Ink or toner? How to tell which your printer uses from the model name, the bay, and the part number
Ink and toner do the same job in completely different ways, and no printer accepts both. Buying the wrong one is a return, not a workaround. Almost every printer tells you which it takes in its own model name, and the ones that do not give it away the moment you open the front. Here is how to settle it in a few seconds, and what the answer means for your running costs.
Why anyone asks this in the first place
People use the word toner as a generic term for whatever goes in a printer, and the shops do nothing to help by filing both under the same aisle. We see the confusion first-hand in our own search logs. Over the last 90 days people reached this site searching for hp officejet 6700 toner and hp officejet pro 6230 toner. Both of those are inkjets. Neither has ever had a toner cartridge made for it. The OfficeJet 6700 takes HP 932 and 933 ink, and the OfficeJet Pro 6230 takes HP 934 and 935 ink.
It runs the other way too. Someone searched hp color laserjet pro m454dw ink for a machine that is a colour laser and takes four toner cartridges. So this is not a silly question. It is a naming problem the industry created, and it costs people money when a cartridge arrives that physically cannot go in the printer.
The fastest answer: read the model name
Manufacturers are consistent about this, more consistent than they are about almost anything else. The technology is baked into the product line name, so you can usually answer the question without leaving your chair. Here is how the lines break down across our catalogue.
| Brand | Takes ink | Takes toner |
|---|---|---|
| HP | DeskJet, ENVY, OfficeJet, OfficeJet Pro, PhotoSmart (68 models here), plus the refillable Smart Tank line | Anything with LaserJet in the name (39 models here) |
| Canon | PIXMA, including the refillable G series (45 models here) | i-SENSYS in Europe, imageCLASS in North America |
| Brother | Codes with a J after the letters: MFC-J, DCP-J (20 models here) | Codes with an L after the letters: HL-L, DCP-L, MFC-L (41 models here) |
| Epson | Expression, WorkForce, EcoTank (46 models here, all of them ink) | Not part of Epson's home range |
HP is the easy one: the word LaserJet is doing all the work, and every one of the 39 toner machines in our catalogue carries it. Brother is the one worth learning, because MFC-J4535DW and MFC-L2750DW look almost identical at a glance and take completely different supplies. The letter after the dash is the tell. That rule covers 36 of our 41 Brother lasers; the other 5 are older machines like the HL-2270DW and DCP-7065DN, named before Brother added the L, and those are lasers too.
Canon is the odd one out only because its two ranges are sold under different names in different regions. A PIXMA is always an inkjet. If the box says i-SENSYS or imageCLASS, it is a laser.
If the name does not settle it, open the printer
If the label has rubbed off, or the machine came secondhand with no box, opening the front settles it in about ten seconds. The two designs look nothing alike inside.
Ink sits in a carriage that slides side to side on a rail above the paper, usually behind a flap on the front or under the scanner lid. The cartridges are small, roughly the size of a matchbox or a chunky domino, light, and often have a copper-coloured contact strip and a printhead underneath. On a refillable tank machine there are no cartridges at all, just a row of translucent reservoirs down one side that you can see the ink level through.
Toner is a single large unit that slides in horizontally from the front, roughly the width of the paper path and surprisingly heavy for its size. It is a sealed plastic box of dry powder, sometimes clipped into a separate drum unit. A colour laser has four of them in a row or a carousel. If you have to use two hands and it feels like it has sand in it, it is toner.
One more giveaway: a laser is warm after printing, because the powder is fused onto the paper with heat. An inkjet page comes out cool and can smudge for a second or two.
The part number on the old cartridge
If you still have the empty, the code on it is definitive. Each brand keeps ink and toner in separate numbering systems and never crosses them over.
| Brand | Ink looks like | Toner looks like |
|---|---|---|
| HP | A short number on its own: HP 61, HP 65XL, HP 932, HP 952XL | A letter-and-digits code: CF248A, CF400X, W2020A |
| Canon | PG, PGI, CL or CLI plus a number: PG-243, CLI-281, GI-290 for bottles | A bare number or a 0xx series code: 055, 057H |
| Brother | LC plus a number (24 LC part numbers in our catalogue) | TN plus a number for the toner (37 here), DR for the drum (7 here) |
| Epson | A number, often with a nickname on the box like 502 or 202XL | Not applicable to the home range |
The Brother split catches people out. A Brother laser needs two separate consumables with two separate part numbers and two different lifespans: the TN toner you replace often, and the DR drum that lasts several toners. Ordering a DR when you needed a TN is a common and expensive mistake, and we break the pairs down in the Brother toner and drum chart. If you are on HP or Canon, the HP chart and the Canon chart do the same job for ink numbers.
