Printers

The printer is cheap. The cartridges are not.

Start with one of these questions

• Is the XL cartridge actually cheaper?

  “The XL is $59 for 600 pages, the standard is $21 for 190. Which is actually cheaper?”

  How to turn a price and a page-yield into a real cost per page, what the ISO yield figure does and does not promise, and how to compare an inkjet against a laser or an ink tank without fooling yourself.

  Work out your cost per page

• Which cartridge does my printer take?

  “There's a 63 and a 63XL and the listings disagree. What exactly do I order?”

  How to go from the model number on the machine to the exact part number to order, why a family number like "63" is not enough on its own, and how to confirm the fit with the manufacturer before you pay.

  Identify your cartridge

• The printer that sits idle

  “I print five pages a month and it's clogged every time. What should I buy instead?”

  If you print a handful of pages a month, the failure mode is not running out of ink — it is the machine not working when you need it. What manufacturers actually document about idle behavior, and what that implies.

  Read what changes for light use

• The page count on a cartridge box is a test result, not a promise. Mono toner yields are declared under ISO/IEC 19752, colour toner under ISO/IEC 19798 and inkjet cartridges under ISO/IEC 24711, using a fixed five-page suite (ISO/IEC 24712 — four typical customer pages plus one diagnostic page) printed continuously until the cartridge reaches end of life, in a lab held at 23.0°C ±2.0°C. Lexmark states plainly that in real use "the actual page yield will vary considerably higher or lower depending upon factors such as page coverage, job size, media type, environmental conditions, end-of-life determination, and duplex or single-sided printing."
• The manufacturers say the same thing about their own numbers. HP's yield document states that ISO standard page yields "should be used only as a starting point for comparison purposes, and not to predict the actual yield you will get from your HP printer and cartridge." Use declared yields to compare cartridge A with cartridge B. Do not use them to budget.
• Published yields are not always measured the same way across brands. Epson declares EcoTank replacement bottle yields "based on the ISO/IEC 24712 pattern with Epson's methodology" — that is the test pattern, not necessarily the full ISO/IEC 24711 procedure. So an Epson bottle yield and an HP or Brother cartridge yield are not strictly like-for-like, and a cost-per-page comparison across those brands carries that caveat.
• A cartridge family number is often not enough to identify the right part. HP runs its own Printer Cartridge Lookup, which asks for your printer model, your printer's serial number and the cartridge number, and then tells you whether that machine takes newer-generation HP cartridges (warranty dates after 15 August 2019) or both older and newer generations. If the manufacturer needs your serial number to answer, a marketplace listing title cannot answer it either.
• On a laser printer the toner cartridge is usually not the only thing you buy. Brother rates the TN760 toner at approximately 3,000 pages under ISO/IEC 19752; the DR730 drum unit that holds it is rated at approximately 12,000 pages, is purchased separately, and Brother notes "Drum yield is approx., and may vary by type of use." That is roughly one drum for every four toners, and it belongs in any cost-per-page figure.