“Buy cheap, and buy twice” – as the saying goes. So here’s a tool to work out just how much that new printer might cost you over its lifetime.
Ink Jet or Laser. Mono Laser or Colour Laser? The running costs of printers over their life time can vary significantly. And it can be really, really, really hard to find out what a new printer will cost. So I built a spreadsheet that will help you to calculate and compare the running costs of the printers you are looking to buy.
Ink Jets are renowned for built in obsolescence, wasting ink, printer heads drying out due to infrequent use or bad ink … or just going wrong with random error codes that require a “service centre visit” or to “call an engineer” – which is just not economical. So more plastic goes to landfill.
Laser printers are typically far more reliable and cheaper per print – but the high cost of a toner cartridge replacement can seem expensive, despite the cheaper print. Times are hard – you might not have $90 / £70 (or more!) to spend on an ink cartridge.
Compatible toner cartridges can often be used – but this can be complex. Refills of toner cartridges even more so, with some printer’s needing reset wheels or other bodges to get them working. Although, nowadays, there is more knowledge available and many compatible inks and toners are more reliable than they used to be (however, some printer brands play nicer than others).
General guidance for choosing a printer
Considerations for a home, home office or small office printer:
- Printing only occasionally? You need a Laser Printer. The print head in an ink jet printer can dry out if not used. Or, the printer (if left on) will push ink through the print head every ‘n’ hours to avoid this. This results in wasted ink filling up a well at the bottom of your printer (often, when the ink well is full, the printer stops working permanently).
- For higher volume printing: Laser Printer.
- Ask the retailer / manufacturer how much ink is included with the printer. Typically the included cartridges only include a fraction of the standard ink / toner cartridges.
- Check out the cost of cartridges and how much pages they will print. Some cartridges include the print head or other components and can be much more expensive.
- Full colour photo prints will deplete cartridges faster and may deliver 20x fewer printed pages. Usually print volumes are calculated on a “5% yield” i.e. 5% of a page covered in ink.
- Do you *really* need colour printing? B&W Mono Lasers are usually the cheapest and simplest to run, and the most reliable.
- Photo Printing = Only an Ink Jet will give you that quality
- For occasional photo printing it’s best to out-source to a Print Company for next day prints. It will be far, far cheaper, much higher quality and less work.
- How much down-time can you afford? Lasers are more reliable.
- Compatible inks and toners can significantly reduce running costs, but…
- *some* compatible inks will cause damage to an Ink Jet Printer’s print head, or…
- simply may not work at all with your printer brand/model.
As you can see – there is a lot to think about when buying a printer, and it is really difficult to compare the running costs of different printers.
You can incur significant cost by buying the wrong printer
Even the cheapest mono or ink jet printers that are available can vary significantly in their running costs over the lifetime of the printer. It’s not uncommon to find that the cheapest printer ends up costing significantly more to run. That’s why it is important to be able to calculate printer running costs.
Cost variation over 10,000 prints:
- A cheapish Colour Laser Printer could cost you as much as £850 or as little as £370.
- A cheap mono Laser Printer could cost you as much as £350 or as little as £200.
- An Ink Jet printer could cost you as much as £1300 or as little as £250.
Use the tool: Calculate printer running costs
An easy to use tool for Google Sheets or Excel
Access* the printer running cost table. It is available in Google Sheets (just take a copy and save it in your Google Drive) or download a copy to use in Excel.
*This is shared under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license – no adaptations are allowed without permission. This file can be shared only with attribution.
Guide: using the printer running cost spreadsheet
Transcript:
Pending.
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