What is going on inside the machine
An inkjet sprays microscopic droplets of liquid ink straight onto the paper through a printhead full of nozzles. The ink soaks in and dries. That is why an inkjet page can smudge if you grab it too early, and why a printer left unused for months can clog as ink dries in the nozzles. It is also why inkjets remain the better choice for photos.
A laser works nothing like that. It has no liquid at all. A laser draws the page as an electrical charge pattern on a rotating drum, dry toner powder sticks to the charged areas, the drum rolls the powder onto the paper, and a hot fuser melts it permanently in place. There is nothing to evaporate or clog, which is why a laser suits someone whose printer sits idle for weeks between jobs.
The two also get their advertised page counts measured under different rulebooks, which matters if you are comparing numbers on two boxes. Mono toner yields come from ISO/IEC 19752, published in June 2004 and based on a standard test page at roughly 5 percent coverage. Inkjet yields come from ISO/IEC 24711 using the test suite in ISO/IEC 24712, and colour toner from ISO/IEC 19798. HP notes that the toner standard requires nine cartridges to be tested across three printers before a yield can be claimed. So the figures within one technology compare fairly, but a page of dense photo printing will empty an inkjet cartridge far faster than the rating suggests either way.
What the answer costs you per page
This is the part that decides which one you should own. We calculate cost per page for every printer in our catalogue by taking the cheapest genuine supply that fits it and dividing by that supply's rated yield. Grouped by technology, the medians look like this.
| Technology | Printers priced | Median black page | Median colour page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cartridge inkjet | 155 | 5.5c | 4.4c |
| Laser | 80 | 2.5c | 3.2c |
| Refillable ink tank | 24 | 0.3c | 0.2c |
The colour column is the cheapest single colour cartridge at its rated yield, not a full colour page, so read it as a like-for-like comparison rather than a bill. On black text, the headline is that a typical laser costs about 2.5c a page against about 5.5c for a cartridge inkjet. The reason is yield, not ink being expensive by the millilitre: the median black inkjet cartridge in our data is rated at 400 pages, while the median black toner is rated at 2,600. The biggest toner we track claims 12,000 pages from one cartridge.
What the medians hide is how much the two ranges overlap. 28 of the 155 cartridge inkjets we price beat the median laser on cost per black page, and 5 of the 80 lasers are worse than the median inkjet. Buying a laser is not automatically buying cheap pages.
The two machines from our search log make the point. The HP OfficeJet Pro 6230 is an inkjet, and its HP 934XL black at 1,000 pages for 38 dollars works out at 3.8c a page. The HP LaserJet Pro M15w is a laser, and its only cartridge, the CF248A, is rated 1,000 pages for 60 dollars, or 6.0c a page. The inkjet is the cheaper machine to feed. Small entry-level lasers are sold with small toners, and that undoes most of the technology's advantage. Move up to a Color LaserJet Pro M454dw with a high-yield W2020X rated 7,500 pages and you are down to 2.2c a page, which is what people mean when they say lasers are cheap to run.
The full ranking across every machine we track is in the cheapest printers to run guide.
So which should you buy
Once you know the difference, the choice comes down to what you print and how often.
- If you print mostly black text in decent volume, get a laser, but check the toner yield before you buy rather than assuming. A cheap mono laser with a small starter-class cartridge can cost more per page than a mid-range inkjet.
- If you print photos, or anything where colour quality matters, get an inkjet. Liquid ink on photo paper is still well ahead of what a consumer colour laser produces.
- If you print rarely and at no particular interval, a laser is the safer bet. Dry powder does not go off, whereas an inkjet left idle for months may need a cleaning cycle or worse before it prints properly. Our clogged printhead guide covers keeping an idle inkjet healthy.
- If you print a lot and much of it is colour, a refillable ink tank undercuts both at a median 0.3c a black page in our data. The trade is a higher purchase price and a printer that wants using regularly, which we work through in ink tank vs cartridge.
