Laser Printer - to colour or not to colour?

robert_harper_2000

I want to get rid of my home printer and get a proper laser printer for my work place. We do mainly black and white printing but for the labels I think I would want the option of colour too.

I want to know if anyone knows which is economical for ink? it seems to be around £50 for 'toners?'

All advice welcome

Pennywise

The colour ink cartridges usually cost a fortune. £50-£75 per colour is average, so you're looking at say £175 or more for a full set of 3 colours. Prices are fairly comparable between manufacturers.

To save money, you have to be savvy with the print settings etc.

Firstly, set it up as two printers on your PC with different settings. One being colour and the other being Black/White. Make the B/W your default printer.

Secondly, use as much colour on the pages as possible - i.e. if you're printing say compliment slips or labels, print as many on a single A4 sheet as possible.

The reason for both the above is simple. All the colour printers I have had work by transferring a set amount of colour toner onto the transfer belt - the same amount of each colour is used for every page, regardless of what toner is actually needed. This is clearly very wasteful and fills up your waste toner tank very quickly. So, even if you only use a little bit of blue on your sheet, the printer will have transferred a default amount of blue, yellow and pink, and will ditch most of it in the waste tank. If you print a black & white page with no colour, but have the printer set to colour, it will still transfer the colours even though they won't be used.

By changing my default to B/W and using the colour setting only when needed, I have reduced by useage of colour cartridges from 2/3 per year to just 1 every 2 years.

No doubt, some printers won't do it this way but I don't think you'll know until you get a printer and try it out - it certainly doesn't say on tech specs, but if you ask the technical support they might be able to tell you. I didn't know about this until a technician told me whilst repairing my printer.

vivatifosi

Agree with Pennywise that you need to work out your settings if you are going for a laser printer or it will cost you a fortune.

I've got room in my home office for two printers, so I have a bog standard HP laser jet for all my daily printing and a second inkjet printer which is my colour printer (used a couple of times a month) but also doubles up as my photocopier, scanner and fax. At the time that I got them you could get good versions of both for less than the price of a colour laser.

robert_harper_2000

I just think I'm always buying and using ink I'd prefer a toner so it saves trips
Plus for business so will get the VAT back and I'm just abit amazed by all the options! Thanks for your tips though, hopefully when I get a toner I could use your advice on that