153X Black LaserJet Tank Toner Reload Kit (W1530X)

What the total is

The total is the cheapest new price we hold for the printer, plus what it costs to print the pages over the horizon you pick. Nothing else is folded in: not paper, not electricity, not repairs, and not a warranty. A printer that is cheap to buy and expensive to feed and one that is the other way round are only comparable once both halves are added together, and that is the whole point of this page.

How many pages

Pick a monthly volume at the top of the page and every total is recalculated for it. Five are offered: 50, 100, 300, 500 and 1,000 pages a month. The page opens on 300 a month. A colour printer is charged at 80 percent black pages and 20 percent colour. A printer that prints black only is charged at 100 percent black, because it cannot print the colour fifth and pretending it printed fewer pages would understate it. Every row says which mix was applied to it.

How long you keep it

Pick a horizon beside the volume and every total is recalculated over it. Four are offered: 1, 2, 3 and 5 years, and the page opens on 5. The purchase price is paid once whatever the horizon, so a one-year total is not a fifth of a five-year one: only the pages scale. That is the whole reason the horizon is a control rather than a fixed assumption. A cheap machine with expensive cartridges can win over one year and lose badly over five, and reading one horizon off the other is exactly the mistake this page exists to prevent.

Cost per page

A cartridge's price divided by the page yield its manufacturer publishes for it. Where a printer accepts more than one size of the same cartridge, the figure uses the size with the lowest cost per page, which is what someone buying to minimise running cost would choose. A colour page needs cyan, magenta and yellow together, so its cost is the three added up, never averaged. A single tri-colour cartridge is costed at its own published colour yield instead.

Which test the yield came from

A page yield only means something next to the test that produced it, so every row on this page names its ISO/IEC test standard. 19752 and 19798 rate laser cartridges; 22505 and 24711 rate inkjet cartridges. All four count document pages. 29102 and 29103 count 4 by 6 photo prints instead, which is a different measurement with no conversion into the other, and no photo yield is ever used to cost a document page. A cartridge whose yield names no test we recognise cannot be costed here at all.

Speed standards are not yield standards

ISO/IEC 24734 measures how fast a printer prints, in pages per minute. It is printed on the same manufacturer pages as the cartridge yields and is easy to mistake for one. It is never used as a yield here, and it never appears in the yield basis column.

Yields we refuse

A rated yield outside the band manufacturers actually publish for that kind of supply is not used, and the printer is left off this page rather than ranked on a number nobody believes. The bands come from what the makers publish, never from our own data, because our own data is the thing being checked.

The cartridge that came in the box

A printer arrives with a cartridge already inside it, and you have paid for that cartridge in the price of the printer. So where the manufacturer publishes how many pages the in-box cartridge prints, those pages are not charged again: the first purchase is deferred by exactly that many pages and the printer's own page says so. HP publishes a 700-page set-up cartridge for the LaserJet M209dw, which at 300 pages a month is the first two months of the term. It is a DEFERRAL and not a discount: no cartridge becomes cheaper, the first one is simply bought later, so the credit matters most over a short horizon and fades over a long one. Where the manufacturer publishes nothing we credit nothing, because an unpublished in-box yield is not the same as an empty box, and where a colour machine publishes a black figure and no colour one we credit black only rather than invent the other. The drum is never credited: a photoconductor wears by the sheet it feeds, so the pages the in-box cartridge prints still use drum life.

The drum, on a laser printer

A laser wears out two things: the toner it prints with, and the photoconductor drum that puts the toner on the paper. A total that counted only the toner would understate every laser, so the drum is charged here. We spread the drum's cost across the pages it is rated to print, rather than treating it as a lump sum on the day it is replaced. That is the modelling rule and it is stated here rather than left implicit: the drum's cost per page is the drum unit's price divided by the page life its maker rates it for, and where a printer takes several drums the figures are added. That amount is charged to every page, black and colour alike, because a colour laser turns all of its drums on every sheet it feeds. Spreading it this way means the totals do not jump at the moment a drum happens to run out, and it is the same arithmetic whichever horizon you pick. A drum is rated for a service life and not by an ISO cartridge test, so it is shown as its own line and never mixed into the cartridge yield.

Lasers with the drum built into the cartridge

Not every laser has a drum you buy separately. On many home and small-office machines the photoconductor is built into the toner cartridge, so you replace both together and there is no second part to price. We do not guess which machines those are: we read the list of consumables the manufacturer publishes for that exact model, and where that list names no drum unit we record that the drum is part of the cartridge. Those printers are costed in full, because the drum's cost is already inside the cartridge price we are charging. Adding a separate drum charge on top would count it twice.

