We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. Cost-Saving Ink Strategies One of the most common printer-related complaints is that ink is too expensive. You can pour a lot of money into replacing cartridges, which all-too-frequently have modest capacities and deplete quickly. Generally, the more expensive the printer, the lower its ink costs will be, and often budget-price home inkjet printers and all-in-ones have the highest costs per printed page, bringing to mind the old strategy of giving away the razor to fleece you on the blades. The good news is that over the past few years, most of the major printer manufacturers have introduced inkjets with unheard-of low running costs, employing a variety of strategies to do so. HP sells ink on several subscription plans through its Instant Ink program, which can offer considerable savings on color costs. Other companies, like Brother, Epson, and Canon, offer similar (though non-subscription-based) cost-saving initiatives. HP Instant Ink: Subscription-Based Savings HP introduced its subscription-based Instant Ink program in 2013, and it has since grown to more than 2 million subscribers. It supports a good number of HP inkjet printer series. Sign-up for the Instant Ink program is integrated into the setup process, in which a customer can choose between Instant Ink plans, or opt for the traditional model of purchasing ink at retail stores or online when they run low. Instant Ink-eligible printers encompass a wide range of printer types, both home and office models, and include Editors' Choice models such as the OfficeJet Pro 9015. When you sign up for an HP Instant Ink plan, you pay a monthly fee to print a defined number of pages per month. The plans are based on the number of pages that you print, not on how many ink cartridges you use. Your monthly fee pays for ink, shipping, and recycling. If you do not print all of your plan pages in a month, you can roll over up to the number of pages per month in your plan. If you print more pages, there is an additional charge but you are still paying the same price per page as your base plan. A printed page counts the same whether it's black and white, a color document, or a photo. Subscribers can choose between several plans: the Occasional plan, which at $2.99 per month supports printing up to 50 pages a month, the Moderate plan, which for $4.99 per month supports printing up to 100 pages a month, the Frequent printing plan, which for $9.99 per month supports printing up to 300 pages a month, and the Business plan, which for $19.99 per month supports printing up to 700 pages a month. For really light-duty users, there is also a free plan, which lets you print for free for the lifetime of the printer, with the caveat that if you print more than 15 pages per month, you will be charged $1 for each additional 10 pages. Likewise, you will be charged $1 per 10 extra pages on the Occasional plan, $1 per 15 pages on the Moderate plan, and $1 per 20 pages on the Frequent or Business plans if you print more than your allotted pages. With the exception of the free plan, if you don't use up all your pages in a month, you can roll over up to a month's worth of pages to apply to pages in excess of your monthly allotment. With Instant Ink, you are not under contract, and you can cancel your plan or change to a different one at any time. HP points to potentially substantial cost savings compared with the traditional model of paying for individual ink cartridges. Cost per page on the Occasional, Moderate, Frequent, and Business plans could be as low as 6 cents, 5 cents, 3.3 cents, and 2.9 cents, respectively. As the plans don't distinguish between black and color pages, you could save a lot of money with Instant Ink if you print mostly in color. Whether you're printing text documents or photos, your cost per page will be the same. Note, though, that your savings may be considerably reduced if you don't use up your allotted pages, or if you frequently print more pages than are included with your plan. If you print mostly in black and white, you may actually save money by sticking to buying cartridges the old-fashioned way. Also, note that HP uses "smart" cartridges that monitor your ink use and the number of pages you print, and automatically sends you replacement cartridges when your ink runs low. Your printer must be connected to the internet for the cartridges to record the ink and page data and transmit it to HP, and you may be unable to print if it is offline for an extended time. If you cancel your subscription, your Instant Ink cartridges will be disabled, and you'll have to buy standard cartridges to use your printer again. HP Instant Ink offers its subscribers considerable ink cost savings over printing with standard cartridges, particularly if much of your printing is in color. There are several tiers of plans to choose from, depending on your average print volume. Not everyone wants