Best Printer for a Primary School

devonpie

Hi

I'm looking for a bit of advice. I'm an ICT coordinator in a primary school and trying to get our ink expenditure down. At present we have a HP Color Laserjet CP3505N which most of the school prints to and its costing us a fortune.

I'm interested to know if we had several cheaper printers around the school that used cheaper ink, would that be better? And if so which are the best for decent quality, high usage printing? AND... is there a website that lets you compare printers like for like using a set of variables such as pages printed etc?

Many thanks to anyone that can help.

HappyMJ

The printer you have is quite efficient for the price point. You could spend a lot of capital to lower the price per page but I doubt you would see a return for a few years. Are they willing to shell out thousands on a new printer to save pennies per page?

How many pages per week do you print?

I've done a guesstimate for you. A high usage color printer in a primary school I think would be 1500 pages per week and that should be costing you 6p per page or £90 per week. That's quite cheap and based on genuine HP toner's from Amazon. If you use remanufactured toner you could get that down to 4p per page.

Mista_C

Now, this all depends on what you want to do with your printer and this might not be the right solution for you but, it's an option.

Have you looked into solid ink printers? Rather than toners these use blocks of coloured wax. There are pros and cons as with anything. I investigated one model for use in a college. While for some areas the cost worked out at around 2 pence per side of A4 compared to the 15 or so pence of the same from a colour laser, other areas found that it was more beneficial to use the colour laser.

There is further information here www . inkguides . com/xerox-solid-ink-printer.asp

You'll need t remove the spaces from that, I can't post links being a new user and all.

John_Gray

If you really need to print everything in colour, have a look at Kyocera printers.

Alternatively, monochrome lasers are much cheaper on consumables, and "only print in colour if it's really necessary" is a good concept in education, and elsewhere.

tomtiddly

Hi we have HP 2600, 3600 and 5550's at our 6th form college which work well but boy are they expensive. Have a look at local companies that can rent them - it may not sound like a good idea but the prices get very competitive and makes it nice and easy for budgeting and no unexpected bills