The printer on your desk costs less than the ink it drinks. That’s the whole story, and it’s the one most buyers miss. A €120 inkjet looks like a bargain at the till. Three years later, at 2,000 pages a month, it has quietly cost you more than a €300 laser that was twice the price on day one.
So let’s do the arithmetic. No adjectives, no “eco-friendly” hand-waving — just manufacturer-published cartridge and toner prices, rated page yields, and the cost-per-page (CPP) that falls out of dividing one by the other. For a green office this matters twice over: the cheapest page to run is usually also the page that wastes the least plastic, so the budget argument and the sustainability argument point the same direction.
How we did the math
CPP is simple: consumable price ÷ rated page yield. For the 3-year total cost of ownership (TCO) we assume a typical small office: 2,000 pages per month, 24,000 pages over 36 months, plus the printer’s purchase price. Where a printer prints in color, we use an 80% black / 20% color mix, which is what most office workloads actually look like. All prices are street prices in EUR, checked in November 2026.
The cheap printer, expensive ink trap
Start with the trap. The Canon PIXMA TS6350 is a fine little all-in-one at around €120. Its CLI-581 multipack costs €46.99 and yields roughly 200 black and 250 color pages. That’s €0.235 per black page — 23.5 cents. At 2,000 pages a month, the ink alone runs about €5,400 a year. The printer was the cheap part. The ink is the business model.
This is the pattern with every cartridge inkjet: the hardware is priced to be disposable, and the consumables carry the margin.
Monochrome laser: the boring winner for text
Laser toner is the opposite. The HP 59A (CF259A) for the LaserJet Pro M404dn costs €111.51 and yields 3,000 pages — €0.037 per page. The Lexmark B342H00 for the B3340dw is €90.98 for 3,000 pages, €0.030 per page, the cheapest black CPP in this table. The Brother TN-2320 XL is €100.97 for 2,600 pages, €0.039.
For a text-heavy office, monochrome laser is the default answer. It’s not the cheapest page in absolute terms — ink tanks beat it — but it’s the cheapest reliable page, and it doesn’t dry out if the printer sits idle for a week.
Color laser: the premium you pay for speed
Color laser is where the bill jumps. The HP 206A (CF420A) black toner for the Color LaserJet Pro M283fdw is €84.99 for 1,350 pages — €0.063 per page before you even count the cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges. A color-laser office at 2,000 pages a month is spending roughly €1,500 a year on toner. You’re paying for speed and volume, and the price tag says so.
Ink tanks: the real cost-per-page floor
Now the numbers that make the rest look expensive. The Epson EcoTank L3250 takes a 4-bottle set of 103 ink for €45.96, rated at 4,500 black and 7,500 color pages. That’s €0.010 per black page and €0.006 per color page. The Canon PIXMA G3470 with GI-41 bottles is even lower: about €40 for 6,000 black / 7,700 color pages — €0.007 black, €0.005 color. The HP Smart Tank 525 with GT53/GT52 bottles lands at roughly €0.008 per page.
An ink tank prints a color page for about a quarter of a cent. That’s not a rounding error; that’s a different category of cost.
The data, in one table
| model | type | black CPP | color CPP | cartridge/toner price | yield | 3-year TCO at 2000 p/mo | source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lexmark B3340dw | mono laser | €0.030 | — | €90.98 (B342H00) | 3,000 p | €928 | Lexmark / itsw.be |
| HP LaserJet Pro M404dn | mono laser | €0.037 | — | €111.51 (59A) | 3,000 p | €1,187 | HP / hpshop.ie |
| Brother HL-L2365DW | mono laser | €0.039 | — | €100.97 (TN-2320 XL) | 2,600 p | €1,062 | Brother ES store |
| HP Color LaserJet Pro M283fdw | color laser | €0.063 | €0.063+ | €84.99 (206A black) | 1,350 p | €1,861 | HP.com |
| Canon PIXMA TS6350 | cartridge inkjet | €0.235 | €0.188 | €46.99 (CLI-581) | 200 B / 250 C | €5,533 | Canon / Coolblue |
| HP Smart Tank 525 | ink tank | €0.008 | €0.008 | €48.68 (GT53/GT52 set) | 6,000 p | €325 | HP / kolero.de |
| Epson EcoTank L3250 | ink tank | €0.010 | €0.006 | €45.96 (103 set) | 4,500 B / 7,500 C | €447 | Epson / svijet-medija.hr |
| Canon PIXMA G3470 | ink tank | €0.007 | €0.005 | ~€40 (GI-41 set) | 6,000 B / 7,700 C | €340 | Canon / inkntoneruk |
TCO = printer purchase price + 24,000 pages of consumables at the CPP above.
