Cheapest total cost of ownership

koru

Having spent quite a while looking into this for my own benefit, I thought I would share some ideas for people looking to save money on printing:

1 You may find a laser printer is cheaper overall than an inkjet. Much cheaper running costs. For example, for the Kyocera Mita FS-1020D, you can get genuine Kyocera cartridges that cost £57 and print 7200 pages (at 5% coverage), so that is 0.79 pence per page printed. I don't think an inkjet could match that. Plus a laser will give superb quality printing with cheap photocopier paper (see 5).

2 For those of you who don't print often, it may take a while until the running cost savings pay you back for the extra purchase price of a laser, but you can get some pretty cheap lasers, now. Also, if you don't print often enough the ink in inkjets can dry out, blocking the printing nozzle. Lasers are more tolerant of being unused for a month or more.

3 For photo prints, some inkjets still have better quality, but if you want photo quality it is far cheaper to use a commercial processor - less than 10p per print. For black text, lasers are far better quality. For colour text and graphics other than photo-quality, colour lasers are now as good as inkjets.

4 Prices of colour lasers have plunged. You can now get them for as little as £190, and I understand there's a Samsung model (CLP-300) due in February that will be about £150. They are, however, a lot bigger than mono lasers.

5 Paper is probably as big an influence on running costs as ink/toner. As already mentioned, a laser will give great results with cheap photocopier paper. If you shop around you shouldn't need to pay more than £2.50 per ream (500 sheets) of A4, which is 0.5 pence per sheet. But you can easily pay twice that amount if you aren't careful.

6 You can save even more on paper by getting a duplex printer, so you can print on both sides of paper. A duplex printer will cost a little more upfront, but will half your paper costs. How soon this will pay off for you depends on how many pages you print.

7 If you print a lot, don't just buy the cheapest laser printer. Toners and drums are far more important influences on overall cost than the upfront cost of the machine. For instance, I found the Brother HL-2030 mono laser printer on the internet for only £83, but I print about 15000 pages per year. So, I did some calculations of the cost for 50,000 pages (about 3 years use). In that time, this printer would use 4 drums and 19 toner cartridges, so total cost to me (machine, toner, drums, paper) would be £1,227. In contrast, although the Kyocera Mita FS-1020D, mentioned earlier, would cost £205 to purchase, but it would only need 6 toner cartridges and no drums, because it has a drum that has been engineered so it lasts 100,000 pages, which is the life of the machine. So, the total cost of the Kyocera would be only £800! So, by spending an extra £120 upfront, I can save £500 over the following three years. A pretty good return on my investment!

As a bonus, the Kyocera is a much better printer - faster, better prints. Plus more ecologically sound, as I send 4 fewer drums to landfill (I would donate the empty toner cartridges to the local school for recycling). Plus it does duplex printing, so if I print on both sides of every sheet of paper I could save an extra £100 of paper.

So, do the maths for your usage. If you print a lot less than me, you may find the comparisons work out differently, but still the cheapest printer may not be cheapest overall.

8 The same lifetime-cost calculations make a colour laser printer look perfectly affordable. For instance, the Samsung CLP-550 is £220 to buy, but its cost over 50,000 pages (black and white printing only, so we are comparing like with like) is about £850, or £800 if you print duplex all the time. So, you can buy a snazzy duplex colour laser for £400 less than the cheapo mono laser! (So, I can get colour capability for only £100 more than the Kyocera, which is tempting. Of course, colour printing costs more than black and white, though the starter cartridges will do 1,500 colour pages, and I reckon that will last me more than 3 years, so my only running cost for colour printing will be paper.)

9 No doubt you can save more money by refilling toner yourself or buying from eBay, but I prefer to shop around and find the cheapest supplier of manufacturer's own toner cartridges. In most cases, these cost very little more than the eBay refills, and I prefer not to risk damaging the printer with refills or replicas.

gonzo10

Just a quick point I would like to make that in some instances it is cheaper to buy a new laser printer than it is to buy the consumables to restock it, well it certainly was with a company I deal with!

koru

gonzo10 wrote:

Just a quick point I would like to make that in some instances it is cheaper to buy a new laser printer than it is to buy the consumables to restock it, well it certainly was with a company I deal with!