to be under subscription, with its inherent regulations, though, and users that print mostly in black and white may have higher running costs with Instant Ink than if they buy cartridges off the shelf. Fortunately, other printer manufacturers have come up with their own methods for reducing their customers' running costs. Brother's INKvestment: High-Yield Cartridges Brother, for its part, is saving businesses (including home offices) a pretty penny with its INKvestment all-in-one printers, which employ low-cost, high-yield ink cartridges. Most of these printers use the same set of cartridges, with the black cartridge having a claimed yield of 3,000 pages and each color cartridge a yield of 1,500 pages. An exception is the Brother MFC-J985DW, which is geared toward home offices, with its black cartridges that have a 2,400-page claimed yield and 1,200 pages for each color cartridge. Either way, running costs come to just less than a penny a page for printing in black and just less than a nickel a page for printing in color. In addition, Brother sells each of these printers in an XL version, which includes extra sets of cartridges, three full sets or 12 cartridges in all for the MFC-985DW XL, and five sets or 20 cartridges for the other models, enough ink to last up to two years, according to Brother. Not all of Brother's inkjets use INKvestment cartridges, but among those that do are some very good ones, including the MFC-J985DW and the MFC-J6945DW, both Editors' Choice models. Epson EcoTank and SuperTank Printers Along with substantially lowering the running costs on some of its standard business inkjet all-in-ones, Epson has tried another tack: providing ink in bottles that you can pour into reusable tanks attached to or (more recently) built into the printer. It launched its first EcoTank printers in 2015, and continues to introduce new models, including everything from basic small office units (the Epson EcoTank ET-2760) to more expensive, feature-packed options (the Editors' Choice Epson EcoTank ET-4760). The highest-capacity models use, instead of semi-rigid plastic bottles, bags of ink that resemble IV drip bags, the tops of which attach to clips in a bay designed to fit them. With these models, you don't have to pour any ink; you just have to make sure that the ink bags are securely in place. Whether the ink comes bottled or in bags, it provides an exceedingly low cost per page, about 0.3 cents per black page and 0.9 cents per color page. A caveat is that the initial purchase price of these printers is very high considering their features and performance. So even though they come with enough ink to last a long while, you're paying a substantial premium up front. My advice is that because of the high initial investment, you carefully check to make sure that the printer you're buying is the most suitable model for your needs. With the need to pour ink from bottles into tanks onto the printer comes a risk of spill, but in practice the ink ends up where it is intended. In the several EcoTank printers I've reviewed, the worst that has happened is that I've gotten a drop or two on my hands, which is a small price to pay for the astonishing ink cost savings you can achieve once you've run through your initial ink allotment. The running costs for standard Epson inkjets have also come down, with many offering black ink for less than a penny a page, and colored ink for less than a nickel a page. Canon MegaTank Bottled-Ink Printers In late 2016, Canon introduced its first G-series MegaTank bottled-ink printers, which are very similar in both concept and cost savings to Epson's offerings. These printers, designed either for home or home office use (or both), have modest feature sets for their price; their real draw is their stunningly low running costs (0.3 cents per page for black ink, 0.8 to 0.9 cents per color page). This, combined with their excellent print quality—including the high-quality photo prints that Canon is known for—makes the MegaTank models a welcome addition to the ranks of low-ink-cost printers; the Pixma G5020 and the Pixma G6020 each earned our Editors' Choice. Low-Cost Ink Is the Future Readers of our printer reviews still complain about the high cost of printing, but the clamor has been reduced over the past few years, thanks to printer manufacturers' strategies such as Instant Ink, INKvestment, EcoTank/SuperTank, and MegaTank. Market pressure should continue to keep ink costs down, at least in select printer lines, and printer makers are likely to extend the savings to a wider variety of models. But even with what's available today, there are models with low ink costs available to suit a wide variety of users, from home and home-office users (including photo buffs) all the way to small-to-midsize businesses. With any luck, it won't be long until complaining about ink prices is a thing of the past.

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