Is printing on an inkjet printer less expensive than printing on a laserjet printer? To get the lowest cost per page, you must consider all of the costs associated with your particular inkjet or laser printer.
The printer ink replacement business produces over 21 billion dollars a year, and it’s still growing. Hp makes well over $10 billion on printer ink alone, and Lexmark makes a cool $2 billion on ink supplies. Printer brands like Epson and Canon are doing pretty well, too. How does this apply to you?
According to popular belief, a cheap printer means cheap printing, but the truth is actually the exact opposite. In reality, the cheaper your inkjet printer, the more expensive your replacement printer cartridge will be. Some people use remanufactured laser toner cartridges to save money and spend 70% less than they would on buying name brand OEM laser toners, but other people still believe that toner cartridges are more “expensive” overall than printer ink cartridges. That belief becomes a myth when all the costs are considered, especially when a printer is used everyday for business purposes. The initial investment for the ink printer may be cheaper than a laser printer, but the printing output for an ink cartridge is less than the printing output of laser toners. Let’s compare cost per page prices for an inkjet and laserjet printer.
A good example of the average inkjet printer is the Canon Bubble Jet Printer, which costs around $55. Cheap, no? The average cost for Canon Bubble Jet Printer ink is about $19, but you must keep in mind that that printer ink cartridge will only print about 170 pages. If you print seven pages a day for 300 business days a year, your total printer ink bill using this inkjet printer will come out to around $236. If you print that amount of pages for three years, the cost of the cartridges will be around $700, which is almost 13 times the original cost of the inkjet printer. And that cost per page is not just for Canon inkjets. If you use an Epson printer and print the same number of pages, the inkjet cartridge cost will be even higher, over $1,000 for three years.
Now let’s compare these costs per page to a laserjet printer. An HP laser printer that retails for $400 and uses a $115 laser toner will yield around 8,000 pages. If you print 40,000 pages the cost will be approximately $400, plus $460 for the ink toner. That’s a total cost of $860. A similar Brother laserjet printer costs around $930 for the same number of pages. The total cost is less than $.02 a page, which is eight times less than the cost of an inkjet. You’ll pay more upfront than you would with an inkjet, but you will save more money in the long run with a laserjet printer.
Why do inkjet printers have a high cost per page? Some inkjet printers are set up to use more printer ink because there is no way to set the printer default to “draft quality,” not to mention the simple fact that inkjet printers don’t print as fast as laser printers. Some of them are prone to giving annoying cartridge error messages even when the cartridges are still in good working order. As a result, the laser printer market is on fire and for good reason. The price of printing with a laser printer turns out to be much less than using ink cartridges.
Buying remanufactured printer supplies helps lower the cost for an inkjet printer, but when all the numbers are considered printing with discount laser toner cartridges produce more pages for less money. That doesn’t mean that an inkjet printer might not be the best choice for you in some instances.