One thing that only affects the cartridge machines: firmware that rejects third-party supplies. It has been an inkjet story far more than a laser one, and tank printers sidestep it entirely because there is no cartridge chip to check. Our firmware DRM tracker lists which models are affected.
If you already bought the wrong one
There is no adapter and no workaround. A toner cartridge will not physically enter an inkjet carriage, and an ink cartridge has nothing to grip in a toner bay. If the cartridge is sealed and unopened, return it. Most sellers accept unopened consumables well inside the usual return window, and marketplace sellers of compatibles generally do the same.
Before you reorder, get the part number from the machine itself rather than from memory. Every printer prints its own supply numbers on a configuration or status page from the front panel, and on many models the driver software lists them too. Or look your model up here and we will show you the exact numbers it takes, ink or toner.
Common questions
Is toner the same as ink?
No. Ink is a liquid sprayed onto paper through a printhead in an inkjet. Toner is a dry powder that a laser printer fuses onto the paper with heat. They are not interchangeable, no printer accepts both, and the cartridges will not physically fit each other's machines.
How do I know if my printer uses ink or toner?
Start with the model name. HP LaserJet, Canon i-SENSYS and imageCLASS, and Brother codes with an L after the letters (HL-L, DCP-L, MFC-L) take toner. HP DeskJet, ENVY and OfficeJet, Canon PIXMA, Brother MFC-J and DCP-J, and every Epson home model take ink. If the name is unclear, open the front: ink sits in small cartridges on a carriage that slides across, toner is one large heavy block that slides in horizontally.
Does my HP OfficeJet use toner?
No. Every HP OfficeJet, including the OfficeJet Pro line, is an inkjet and takes liquid ink cartridges. The OfficeJet 6700 takes HP 932 and 933, and the OfficeJet Pro 6230 takes HP 934 and 935. Only HP models with LaserJet in the name use toner.
Is toner cheaper than ink?
Usually, but not always. Across the printers we price, the median laser costs 2.5c per black page against 5.5c for a cartridge inkjet, because the median toner is rated at 2,600 pages where the median black inkjet cartridge is rated at 400. But 28 of the 155 inkjets we price beat the median laser, so the cartridge yield on the specific model matters more than the technology.
Can I put toner in an inkjet printer?
No, and there is no adapter that makes it possible. The two use entirely different mechanisms: an inkjet has nozzles that spray liquid, a laser has a charged drum and a heated fuser. A toner cartridge will not fit an inkjet carriage. If you have bought the wrong one and it is unopened, return it and order by the part number printed on your printer's own configuration page.
Do laser printers dry out like inkjets?
No. Toner is a dry powder, so there is nothing to evaporate or clog. That is the main practical reason to pick a laser if you print rarely. An inkjet left unused for months can need cleaning cycles before it prints cleanly again, and in bad cases the printhead may not recover.
Keep reading
- Which printers are cheapest to run, ranked the full cost-per-page table across inkjet, laser and tank.
- Ink tank vs cartridge: is refillable worth it the third option, and the volume at which it pays back.
- Brother toner, drum and ink chart which TN, DR or LC number your Brother takes, and why lasers need two parts.
- HP ink cartridge compatibility chart the number your HP inkjet takes, by model.
- Printer printing blank pages the fix differs by technology: a clogged head on an inkjet, a seal or drum on a laser.
- Drum unit vs toner the second laser consumable, and which machines make you buy it.
- HP LaserJet toner compatibility chart if it is toner, this chart maps every HP laser to its number.
- Waste ink pads and maintenance boxes lasers have no ink pad at all, which is one more thing the choice decides.
Sources
- ISO/IEC 19752, method for determining toner cartridge yield for monochrome printers. iso.org
- ISO/IEC 24711, method for determining ink cartridge yield for colour inkjet printers. iso.org
- HP, The ISO standard for toner cartridge yield for monochrome LaserJet printers. hp.com
- Lexmark, Understanding print cartridge page yields, on the 5 percent coverage test pages. lexmark.com
- Cost per page figures computed from this site's own catalogue of printers and genuine supplies. mycartridgefinder.com
Last updated . This guide is general information, not a repair warranty. Printer menus and HP's model lists change, so confirm the exact steps for your model on the manufacturer's support site before you make changes.