Cheap Printer, Costly Habit: What Five Popular UK Home Printers Really Cost to Run in 2026
Photo: Edmund Evans / Joseph Martin Kronheim / William Dickes / Adam Cuerden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Here's a number that tends to stop people mid-scroll: over three years, the ink for a £49 DeskJet can cost more than five times what you paid for the printer itself. That isn't a scandal exactly — it's just how the razor-and-blades model works — but it does mean buying on sticker price alone is a bit like picking a car based on the price of the fuel cap.
So we've done the boring bit. Five printers that UK households genuinely buy, costed against own-brand cartridges, compatibles and refills, using the page yields the manufacturers themselves publish. Prices are indicative street prices gathered in autumn 2026 and will move around with retailer promotions, but the ratios between them hold steady enough to be useful.
First, a word about those yield figures
Every cartridge box quotes a page count, and almost every one of those counts comes from the same lab test: ISO/IEC 24711, run at 5% coverage. Five per cent coverage is a page with a short paragraph and nothing else. A real letter, a school worksheet with a logo, a boarding pass, a recipe with a photo — all of those sit closer to 8–15%.
In practice, that means the yield printed on the box is typically 20–40% optimistic for a normal household. We've used the manufacturer figures because they're the only ones everyone quotes, but treat them as a best case. Colour printing is worse still, and photo printing is a different universe entirely.
All prices below are what you'd pay from a mainstream UK retailer or a reputable online supplier, VAT included. Paper isn't in these numbers, and neither is your time.
The five machines, and what their ink costs per page
| Printer | Typical UK price | Cartridge | Own-brand price | Quoted yield | Pence per page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP DeskJet 2820e | £49 | HP 305XL black | £27 | 240 | 11.3p |
| Canon PIXMA TS3450 | £59 | PG-545XL black | £27 | 400 | 6.8p |
| HP Envy Inspire 7920e | £89 | HP 912XL black | £33 | 825 | 4.0p |
| Brother DCP-J1050DW | £99 | LC-421XLBK black | £28 | 3,000 | 0.9p |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 | £199 | 104 black bottle | £10 | 3,600 | 0.3p |
That spread — from 0.3p to 11.3p a page — is the whole story of the home printer market in one column.
Now the alternative supplies. Compatible cartridges for the two HP machines and the Canon typically land at around 30% of the own-brand cost per page; refill kits can beat that but demand a steady hand and a bit of patience. The Brother is the interesting one, because its own-brand high-yield cartridge is already cheap — compatibles save you very little there, and the cheapness of the genuine article removes most of the reason to stray.
| Printer | Compatible/refill | Pence per page | Saving vs own-brand |
|---|---|---|---|
| HP DeskJet 2820e | Compatible XL, £10 | 3.3p | 71% |
| Canon PIXMA TS3450 | Compatible XL, £9 | 2.3p | 66% |
| HP Envy Inspire 7920e | Compatible XL, £14 | 1.8p | 56% |
| Brother DCP-J1050DW | Compatible XL, £11 | 0.6p | 40% |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 | Third-party bottle, £4 | 0.1p | 64% |
The monthly reality check
Most UK households print somewhere between 20 and 150 pages a month, with the winter term and the run-up to Christmas pushing the top end. Here's what that looks like in pounds, black text only, for the two supply routes that matter most.
| Printer | 60pp/mo own-brand | 60pp/mo compatible | 150pp/mo own-brand | 150pp/mo compatible |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP DeskJet 2820e | £6.75 | £2.00 | £16.88 | £5.00 |
| Canon PIXMA TS3450 | £4.05 | £1.35 | £10.13 | £3.38 |
| HP Envy Inspire 7920e | £2.40 | £1.05 | £6.00 | £2.63 |
| Brother DCP-J1050DW | £0.56 | £0.33 | £1.40 | £0.83 |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 | £0.17 | £0.07 | £0.42 | £0.17 |
A DeskJet on own-brand ink at 150 pages a month is a £200-a-year habit. The same machine on compatibles is £60. That gap buys a lot of paper.
Three-year total cost of ownership
This is where the maths gets genuinely surprising, because it's the only place the purchase price and the ink price meet. Assumes 60 pages a month for three years — 2,160 pages, which is about average for a family that prints homework, forms and the occasional eBay label.
| Printer | Buy price | 3yr ink, own-brand | 3yr ink, compatible | Total, own-brand | Total, compatible |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP DeskJet 2820e | £49 | £243 | £72 | £292 | £121 |
| Canon PIXMA TS3450 | £59 | £146 | £49 | £205 | £108 |
| HP Envy Inspire 7920e | £89 | £86 | £38 | £175 | £127 |
| Brother DCP-J1050DW | £99 | £20 | £12 | £119 | £111 |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2850 | £199 | £6 | £2 | £205 | £201 |
What the numbers actually say
Below about 60 pages a month, the cheapest route wins outright. A £59 Canon TS3450 plus compatible cartridges comes in at roughly £108 over three years — less than half the cost of an EcoTank. If you print sporadically, that's the answer, and no amount of marketing about 'free ink for a year' changes it.
The EcoTank's break-even point is higher than the advertising implies. Against the cheapest printer-plus-compatibles combination, the ET-2850 needs roughly 4,900 pages before it pulls ahead — about 135 pages a month over three years. Print more than that and it's comfortably the cheapest thing on this list. Print less and you've paid a £150 premium for a printer that sits idle.
Against the Brother, it may never break even. The DCP-J1050DW's own-brand ink is already under a penny a page, so the £100 price difference takes somewhere north of 15,000 pages to recover. For a household, that's a decade or more.
The middle of the market is the awkward one. A £89 Envy Inspire on own-brand cartridges costs more over three years than the Canon or the Brother, and its compatibles only bring it roughly level with the Brother on genuine ink. It's a fine printer; it's just not the value pick.
The colour trap nobody mentions
On the DeskJet and the TS3450, the colour ink comes in a single tri-colour cartridge. Empty the cyan and you replace the magenta and yellow with it. That's why a child's school project can cost £25 in one afternoon, and why colour pages on these machines work out at 25–30p each on own-brand supplies. The Envy Inspire and Brother use separate colour tanks, which is duller to read about and much kinder to your wallet.
One thing to check before you order
If you're going down the compatible route, firmware is the risk worth managing. A printer that auto-updates overnight can refuse a cartridge that worked perfectly well last week, and the fix isn't always obvious. Check your printer's current firmware version before you buy and compare it with the supplier's compatibility notes — most decent UK sellers list the firmware revisions they've tested against, and the ones who don't are usually the ones you'll be ringing in a fortnight.
The short version
Print under 60 pages a month: buy a cheap cartridge printer and use quality compatibles. Print 150 pages or more: an EcoTank will pay for itself inside three years. Somewhere in the middle: check the per-page price of the high-yield cartridge before anything else, because on a few machines — the Brother especially — the genuine ink is already cheap enough that compatibles barely get a look in.