Sadly, I think you are right. Environmentally, this is an absolute nightmare. I don't want to "save money" by sending perfectly good printers to landfill and buying a new one because it is cheaper than buying a replacement drum for the old printer. It is not fair for the printer makers to put us in this position.

That's why I wanted to highlight the Kyocera printer. As far as I know, they are the only manufacturers who have made the effort to make a printer where the drum does not need replacing, so you don't have to send either the printer or any drums to landfill for the life of the machine, which is apparently 100,000 pages (nearly 7 years, even at the high volumes that I print). And they make cheap high-capacity toners, so you send far fewer of them to the landfill, also.

What I was really pleased to find from my calculations is that not only is the Kyocera far better than other printers in ecological terms, but it is also cheaper, provided you are smart enough to look at the life of the product. The other manufacturers could do the same as Kyocera, but they think we are so stupid that we just choose the printer with the lower sticker price. I hope Kyocera are rewarded with lots of sales.

You don't need to print as much as me to decide it is worth buying the pricier, ecologically-sound machine. Over the life of the machine the Kyocera costs 0.96p per page printed (for toner, drum and paper), assuming you always print on both sides of the paper. In comparison, the "cheaper" Brother costs 2.4p per page. (Other cheapies are nearly as much: the Epson EPL-6200l is 2.2p.) So, you would recoup the extra £120 purchase cost of the Kyocera after printing only 8,450 pages. That's 17 reams of paper.

If you print less, then take a look at the cheaper Kyocera FS 720, which is only £115, and also has a lifetime drum.

Edit:

Actually, having checked, I am surprised to find I was wrong to agree with you. What you said is commonly stated by many people, so I assumed it is right, but at least for mono lasers it doesn't seem to be correct.

I had previously worked out on a spreadsheet the total cost of ownership for 12 mono laser printers, and I realised that this would easily allow me to compare purchase price with the cost of a replacement drum. In ALL 12 CASES, a drum is cheaper than a new printer - anything from £24 cheaper, to £176 cheaper, depending on the model.

Of course, with a new printer you get a supply of toner, so a new printer means you don't have to buy another toner refill for a while. And a toner cartridge can cost £50, right? But that's for 5000-8000 pages of printing capacity. Generally a new printer has only a "starter" cartridge, typically worth 1500 pages of printing. At most this might save you £15 of toner you would otherwise have had to buy, which is not enough to make up for the extra cost of a new printer (at least £24).

Now, I am sure if you look hard enough, you can find a mono printer whose price with some retailer is less than the cost of a drum, but my figures were based on the cheapest internet suppliers I could find. So, I think that as a general rule, if you shop around for a good deal on the drum, it is almost always going to be cheaper to just renew the drum (as well as more ecologically sound!)

The exception seems to be colour printers. I only looked at figures for two of these. In both cases, you would indeed save money by scrapping your printer when the drum runs out and buy a new printer instead.

mrwibble

Some intelligent and thoughtful discussion here.

I have been surprised by the fall in printer purchase costs - assuming that £500 was the entry point for a decent HP mono laser but seeing good colour lasers for around £250 (bear in mind that they are bulkier than mono lasers due to the extra cartridges) and mono lasers at far less has caused me to re-think my usual policy of buying 3-5 yr old LaserJet 4xxx series (or similar) from auction for £60 (with a cartridge and network card) and flogging them on Ebay when the toner starts to fade. Although this would still be cheaper the warranty, extra print speed from a new printer and sheer hassle of selling printers on Ebay (sourcing suitable packing material and spending 1-2hours listing and packing every 6 months) cause me to think again. The accessories I have for the HP for tasks such as duplexing or envelope feeding are not such an issue as they were.

I actually bundled an HP LJ4+ as a free extra in a job lot deal the other month just to clear the thing.

koru

Just wondered if anyone has redone these figures recently. I imagine it is still the same, but are there any new trends people have spotted?