Best All-in-One Printers With Cheap Ink in 2026

The dirty secret of cheap printers is that the ink costs more than fine champagne by volume — the $79 machine is bait, and the cartridges are the hook. This guide is for anyone who prints regularly and wants an all-in-one (print, scan, copy) where the cost per page is measured in fractions of a cent, covering picks from about $150 to $400.

1. Epson EcoTank ET-3850 — best overall cheap-ink all-in-one

The ET-3850 is the step-up EcoTank that home-office people should buy: refillable tanks, auto duplex, an auto document feeder for multi-page scans, and faster print speeds than the entry models. Epson rates the included ink bottles in the thousands of pages, and a full replacement set costs less than one round of brand-name cartridges. Black-and-white pages work out to well under a cent; color to a few cents.

• Why it wins: ADF plus duplex plus tank ink is the complete home-office package; ink cost is effectively a rounding error
• Realistic 2026 street price: $300–$400, with regular promos in the $270–$320 range
• Where to buy: Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart

2. Canon MegaTank G7020 — best for high-volume households

Canon’s G7020 is the MegaTank for families that print a lot: it adds a fax-capable ADF, two paper sources, and auto duplex to the refillable-tank formula. Rated yields from a set of bottles run into the thousands of pages in black, so a family burning through homework packets, shipping labels, and recipes can go a year or more between refills.

• Why it wins: highest practical page volume per dollar of ink in this roundup
• Realistic 2026 street price: $250–$330
• Where to buy: Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart

3. Brother MFC-J4335DW (INKvestment) — best cartridge system that isn’t a ripoff

If you’d rather not deal with ink bottles at all, Brother’s INKvestment line is the honest cartridge system: oversized cartridges plus an internal ink reservoir, with claimed costs around a penny per black page. The MFC-J4335DW adds an ADF and auto duplex, and it inherits Brother’s core virtue — it keeps working after months idle without clogging into an expensive brick.

• Why it wins: near-tank ink economics with the convenience of drop-in cartridges, and Brother reliability
• Realistic 2026 street price: $180–$250
• Where to buy: Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy

4. HP Smart Tank 6001 — best tank option for HP loyalists

HP came late to refillable tanks but the Smart Tank line is now a legitimate contender, and it’s the pick if your household is already deep in HP’s app ecosystem. The 6001 prints, scans, and copies, does auto duplex, and ships with enough bottled ink for roughly two years of typical home use — with no subscription required, which for HP is worth saying out loud.

• Why it wins: tank-cheap ink inside the familiar HP Smart app experience, no Instant Ink strings attached
• Realistic 2026 street price: $200–$280
• Where to buy: Best Buy, Amazon, Target

5. Epson EcoTank ET-2850 — best cheap-ink pick under $250

The ET-2850 appears in our general home-printer guide for a reason: it’s the value floor of respectable tank printing. You lose the ADF of the ET-3850 but keep the refillable tanks, auto duplex, and print/scan/copy basics. For a household that scans a page at a time and mostly prints, the $80–$120 you save over the step-up model buys a lot of paper.

• Why it wins: the lowest price that still gets you genuine EcoTank running costs and duplex printing
• Realistic 2026 street price: $200–$250, with sale dips toward $180
• Where to buy: Amazon, Target, Walmart

How to get the best price

• Tank printers see their deepest cuts — often $60–$100 — during back-to-school season and Black Friday; put your pick on a CamelCamelCamel or Keepa alert now and buy the dip.
• Always compare the true cost: (printer price) + (annual pages × cost per page × years you’ll keep it). A tank printer usually wins by year two even against a “free-after-rebate” cartridge machine.
• Open-box tank printers are a strong play at Best Buy — sealed ink bottles are usually still in the carton, and discounts run 15–20%.
• Skip third-party ink in tank printers (bottles are already cheap, and knockoffs can clog heads), but for the Brother, reputable third-party INKvestment-compatible cartridges cut costs further.

The takeaway: cheap ink in 2026 means tanks — the ET-3850 if you scan stacks of pages, the Canon G7020 if you print in bulk, the ET-2850 if you want in for the least money — with Brother’s INKvestment as the honorable cartridge exception. Any of these will cost more at checkout than the bait-priced machines beside them, and all of them will be thousands of dollars cheaper by the time you recycle them.