I doubt that. I always buy the largest B&W toner cartridge that fits the printer and it takes me years before it is empty.
You doubt that laser could be more expensive than inkjet? Don’t be so sure! The toner cartridges for the cheapest black and white lasers are very expensive. For example, for HP’s entry level models, that’s $45 for just 950 pages. There are many cartridge inkjets with ink cheaper than that (not entry level, but not expensive, either), and ink tank printers are orders of magnitude cheaper to run.
With color it gets worse: $50 for 700 pages for HP’s entry level. Per color.
(And just to make sure you can’t call me out: I am NOT saying that entry level lasers cost more to run than ALL inkjet printers. That is not true, some inkjets use crazy expensive ink. But it’s also incorrect to think that ALL laser printers are cheaper to run than inkjets!)
Now look at, say, a $400 color multifunction. With laser (looking at a Xerox for example), high capacity toner is $70 per color, for 2500 pages (3000 for black). For $400, you get a nicely equipped Epson ink tank inkjet that uses ink that costs $10 per bottle, and lasts for 4500 pages black, 7500 pages color.
When I said you could waste HALF the ink on head cleaning and still come out cheaper, I wasn’t exaggerating even a tiny bit. Heck, you could waste 90% of the ink on cleaning and it would still be less than half the price per page than the entry level laser!
But you don’t even need to choose an ink tank to find inkjets that are cheaper to run than the basic lasers. You could also look at, say, a $250 HP cartridge printer, and discover that the high-capacity cartridges are $35 for 1600 pages (color) and $60 for 3000 pages (black).
I’m in the market for a new printer, so I’ve been checking things out, and it’s absolutely shocking how expensive the supplies for cheap lasers are.
But as I said already
more than once: for someone who prints very little, and very sporadically, that can still be the right choice, since you won’t waste toner on head cleaning.