The cheapest all-in-one printer on the shelf is usually the one that costs the most to own, and the maker publishes the figures that prove it. HP sells the Envy 6155 for $89.99 and the OfficeJet Pro 8139 for $179.99, yet a black page costs 16.9 cents on the cheap one and 7.4 cents on the dear one.
Both numbers come from HP's own cartridge prices divided by HP's own published page yields. Neither is an estimate.
That gap matters because the purchase price is the smaller number in the end. One black and one tri-colour cartridge for the Envy 6155 cost $53.98 on HP's store, which is 60 percent of the printer itself.
The arithmetic that settles it
Cost per page is the cartridge price divided by the page yield the maker publishes. Both figures are printed, so the sum can be done in the aisle.
HP's specification page for the Envy 6155 rates the HP 68 black at about 160 pages and the HP 68 tri-colour at about 120. HP charges $26.99 for each.
That gives 16.9 cents a black page and 22.5 cents a tri-colour page. A page that uses both cartridges lands at 39.4 cents.
HP's page for the OfficeJet Pro 8139 rates the HP 923 black at about 500 pages and each colour at about 400. At $36.99 and $18.99, that works out at 7.4 cents in black and 21.6 cents for a page using all four.
Paper and any drum or maintenance parts belong in the same sum, as this guide to calculating printer cost per page sets out. Ink is the part that decides the answer on a cheap inkjet.
Where the cheap printer stops being cheap
The OfficeJet costs $90 more to buy and saves 9.5 cents on every black page. Dividing one by the other gives the crossover, at about 950 black pages.
Past that point the $89.99 printer has cost more in total than the $179.99 one. If those pages use colour as well, the crossover falls to about 500.
HP rates the Envy 6155 for 100 to 400 pages a month. A household at the top of that range passes the line inside three months.
The machine is the easy part of the decision either way, and adding a printer in Windows 11 is the same short job whichever one arrives.
Why high-yield cartridges can save nothing
The usual advice is to buy the XL cartridge, and on these two printers it does not work. HP's 68e EvoMore black costs $53.99 and is rated at about 320 pages, which comes to 16.9 cents.
That is the same cost per page as the standard black, to the tenth of a cent. The EvoMore costs one cent more than two standard blacks and prints exactly twice as many pages.
The pattern repeats on the OfficeJet. Its 923e EvoMore black saves a tenth of a cent, and the 923e colours come out fractionally dearer per page than the cartridges they replace.
HP also lists no high-yield tri-colour for the Envy 6155 at all. Running the division is the only way to tell a real saving from a bigger box, and it is worth doing before settling on which printer to buy.
Why a subscription can cost more than cartridges
HP's Instant Ink page starts at $1.99 a month for 10 pages. That is 19.9 cents a page, above the 16.9 cents of buying HP's own black cartridge outright.
The cheapest yearly tier, $20.99 for 120 pages, works out at 17.5 cents. Pay As You Print is 27.5 cents for a 20-page set, the dearest per-page option HP sells.
Volume is where the plans win. HP's 700-page monthly plan is 4.7 cents a page, below anything a cartridge reaches on either printer.
The terms are the part worth reading first. HP's terms of service say subscription cartridges are disabled when the printer goes offline while billing continues, and are remotely disabled once the service is cancelled.
Canon runs the same mechanism on its PIXMA Print Plan. Canon's own wording is that those cartridges only work while subscribed, and that the printer has to stay connected to the internet.
When the maker publishes no page yield
Some printers cannot be compared at all. Canon's own specification sheet for the PIXMA TS6520 gives its two cartridges as 6.7 ml and 9.9 ml, and the word yield does not appear anywhere in the document.
Millilitres cannot be turned into a cost per page. Canon publishes page yields for other PIXMA cartridge families, so the silence here is a choice rather than a house style.
HP leaves gaps of its own. The Envy 6155 ships with setup cartridges rated at 120 and 75 pages, under the 160 and 120 of the replacements, and HP publishes no in-box figure at all for the OfficeJet Pro 8139.
Neither maker publishes a paper cost, so every figure here is ink only, and HP footnotes its yields as varying considerably with what is printed. Both black cartridges for the Envy 6155 are out of stock on HP's own store at the time of writing.
Cartridge prices move, and the crossover moves with them. The sum is worth redoing with the prices on the day.
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