more for your money, and it lasts and lasts and lasts.
Let’s look at the $300 Epson EcoTank ET-2760, one of my top ink-tank picks. Included in the box are four bottles of ink (black, yellow, magenta and cyan). Like a mad scientist, you pour each one individually into the tank.
Now let’s look at the inkonomics: At $300, the Eco-Tank comes with two years of ink, according to the company’s estimates—up to 7,500 black pages and 6,000 color pages. When you do run out, the replacement ink tubes cost $13 for each color and $20 for black.
The Epson WorkForce Pro WF-3820, an old-schoolcartridge inkjet printer I tested, costs $150 and comes with cartridges that print 350 black pages and 240 color pages. The black ink cartridge costs $20 to replace, while the color bundle is $34.
You pay twice as much for the EcoTank printer up front, but if you went with the WorkForce and replaced the cartridges three times, you would be paying the price of the EcoTank. And if you wanted to print 7,500 black-and white pages and 6,000 color pages with this Work-Force model? It could set you back over $1,200.
The Epson EcoTank had the best ink-to-price ratio, but I’m going for the $200 Brother INKvestment Tank MFCJ995DW. It has a touch screen and among the ink-tank models I tested, it had the fastest black ink print speed.
Most tolerable cartridge inkjet
The only time an old-school, cheap cartridge ink-jetmakes sense is if you need to print a page here and there.
If that’s you, I recommend the $150 HP Envy Pro 6455. The compact printer was easy to set up, printed at a decent clip and had good photo quality. My one problem is that there are just a few buttons. HP leans on its app to handle most print info and controls.
In that app, HP will try to sell you on Instant Ink, its ink-subscription program. I know, because you need another subscription in your life. Yet the president of HP Print, Tuan Tran, tells me the service grew 60% because of work and school at home.
The subscriptions are based on pages. For example, $5 buys you 100 pages a month. Need to print more than that? You’ll be charged $1 for every 10 pages. Since your printer is connected to the internet, as soon as the ink gets low, HP sends new cartridges.
Most tolerable laser printer
If you need a fast blacand- white printer look at the $170 Brother HLL2395DW. It printed the first 50 pages of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission report in 1 minute, 36 seconds flat. An HP laser printer I tested took a minute longer. None of the ink-tank printers could do the job in under 4 minutes.
The inkonomics don’t quite favor laser. A Brother’s $77 toner replacement prints 3,000 pages. That makes a lot of sense compared with an old-school inkjet, but on bang for buck, it’s no match for the Epson EcoTank.
Should buying a printer be so hard in 2021? No. The business models are much more consumer-friendly than they were five years ago, but the printers are still delicate and annoying pieces of machinery.