Best home printer

Because the cartridge-inkjet business model is to sell the machine cheap and make the margin back on ink. Consumer Reports models a $128 cartridge printer at roughly $543 over five years once ink is counted, against about $5 a year for a refillable tank printer — the purchase-price gap is small next to that difference.

For general use, yes, with one exception: if you almost never print in color, a mono laser like the Brother HL-L2465DW has a higher per-page cost than tank ink, but it's more reliable long-term — toner doesn't dry out, so it survives months of not being used, exactly the failure mode that kills inkjets.

Only if you regularly scan stacks of paper. The Epson EcoTank ET-4800 includes one alongside fax and Ethernet; the cheaper ET-2803 doesn't — scanning multiple pages means feeding them one at a time. For an ordinary household without office-style needs, that gap rarely matters.

It varies by model. The Epson EcoTank ET-2803 includes roughly two years' worth of ink in the box per the manufacturer, so the first refill is a long way off. Always check the manufacturer's own figure for your specific model rather than assuming a generic number.

When you don't need color and reliability matters most. Consumer Reports is blunt on this point: lasers are markedly more reliable than inkjets, and toner doesn't degrade over time the way liquid ink can in a printer you use infrequently.