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 $169.99. Thirty-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 $4,484. The Smart Tank costs about $272. 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 248 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. Drums, fusers and waste containers are rated for a service life rather than by an ISO cartridge test, so they are reported separately and never costed as pages. 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.

Prices observed 4 September 2026. We hold prices for 296 printers and can compute a five-year total for 248 of them. The other 48 are listed with the reason we cannot cost them, because a printer missing from a ranking with no explanation looks like a printer that does not exist.

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 5000 Wireless All-in-One$169.99 to buy, about $272 over five years at 300 pages a month
• HP Smart Tank 6001 Wireless All-in-One$189.97 to buy, about $292 over five years at 300 pages a month
• HP Smart Tank 5003 All-in-One$199.99 to buy, about $302 over five years at 300 pages a month
• HP Smart Tank 5003 All-in-One$199.99 to buy, about $302 over five years at 300 pages a month
• Brother HL-L5000D Business Monochrome Laser$300.99 to buy, about $444 over five years at 300 pages a month, the cheapest laser to run, and black only

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 and say so. They are never hidden.
• 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.