This is a pretty common question because a lot of times people don’t care that much about the printer they are getting, they only care about how much it’s going to cost them in the long run. Some people use their inkjets just for documents and very rarely print pictures, and for people like that it doesn’t matter what the printer resolution is or how big the LCD or any of that jazz.

Well the answer to this is: there is no answer. There is no one printer that stands above all others in terms of its ink costs. Now before you get too angry for that big tease…there are certain things you can look for to find the models with the cheapest ink costs.

  1. Look for printers with individual ink cartridges
  2. Look for printers with photo specific cartridges
  3. Do not buy a Lexmark/Dell
  4. Only buy an HP if you plan on refilling

Canon and Epson are the main ones for individual ink cartridges, although HP has introduced a few models in the last year or so that feature individual cartridges. Printers with separate cartridges for photo colors help you save your regular colors for when you are doing color printing you don’t care about. You will never save on ink with a Lexmark or a Dell printer, so don’t even try. Finally, as we have mentioned before, HP cartridges keep getting smaller and smaller, to the point where their ink costs twice as much ($3.60/ml vs. $1.85/ml) as it did just a few years ago. At the same time, you can save a lot of money with HPs by refilling the cartridges, so operating them is either pretty expensive or really cheap.

The short answer to this is probably to just buy a Canon, because they have individual ink cartridges that are usually cheaper than all other manufacturers, and most cost per page test results (like this one, for example) favor Canon printers.

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