Laser printers whose drum we have not captured

Where a manufacturer's own consumables list names a drum we have not yet priced, or where we could not read that list at all, no total is shown for the printer at any volume or horizon, and the row says the drum cost is not yet captured. Publishing the toner-only figure would be the same arithmetic as charging nothing for the drum, and it would be wrong in the one direction that flatters a laser against every inkjet on the page. Those printers stay on the table with the reason stated rather than being dropped. Note the difference from the section above: a list we read that names no drum is an answer, and a list we could not read is not.

Two worked examples

A machine whose drum is built into its cartridge, and one whose drum is a separate part you buy. HP LaserJet M209dw Wireless Black & White Laser Printer: cheapest new price $129.99; its own W1340X toner, rated 2,400 pages, works out at 5.92 cents a black page. The maker's consumables list for this exact model names no drum unit, so the photoconductor is inside the cartridge and there is no second part to price. The maker publishes a 700-page in-box cartridge, so the first 700 pages are already paid for. At 300 pages a month over 5 years that is 18,000 pages of which 17,300 are charged, and the total is $1,153.51. Brother HL-L2400D Home Office-Ready Monochrome Laser Printer with up to 700 Prints In-box: the drum is separate. Cheapest new price $189.99; its TN830XL toner, rated 3,000 pages, is 3.13 cents a black page; the maker's list names the DR830, which we hold at $168.99 for a rated 15,000-page life, so every page carries another 1.13 cents. We hold no published in-box yield for this one, so nothing is credited and every page is charged. Over the same 18,000 pages the total is $956.72. Read on toner alone the second machine looks like the cheaper page; the drum is 26% of what it costs to run, and that is why the drum is a term in the total rather than a footnote under it.

Fusers, transfer belts and waste containers

The other laser service parts are not in the total. Unlike a drum they are replaced on a schedule 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. They are shown on the printer's own page where we hold them.

When a volume is more than the maker advises

Some manufacturers publish a recommended monthly print volume. Where we hold one and the profile prints more than it, the row says so. That is a warning about the machine, not a doubt about the arithmetic. Where no recommended volume is published the row says the maker did not state one, which is a different answer from saying the volume is fine.

Where the prices come from

Every price is one we hold from a Canadian listing, in Canadian dollars, on the date shown at the top of this page. ONE RULE sets all of them: the cheapest new, purchasable listing we hold for that exact item. That is how the printer is priced, and it is how every cartridge and every drum is priced too. A drum is a product with its own Canadian listings, so its price is read from those listings like any other part - it is never derived from the printer, from a similar model, or from a maker's suggested price we have not seen on a shelf. Whichever shelf is cheapest wins, and the manufacturer's own store counts as one of those shelves. Which kind of shelf wins is not the same for every part: on cartridges it is more often a retailer, and on drums it is more often the manufacturer, because far fewer retailers stock drums at all. Prices move, so read the totals as of that date. No price here is estimated, adjusted or projected forward, and where we hold no price for a part the printer gets no total rather than a total with a guess in it.

Printers with no total

A total needs a printer price and a cost per page for every kind of page the profile prints. Where either is missing there is nothing to add up, and no total is shown: not a rounded one, not an approximate one, and not a dash with a footnote. Those printers are listed lower down with the reason stated.

Which tests the yields came from

Every published row names the ISO/IEC test standard its rated yields were measured under. A yield with no named test cannot be costed here.

• ISO/IEC 24711: 178 cartridge rows
• ISO/IEC 19752: 106 cartridge rows
• ISO/IEC 19798: 91 cartridge rows
• ISO/IEC 22505: 67 cartridge rows

ISO/IEC 24734 measures print SPEED (pages per minute), not cartridge yield. It is never a yield basis and never appears as one on this surface.

What the total leaves out

• Paper.
• Electricity.
• Repairs, servicing and extended warranties.
• Fusers, transfer belts and waste containers. The DRUM is included on a laser printer; these other service parts are not.
• Taxes, shipping and any retailer delivery charge.
• Third-party, remanufactured and refilled cartridges. Where a retailer lists one against the manufacturer's own part number it is shown separately, with its price, and is never used to compute a total.
• We are not the seller. Every price is a retailer’s own listed price and every buy link goes to that retailer.

Limitations

These totals compare printers against each other on one set of assumptions. They are not a prediction of what any particular household will spend: how much you print, what you print, and what cartridges cost when you come to buy them all move the number.

Page yields are manufacturer figures measured under ISO test conditions. Real yield moves with how much ink or toner each page uses, so a page of dense graphics costs more than the test page and a sparse invoice costs less. Prices change, and these were the prices we held on September 19, 2026.