For the same printer price, the HP Photosmart 5510 MFP matches the MDC-J430w’s 4.2 cents per page for high-yield black and costs 11.4 cents per page for four-color pages.Įpson’s ink prices are a slightly different case. The Brother MFC-J430w MFP, which costs just $100, offers high-yield inks that ultimately cost 4.2 cents per page for black and 11.7 cents for all four colors both of those figures are slightly above average. Inks from Brother and HP aren’t close to Kodak’s prices, but they do tend to be about average. The company has improved its most recent models somewhat on those variables–just in time for its bankruptcy filing. We’ve encountered problems with the speed, features, and print quality of Kodak printers in the past. For high-yield color cartridges, Kodak’s price is 9.2 to 9.5 cents per four-color page–still well below the average.Ĭheap ink isn’t everything, of course. Add in cyan, magenta, and yellow, and the cost rises to 9.5 cents per page for a standard-size cartridge, but that’s still more than 4 cents per page below the average ink price per four-color page. For the $100 Kodak ESP C310 multifunction printer, for example, the cost of black ink works out to a very reasonable 3 cents per page, whether you’re using the printer’s standard-size or high-yield ink cartridges. Kodak’s ink is one of the best deals on the market, regardless of the particular model you buy. The average costs for large, high-yield cartridges are about 3.4 cents per page for black and 10.4 cents for a page with all four colors. High-yield cartridges have more ink and print more pages–in some cases, thousands more pages–and like most bulk purchases, they cost less in the long run. The averages have remained fairly stable over the past few years: For standard-size ink cartridges, which generally yield about 250 pages or less, the average price per page is about 4.8 cents for pages that use only black ink, and it’s about 13.8 cents for prints that use all four colors. I maintain a dynamic average of ink costs that shifts as I add new printers to the list and retire old ones. When you look at as many inkjet printers and multifunction printers as I do–about 40 per year, representing about half of the total number of models currently available from major vendors–you start to see trends in ink pricing. Some printer makers, like Kodak, work hard to keep their ink prices reasonable, while others, like Dell, consistently charge top dollar. Even so, the size of the bill depends to a great extent on which brand of printer you buy. If you buy a cheap inkjet printer, you’re going to pay a small fortune for the ink to run it (assuming that you use the ink that its manufacturer specially designed for it).