I Test Home-Office Gear for a Living — and a £99.99 Printer With No Ink Inside Just Retired My "Proper" One
Our review team put five printers head to head on what they truly cost to own — purchase price, consumables, and the faff between you and a printed page. The cheapest machine of the five won. I spent weeks trying to catch it out. Here's what happened instead.
It's 7:40 on a Tuesday morning. The airline app has crashed — again — and the desk downstairs wants a printed boarding pass. The taxi arrives in twenty minutes. I press print, and my printer — a respectable big-brand machine I once reviewed rather kindly — chooses that exact moment to announce the black cartridge is empty. The colour cartridges were nearly full. It refused to print one black-and-white page anyway.
If you've ever stood over a printer at a moment like that, you know the very specific fury it produces. And here's what finally pushed me to write this piece: when I added up my receipts at the end of the year, I had spent more on ink than I originally paid for the printer itself. For a machine I used perhaps twice a month.
Most of us simply don't print much anymore. A contract on Tuesday, a return label on Friday, then nothing for three weeks. Yet the average home printer is still priced, sized and ink-billed as though we all ran busy offices — a bulky box that claims a permanent corner of a flat with no corners to spare, and quietly drinks money while it sleeps.
The Racket Nobody Calls a Racket
Here is the open secret of the printer industry: the machine is the cheap part. The cartridges are the business model. And if you print only occasionally, the model punishes you twice — ink dries out between jobs, so you pay for cartridges you barely used, and then you pay again for their replacements. The less you print, the more each page costs you. It is, when you say it out loud, a genuinely absurd arrangement.
So when our team lined up five current machines — ThermaGo, the Canon MAXIFY BX110, the Brother PocketJet PJ763MFi, the Brother DCP-J1313DW and the Phomemo M08F — we deliberately changed the question. Not "which prints the prettiest photograph?" but "what does each one actually cost to own after checkout, and how quickly does it put a real A4 page in your hand?"
The result surprised all of us. The cheapest printer of the five didn't just survive the comparison. It won it.
The Little Black Bar I Fully Expected to Fail
ThermaGo is a portable A4 thermal printer — a slim, matte-black bar not much bigger than a rolled-up magazine, with a single power button on top. There is no ink inside it. No toner, no ribbons, no tanks. It pairs with your phone or laptop over Bluetooth, runs on its own rechargeable battery, and prints proper A4 pages using heat instead of ink.
My scepticism was professional. I've tested plenty of small "portable printers" that turn out to be receipt machines in disguise — narrow strips, sticker-sized labels, half-page compromises. So I gave ThermaGo the only test that matters: the documents people actually print, at the moments they actually need them printed.
How a Printer With No Ink Actually Works
The technology is called inkless thermal printing. Instead of spraying ink onto the page, the print head applies precise heat to thermal paper, forming sharp black text and graphics directly. Nothing is consumed except the paper itself — which means the running-cost line in your budget simply reads zero. Six things stood out across my weeks of testing:
The ink bill ends. Permanently.
No cartridges, no toner, no ribbons — ever. Paper is the only thing you'll ever restock, and the recurring cost that makes ordinary printers so miserable to own simply doesn't exist.
Real A4 pages, fit for anything official
No shrunken formats or thermal-till strips. ThermaGo prints the full A4 your contracts, tickets, forms and shipping labels were designed for, with crisp, dark text you can hand to a landlord, an airline desk or a courier without a second thought.
Phone to paper over Bluetooth
It connects wirelessly to smartphones and laptops alike — no drivers, no cables, no Wi-Fi network required. The document on your screen becomes the page in your hand, and the ritual of coaxing a computer and a printer to acknowledge each other is gone.
A battery that unplugs printing entirely
The built-in rechargeable battery means the printer goes to the document rather than the other way round. Kitchen table, parked car, hotel room, a property viewing — you recharge it the way you recharge your phone, and it's ready for the road again.
Slim enough to live in a drawer
The ultra-compact body slips into a backpack or a desk drawer. It claims no permanent surface in your home, which — if you live anywhere smaller than a manor — is a feature in its own right.
Not chained to one branded refill
ThermaGo supports different types of paper rather than locking you into a single proprietary consumable. You choose what goes in the tray, not the manufacturer's accessories department.
One honest note before we go further, because every review worth reading has one: ThermaGo prints documents in crisp black and white. If glossy holiday photographs are your priority, buy a photo printer. But be truthful about what you actually print. For most households it's text on a page — and for text on a page, this does the job cleaner and cheaper than machines that dedicate half their bulk to colour tanks you'll never empty.
Where It Earned Its Keep
Specifications are one thing; the moments a printer exists for are another. During the test period, ThermaGo printed a return label at my kitchen table while the courier's van was on my street — box under one arm, phone in the other hand. It printed a rental checklist in the car outside the property, because the battery meant it could. And it printed a boarding pass in a hotel room the night before an early flight — the exact job my old printer refused me on that Tuesday morning.