What you save
Switching a cartridge inkjet to an ink tank, at 2,000 pages a month:
| EUR/year saved | ~€5,190 (cartridge inkjet ~€5,410/yr vs ink tank ~€225/yr) |
|---|---|
| Effort | Low — swap the printer once, then just refill bottles; no cartridges to buy or bin |
| Payback | Under a month — the ~€100 price gap is recovered in about two weeks of printing |
The green angle: energy per page
Here’s the part that surprises people. Energy is a rounding error next to ink. A color laser like the Dell 5130cdn draws about 600 W at 46 ppm, which works out to roughly 0.22 Wh per page. An inkjet like the HP PhotoSmart eStation draws about 28 W at 33 ppm — roughly 0.014 Wh per page. At 2,000 pages a month, the laser uses about 5.3 kWh a year and the inkjet about 0.3 kWh. At €0.25/kWh, that’s the difference between €1.30 and €0.09 a year.
So the green case for an ink tank isn’t really the electricity — it’s the waste: fewer cartridges to bin, less plastic, and a consumable that lasts months instead of weeks. Energy per page is the small number; the plastic is the big one.
Which model wins, by use case
- Text-heavy office, high volume, reliability first: monochrome laser. The Lexmark B3340dw or HP M404dn. Cheapest reliable page, no drying out.
- Color work, budget first: ink tank. The Canon PIXMA G3470 or Epson EcoTank L3250. Lowest CPP in the table, by a wide margin.
- Color work, speed and volume first: color laser. The HP M283fdw. You pay for it, but it earns its keep at high throughput.
- Low volume, occasional color: ink tank still wins, because it doesn’t dry out the way a cartridge inkjet does — and it costs a fraction per page.
The only scenario where a cartridge inkjet makes sense is a home that prints maybe 50 pages a month and never wants to think about it. For an office, the math is unambiguous.
We find the money in the boring stuff. Then we show the receipts.
— Carla Lavigne, Green Ops Editor
Sources
- HP 59A (CF259A) toner, €111.51, 3,000-page yield — hpshop.ie, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.hpshop.ie
- Lexmark B342H00 toner, €90.98, 3,000-page yield — itsw.be, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.itsw.be
- Brother TN-2320 XL toner, €100.97 incl. VAT, 2,600-page yield — Brother ES store, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.brother.es
- HP 206A (CF420A) color laser toner, €84.99, 1,350-page yield — HP.com, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.hp.com
- Canon CLI-581 multipack, €46.99, 200 black / 250 color pages — Coolblue, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.coolblue.be
- Epson 103 ink bottle set, €45.96, 4,500 black / 7,500 color pages — svijet-medija.hr, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.svijet-medija.hr
- Canon GI-41 ink bottle set, ~€40, 6,000 black / 7,700 color pages — inkntoneruk, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.inkntoneruk.com
- HP GT53/GT52 ink bottle set, €48.68, 6,000-page yield — kolero.de, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.kolero.de
- Printer purchase prices: HP LaserJet Pro M404dn €295 (Coolblue BE), Epson EcoTank L3250 €221 (officeside.lt), Canon PIXMA G3470 €187 (cdrmarket), accessed 2026-11-06.
- Energy per page: Dell 5130cdn ~0.22 Wh/page, HP PhotoSmart eStation ~0.014 Wh/page — lasertekservices, accessed 2026-11-06. https://www.lasertekservices.com
- Independent CPP context: PCMag, “Ink tank vs laser: which type of printer saves you more money,” accessed 2026-11-06. https://uk.pcmag.com/printers/160347/ink-tank-vs-laser-which-type-of-printer-saves-you-more-money
Next leak to fix
Carla Lavigne is Green Ops Editor at mycompanyisgreen.org and the colleague who brings the calculator to the audit.
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