How to Use This Tool
Enter the cartridge price and its rated yield, plus what you pay for paper. The cost per page is the number to compare printers on — the purchase price rarely decides the total.
The arithmetic
- Consumables = cartridge price ÷ rated yield, multiplied by four for a colour laser because cyan, magenta, yellow and black are separate cartridges.
- Paper = ream price ÷ sheets per ream, halved if you print both sides.
For a typical mono laser: 80 ÷ 2,500 = 0.0320 in toner, plus 6.50 ÷ 500 = 0.0130 in paper, giving 0.0450 a page. Duplexing brings it to 0.0385, a saving of 0.0065 — small per page and 65 across ten thousand.
Colour laser: four cartridges at 95 each rated 2,200 pages is 0.1727 in toner and 0.1857 in total. That is 4.1 times the mono cost, so a thousand pages is 185.73 instead of 45.00.
Rated yields assume 5% coverage
The page count on the box is measured on a standard test page with roughly 5% of the area covered in ink — about what a short business letter uses. It is a consistent basis for comparison and it is not what most people print.
A page of dense text is nearer 10%, a page with a chart or a coloured header can be 20% or more, and a full-page image is far beyond that. Coverage scales the toner cost roughly linearly, so a 10% page costs about twice the rated figure in consumables.
Which means every "cost per page" quoted by a manufacturer — and the default in this tool — is a best case. Set your own coverage above if you know it.
Why cheap printers have expensive cartridges
The machine is frequently sold at or below cost and the money is made on consumables. An inkjet at 60 with a 25 cartridge lasting 300 pages costs 0.0833 a page in ink alone — before paper — which is nearly twice a mono laser's total.
Over four years at 500 pages a month, that inkjet spends about 2,000 on ink to save 190 on the purchase. The comparison is not close, and it is invisible at the point of sale.
Things that change the answer:
- High-yield cartridges are usually cheaper per page, sometimes substantially. Compare price ÷ yield, never price alone.
- Refillable ink tank printers cost more upfront and dramatically less per page, which inverts the usual maths if you print enough.
- Starter cartridges shipped with a new printer are often part-filled, so the first replacement arrives sooner than expected.
- Low volume. Printing twenty pages a month, inkjet ink dries out and gets wasted on cleaning cycles, so cost per page rises far above any calculation here. A laser is usually better for occasional printing, which is the opposite of the common advice.
What this leaves out
Drum units and fusers on laser printers wear out on their own schedule and can cost as much as a cartridge. Electricity is real but small for occasional printing. Maintenance, jams and the time spent dealing with them are not costed here and are not zero.
All of these push the true figure up, so treat the result as a floor for comparison rather than a budget.
