The Best Printers to Run in Canada

A printer's price is the smaller half of what it costs. We now publish the other half: what each printer costs to own for five years, on every printer page, with the arithmetic shown.

The number that changes the decision

Two colour all-in-ones, both from HP, both on sale in Canada today. The DeskJet 4355 costs $134.99. The Smart Tank 5000 costs $199.99. Sixty-five dollars apart on the shelf, and a shopper comparing shelf prices buys the DeskJet.

Print 300 pages a month for five years and the DeskJet costs about $4,460. The Smart Tank costs about $241. The cheaper printer is more than four thousand dollars more expensive, and nothing on either box says so.

That is not a trick example picked to make a point. It is the widest gap in our catalogue, and the pattern behind it holds across all 298 printers we can cost: cartridge inkjets are cheap to buy and expensive to feed, refillable tank machines are the reverse, and lasers sit between the two with the black-only models close to the tank machines. The purchase price tells you almost nothing about the order.

How we work it out

The five-year total is the cheapest new price we hold for the printer, plus the pages. Cost per page is a cartridge's price divided by the page yield its manufacturer publishes for it, under a named ISO/IEC test. A colour page needs cyan, magenta and yellow together, so its cost is the three added up rather than averaged. Where a printer takes more than one size of the same cartridge we use the size with the lowest cost per page, because that is what somebody buying to minimise running cost would choose. Colour printers are charged at 80 percent black pages and 20 percent colour; a printer that prints black only is charged at 100 percent black.

Nothing else is folded in. Not paper, not electricity, not repairs, not a warranty, not taxes or shipping. A laser wears out two things, though, and the drum is one of them, so the drum IS in the total: its price divided by the page life its maker rates it for, charged to every page. On a Brother HL-L2400D that is 1.13 cents a page on top of 3.13 cents of toner, which is more than a quarter of what the machine costs to run. Where a maker's own consumables list for a model names no drum unit the photoconductor is inside the toner cartridge and nothing extra is charged, and where the list names a drum we have not priced the printer gets no total at all rather than a flattering one. Fusers, transfer belts and waste containers are the parts that stay out: they are rated for a service life most owners never reach inside five years, and folding a part that may never be bought into a per-page cost would overstate the machine. A cartridge whose yield names no test we recognise cannot be costed at all, and the printer is left off the list rather than ranked on a number nobody believes. The full method, with the limitations spelled out, sits under every table that shows a total.

Two more things the totals now do. The cartridge that came in the box is not charged twice: where the manufacturer publishes how many pages it prints, those pages are already paid for in the price of the printer, so the first purchase is deferred by exactly that many. HP publishes a 700-page set-up cartridge for the LaserJet M209dw, which at 300 pages a month is the first two months. It is a deferral and not a discount, so it matters most over a short horizon and fades over a long one, and where a maker publishes nothing we credit nothing, because an unpublished in-box yield is not the same as an empty box. And a third-party compatible cartridge never sets a cost per page here. Compatibles are real products at real prices and they are shown, with the retailer named, beside the total; the total itself is built on the cartridge the manufacturer sells, because nobody publishes an ISO page yield for a compatible and a price without a yield cannot be a cost per page.

Prices observed 17 October 2026. We hold prices for 324 printers and can compute a five-year total for 298 of them. The other 26 are left out of the tool rather than shown with a price and blank cost columns, and the count is published beside it with every reason given: a printer we cannot cost completely would otherwise appear as a row of wrong numbers, and a missing printer with its reason stated is the honest version of that.

Cheapest to run, whatever your budget

Ranked by five-year cost at 300 pages a month. The same machines top the under $200, under $400, under $600 and under $1,000 budgets, and that is the finding rather than a shortcut: the cheapest printers to run in Canada are also inexpensive to buy, so a bigger budget buys you speed, paper handling and a scanner, not lower running costs.

• HP Smart Tank 5003 (9B2D3A)$279.99 to buy, about $319 over five years at 300 pages a month
• HP Smart Tank 5000 (5D1B6A)$199.99 to buy, about $241 over five years at 300 pages a month
• HP Smart Tank 6001 (2H0B9A)$199.99 to buy, about $302 over five years at 300 pages a month
• Epson ET-2803$329.99 to buy, about $438 over five years at 300 pages a month
• HP Smart Tank 5100 (D06BLA)$329.99 to buy, about $369 over five years at 300 pages a month
• HP Smart Tank 5101 (1F3Y0A)$309.97 to buy, about $351 over five years at 300 pages a month

By type, and by colour

The choice that matters most is the supply system, so here is each one on its own terms. Every figure is the five-year total at 300 pages a month.

There is no cartridge inkjet that prints black only in our catalogue, which is why that pairing has no list. Mono inkjets exist; none of the ones Canadian retailers stock reached us with both a price and a rated yield.

What is on the site now

• Every printer page carries its five-year cost at 50, 300 and 1,000 pages a month, the full specification block, and every ink, toner, drum and bottle we carry for that machine with its own cost per page.
• Every ink and toner page carries its page yield, the ISO test that yield was measured under, its cost per page, and the printers we carry that take it.
• The printer list sorts by cost to run at 300 pages a month, in either direction. Printers we cannot cost sort last on that list and say so. In the cost-of-ownership tool they are left out entirely and counted beside it, because a row carrying a price and two empty cost cells reads as a wrong answer rather than as a missing one.
• You can put up to four printers side by side, every specification lined up in the same rows, with the cost rows on top.

A price without a date is a rumour, and a running cost without its method is worse. Both travel with every number we publish.