Printer Comparator: Inkjet Head-to-Head

Read running cost first

The first row is the one that decides most of these matchups. A refillable supertank refills from bottles rated for thousands of pages, while a cartridge machine charges you again every few hundred — a replacement ink set on a budget all-in-one can approach the printer's own sticker. That is the same cost-per-page model the independent labs rank printers by; see RTINGS' cost-per-print testing for inkjet printers and Consumer Reports' inkjet running-cost testing. The comparator shows the tier, not a dollar figure — to put real numbers on your own volume, run the ink cost calculator.

One honest caveat the table cannot show: a supertank only earns its lower cost if you actually print. Leave one idle for weeks and the printhead dries, and the cleaning cycles waste the ink you saved. So the running-cost win assumes steady use — a page or two most days. Print twice a year and the cheap cartridge machine, or a mono laser, is the saner buy.

How the winner column works

A highlighted cell is the better pick on that single criterion, judged the way owners weight them. Lower running cost wins. The higher owner rating wins on reliability — the figure that exposes the Wi-Fi-setup and cartridge-validation failures that drag a printer's stars down, since one-star reviews across all four major brands cluster on setup and ink cost, not print quality. And an open ink system — one that takes aftermarket cartridges without a firmware block or subscription — wins the lock-in row, because freedom from Instant Ink and OEM ink locks is a first-class buying axis owners rage about, not a footnote.

Speed, functions, duplex and ADF are shown without a winner mark on purpose. A 20-page-per-minute office machine is not "better" than a slower photo printer if you print homework, and an ADF is dead weight unless you feed multi-page stacks. Read those rows against your own jobs. For the full picture behind any pick, the spec rows here trace back to each model's review, and the matchups themselves live on our comparison pages — the comparator is the fast filter, the review is the verdict.

When a third printer helps

Add Printer C when two machines tie on the row you care about. A common case: two supertanks land within a tenth of a star and both refill cheaply, so the decision drops to functions and ink-lock — a third candidate from a different brand often breaks that stalemate by being the only one with auto-duplex, or the only one without a subscription. Owner threads decide exactly this way, naming three models and arguing the split, so the comparator gives you the same three-up view rather than forcing a false binary.