The setup deserves a mention too, because this is where cheap gadgets usually betray themselves. Charge it, pair it over Bluetooth, print. That's the entire onboarding. Nobody in my household needed instructions, and my mother — the household's designated technology sceptic — sent a printed page from her phone on the first attempt. I do not say that about most printers I review.
What Happened When Other People Tried It
In our five-printer comparison, ThermaGo took the top editorial value rating of 9.6 out of 10, and the official listing backs the momentum: it's rated the number one portable thermal printer there, with more than 5,000 verified reviews and over 25,000 customers to date. The feedback from readers who took the recommendation has been strikingly consistent:
"I ordered it for return labels, honestly. Now the old printer is unplugged in the garage. I haven't thought about ink in months — it's the absence of a chore I didn't realise I could delete."
— Sarah K.
"I view properties for a living and print agreements in the car between appointments. It lives in my bag with my laptop. That's the whole review."
— Daniel R.
"My student daughter took it to halls. Everything she prints comes off her phone, there's no cartridge for her to forget to buy, and it fits in a desk drawer. Wish this had existed years ago."
— Margaret P.
The Questions Readers Keep Asking Me
How can it print without ink — don't I ever buy cartridges?
Never. The thermal print head forms text and graphics with precise heat on thermal paper. There is physically no cartridge, toner or ribbon in the machine to replace. Paper is the only thing you'll ever restock, and ThermaGo supports different types of paper rather than one branded refill.
Will it work with my phone and my laptop?
Yes — both. It connects over Bluetooth and prints directly from smartphones and laptops alike, so the PDF on your phone and the file on your computer come out of the same slim device. No drivers, no cables, no Wi-Fi network required.
Does it need to stay plugged in?
No. The built-in rechargeable battery is the whole point: it prints in the car, in a hotel room, at the kitchen table — wherever you are. Recharge it the way you would your phone and it's ready to travel again.
Why is it so much cheaper than the big-brand portable printers?
Two reasons. ThermaGo is sold directly online, with no retail middlemen adding margin. And unlike the legacy printer brands, there is no cartridge or ribbon ecosystem to profit from later — nothing is hidden in future consumable costs. The current 50% launch pricing brings a single unit to £99.99.
How fast is delivery?
Orders are processed within 24 hours on working days, ship free from an EU warehouse, and travel with a tracking number so you can follow the parcel door to door. The exact estimate for delivery in the UK is shown at checkout before you pay.
What if it's not for me?
Every order is covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee. Use it in your own home, and if it doesn't fit your routine, contact customer service within 30 days for a full refund — no lengthy forms, no interrogation. A month of real printing is the fairest trial there is, and you risk none of it.
Now the Price — Because This Is Where It Stops Being Close
Line the five machines up and the maths writes itself. The Brother PocketJet PJ763MFi is superb enterprise kit at around £1,000 — an answer to a question nobody at home is asking. The Canon MAXIFY BX110 is a fine mobile printer at about £280, before a lifetime of cartridges. The desk-bound Brother DCP-J1313DW costs roughly £146 and can never leave the house. Even the Phomemo M08F — the same inkless idea — sells for around £112, with owners reporting fiddly first-time pairing and no written money-back guarantee highlighted on its listing.
ThermaGo, with the strongest overall showing of the five, is currently £99.99 at the official checkout instead of the regular £199.99 — a straight 50% discount, verified live at the time of writing, saving you about £100 on the spot. Need more than one? The bundles are where it gets a little silly: a two-pack costs £149.99, which works out at £75 per printer, and the three-pack at £199.99 brings each unit down to £66.66 — up to 75% off, and in effect three printers for the regular price of one. For households, landlords and small teams, the absurd economics of printing finally point in your direction.
Shipping is free, orders leave an EU warehouse within 24 hours on working days, and the 30-day money-back guarantee covers the whole decision. Thousands of Brits have already made the switch — and having watched this category for years, I understand exactly why.
One honest caveat, because I write these the way I'd advise a friend: £99.99 is promotional launch pricing, not the standard price. The company can withdraw the 50% discount at any time without notice, and once it ends, the printer returns to £199.99. I don't know how long the promotion runs — nobody outside the company does. If you're considering it, open the official offer page and check today's price and stock before you decide anything.
My Verdict, Reviewer to Reader
The rare gadget that deletes two annoyances at once earns its ranking on that alone: ThermaGo removes the ink bill and the desk footprint in one purchase, then adds a battery and Bluetooth so the printer finally fits your life instead of demanding a corner of it. It prints pages, not albums — and pages are what you actually print.
If your printer story sounds anything like my Tuesday-morning boarding pass, do what our test told us to do: order ThermaGo from the official website while the 50% discount is still live, print with it for a month, and let the guarantee carry the risk. The worst case is a full refund. The best case is never buying ink again.