CastleScore September 2026: The Printers That Moved

September's CastleScore refresh turned into the biggest rebuild since we launched the rankings. Not because printers got worse — because most of them stopped being printers you can buy. Eight of the ten inkjets and five of the ten lasers on the August list have been discontinued, delisted, or quietly pushed out of stock by their manufacturers.

The CastleScore rates a printer on six weighted pillars: owner sentiment, expert consensus, true cost to run, reliability and longevity, features and usability, and value for money. Availability isn't a pillar of its own — but a model whose maker has stopped building it, whose successor has already been announced, or whose ink has been discontinued alongside it, is a genuinely worse long-term buy. That shows up in Reliability & Longevity and in Value for Money, and this month it showed up hard.

Here's what changed, and why.

The short version

Inkjet: the tanks took over

Four inkjets left the list this month, and all four left for the same reason. The Canon PIXMA TR8620a is discontinued and so is the PGI-280XXL ink that feeds it. The Canon PIXMA TS6420a is discontinued. The HP ENVY Inspire 7955e is discontinued — and so is the 7958e that replaced it. The HP DeskJet 4155e was already the most expensive printer on the list to run at roughly 15 cents a mono page, carried the weakest owner rating of any model we scored, and has now been renamed twice on its way out the door.

What came in is telling: three of the four new entries are refillable-tank machines.

The movers

Brother MFC-J4335DW −2 (still #1, 90). Nothing about the machine got worse. Brother has simply moved production to the MFC-J4355DW, which is a real longevity question for a printer you expect to keep five years. It stays at the top because it is still widely stocked, still costs about 1.2 cents a mono page, and LC406 ink remains easy to buy.

Canon PIXMA MegaTank G3270 −1 (#4, 87). Still the lowest cost-per-page number on the page — about 0.40 cents mono. But Canon has quietly delisted both it and the G3290 that was meant to replace it, which puts a question mark over parts and support.

HP OfficeJet Pro 9125e −1 (#8, 81). Still the most capable office all-in-one we rank. It loses ground on two of our pillars: HP's January 2026 firmware update widened Dynamic Security cartridge checks, and Instant Ink prices went up again. Capability is not the problem; cost of ownership and control over your own hardware are.

Epson WorkForce Pro WF-3820 (unchanged at 80, now #9). Its score didn't move at all. It sits three places lower purely because newer tank models scored past it. It is also one of only two printers on August's inkjet list that is unambiguously still in production — which, this month, counts for something.

Laser: four discontinued, four replacements

The laser list lost the HP LaserJet Pro M209dwe, the HP LaserJet MFP M234dwe, the Canon Color imageCLASS LBP632Cdw and the Lexmark MB2236adw — all four discontinued. Their replacements are, on the whole, better machines.

The movers

HP Color LaserJet Pro 3201dw +2 (#8, 82) — the month's biggest riser. This one is simple: the price fell from about $399 to $280. At roughly 3.6 cents a mono page with no separate drum to buy, that makes it the best-value colour laser on the list. The caveat is owner sentiment, which is the softest of any model we rank — worth reading the reviews before committing.

Brother MFC-L3780CDW −3 (#6, 84) and HL-L3300CDW −3 (#10, 79) — the month's biggest fallers. Two things happened at once. Street price on the L3780CDW climbed from roughly $500 to $570. And the reports that firmware on this family disables colour registration when non-OEM toner is fitted are still unresolved as of August 2026 — Brother denies it, no regulator or court has ruled, and owners keep filing it. We score reliability partly on firmware lockouts and cost partly on whether you are free to buy third-party supplies, so an unresolved dispute of exactly that shape lands on both pillars. These are still capable machines. They are more expensive machines to own than they were a month ago.

Canon imageCLASS MF275dw −2 (#9, 81). A well-liked compact all-in-one that falls purely on availability — Canon has delisted it and what's left is retail channel stock. Fine to buy at a good price; just expect a shorter support tail.

What this month says about buying a printer

Three things worth taking away.

Refillable tanks won the cost argument outright. Six of our ten inkjets now use bottles or high-capacity refill cartridges. The gap is not subtle: the tank models on this list run between 0.28 and 0.40 cents a mono page, while the best cartridge-based machine on the list runs about 1.2 cents and the worst is over ten times that. If you print more than a few hundred pages a year, that difference will dwarf what you paid for the printer.

Firmware is now a buying consideration, not a footnote. HP widened Dynamic Security in January. Brother's colour-registration reports remain open. Both cost their makers points this month. When a manufacturer can change what your printer accepts after you have bought it, that is a durability question, and we score it as one.

Check that the model in a review is still the model on sale. Most "best printer" lists you'll find right now are recommending machines their makers stopped building. That is not usually dishonesty — it's the lag between a review being written and a product line moving on. It's also the single most useful thing a monthly refresh catches.

Top 10 inkjet printers · Top 10 laser printers · How the CastleScore works · August 2026 archive

How we score. Every printer earns a 0–100 CastleScore from six weighted pillars — owner sentiment (28%), expert consensus (18% inkjet / 20% laser), true cost to run (24% / 18%), reliability and longevity (13% / 18%), features and usability (12% / 11%) and value for money (5%). Cost-per-page figures come from real cartridge and toner pricing, which is the one thing a printer-ink retailer can measure better than a review site. AI-assisted, human-verified: we use AI to read owner reviews and expert tests at a scale no team could match by hand; our editors set every final ranking. Prices are street prices at the time of writing and move constantly. Some links to retailers are affiliate links.