The prices of personal printers look pretty enticing, especially those sub-$100 models. But keep in mind that the purchase price is just the start: the care and feeding of a printer can quickly exceed the original cost. Before pulling out your credit card, be sure to compare the costs of consumables.
Ink and toner
Inkjets are the least expensive printers available, with many models starting at less than $100. The catch? The consumables, such as replacement inks and specialty papers, can cost you an arm and a leg. Ink typically costs between $12 and $60 per cartridge and can last for 100 to 200 pages. More expensive printers, however, tend to be more economical to operate because they have higher-capacity ink tanks and separate ink tanks for each color so that you don't need to replace everything when only one color runs dry. To save some money, you can purchase a compatible ink-refill kit from a separate company, though you may not get the same reliability or print quality.
Laser toner cartridges vary greatly in price, yield, and print capabilities. Toner cartridges generally cost from $10 for a small cartridge for a personal laser printer to as much as $300 for a high-capacity cartridge for a networked workgroup laser printer. Toner costs seem high, but so is the yield. A cartridge typically prints between 2,500 and 10,000 pages (although some claim to print as many as 30,000), so the cost per page is a few pennies for text (at 5 percent coverage) and not much more for images (with 15 percent coverage). Pay attention to the expiration dates, though; some cartridges (HP's in particular) will stop working at a set time, no matter how much ink is left. Also, consider paying a little more for a separate toner cartridge and drum kit, rather than the usual combination unit. That way, you don't have to replace the drum, which is often capable of handling many more print jobs, every time you replace the toner.
The chart below illustrates the cost of printing 1,000 pages on a budget inkjet (750 pages of black text and 250 pages of color images), a personal laser, and a midrange office laser. Factoring in the cost of the printer and the cost of the printed pages, the lasers still cost more in total, but that's because their purchase price was so much higher. The cost of printing pages on the inkjet, however, has already overtaken the cost of purchasing the actual printer. If you project out to printing 3,000 pages on each printer, the inkjet's total cost rockets to $291.75, compared to the personal laser's $278 and the midrange laser's $294.
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Printer |
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Cost per 1,000 pages printed* |
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Total cost |
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Budget inkjet
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Personal laser
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Business laser
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* Assuming 750 black pages and 250 color pages
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Dye-sublimation printers have the advantage of a fixed cost per print, since each print eats up the identical amount of ribbon, regardless of photo content. On the other hand, the prices for packs of ribbons and paper can be exorbitant, sometimes as much as $2 per photo.
Paper
If there's one thing we've learned from CNET Labs' extensive printer testing, it's that better-quality paper yields better-quality printouts. For the best results, you really need to bite the bullet and buy the coated or specialty paper recommended by the manufacturer of your model. This is particularly true for inkjets, photo printers, and multifunction devices. Special paper can cost 10 cents to $2 per letter-size sheet, but it is essential if you want to print crisp-looking text or high-resolution photos.
Extras
The biggest gotcha with many printers is the printer cable. Incredibly, many manufacturers don't even include one because retailers want to sell you one separately for anywhere from $10 to $30. Before leaving the store, read the box to determine whether you'll need to buy one separately. For some business inkjets and laser printers, network connectivity is optional, as well.
If you're purchasing a workgroup printer or an advanced multifunction printer, you should also consider some paper-handling features that are frequently offered as add-ons, such as larger-capacity input trays; output bins for collating, stapling, and other finishing options; and auto documents feeders for copying and faxing multipage documents.
