Which ink/toner does the Brother DCP-L2550DW use?

The DCP-L2550DW is a mono laser, so nothing about it involves ink. It takes a TN-730 or TN-760 black toner cartridge, and it also takes a DR-730 drum unit, which is a separate part that most cost comparisons leave out altogether.

Put the drum back in and the numbers change. A TN-760 is rated 3000 pages for $84.99, so 2.83c a page, and a TN-730 is 1200 pages for $54.99, or 4.58c, which makes the higher yield toner 38 percent cheaper per page and an easy decision. The DR-730 is rated 12000 pages for $129.49, adding 1.08c to every page it prints. Toner and drum together, a page off this printer costs 3.91c rather than 2.83c.

Across a full drum life the whole bill is visible. Twelve thousand pages needs four TN-760 cartridges and one DR-730, which is $469.45 in consumables. That is still cheap printing by any inkjet standard, but it is not the 2.83c figure the toner box implies. For where it sits among lasers, the TN-760 is 18th cheapest of the 48 mono laser blacks we price and the median there is 3.69c, so on toner alone this machine is a little better than average. Once the drum is counted, the true page cost lands just above that median instead.

Brother does not lock this model to its own supplies, so compatible TN-730 and TN-760 cartridges work, and so do compatible drums. The two parts behave differently in practice: toner is a straightforward commodity, while a drum is what determines whether pages come out clean, and repeating marks down a page at regular intervals are the classic sign of a tired or cheap one.

Two messages on this printer are routinely misread. Toner Low appears well before the cartridge is finished, and taking the cartridge out and rocking it gently end to end redistributes what is left for a useful number of extra pages. Replace Drum is a counter rather than a measurement, and it resets from the front panel after a genuine drum change, which is worth knowing because the warning arrives whether or not the pages still look right. Faded printing across the whole page is usually toner, while streaks or ghost marks that repeat at a fixed spacing usually are not.