Cut-price prints

Most owners of inkjet printers are already aware of the frighteningly high price of replacement ink cartridges.

It’s attractive to look at alternatives, but printer technologies such as laser or dye-sublimation are not necessarily cheaper.

Finding the best printer is tied to the types of document you wish to produce, and also the volume of documents you are likely to be printing.

Regardless what type of printer you own, it’s possible to save money by making a few simple changes.

If you’re prepared to adopt a more radical approach, such as purchasing consumables from other manufacturers or even refilling your own, the savings can be remarkable.

Switching printers
Tempting as it may be to abandon your current printer to avoid expensive consumables, the options are limited.

Inkjet printers are the only true all-rounders, capable of working in colour or black and white on almost any type of media, and equally adept at producing a single glossy photo or hundred-page report.

Monochrome lasers are cheap to buy and have a lower price per print, but contain components that wear out and can be expensive to replace. Basically, they’re only suitable for text.

Colour lasers deliver high quality at high speed, but can only print on a limited range of paper and can’t do photo-quality glossies.

And despite plummeting prices, they still cost upwards of £200.

For helpful guidelines on both laser and inkjet printers, click here. We’ve put up lots of extra tips on laser printers there, too.

The newest type of home printer is the specialist photo printer, which produces 6in x 4in snapshots.

Based on either inkjet or d ye -sublimation technology, they offer fixed-price printing (at on average 25p per snap), but the downside is that they can’t print any other kind of document.

What’s clear is that to replace an inkjet you need two printers. If you choose a laser and a photo printer, you’re still not able to print T-shirt transfers or photos bigger than 6in x 4in.

A better combination is a mono laser for text documents and an inkjet for everything else, with a combined price of about £150.

Connecting two printers at the same time to Windows XP is no problem provided they both use USB connections.

The true cost of printing
To work out the cost of printing a single page, it is important to take account of more than just ink or toner.

For example, how much did the printer cost, and how many pages do you expect to print?

Pay £100 for a sophisticated inkjet printer and only print a thousand pages, and the associated cost per page is 10p.

Even printing 10,000 pages – which most users never would – still costs a penny per page on top of the cost of ink and paper.

There are hidden costs too, especially with laser printers. The most significant of these is the OPC drum.

The life of these drums is limited, but they’re usually good for at least 12,000 pages.

While replacing the drum is straightforward, they can be very expensive, costing anything up to £170.

Many laser printers from Canon, HP and other major manufacturers are fitted with all-in-one toner cartridges incorporating an OPC drum, which means that every time you change the toner cartridge you change the drum too.

Whether this works out cheaper than separate drum replacement depends on the number of prints you expect to make in the life of the printer.

You also need to consider the service life and replacement cost of buying separate drums.

Some types of laser printer incur other costs, such as the occasional replacement of drive belts and waste toner collection bottles, and the very infrequent but expensive renewal of the fuser unit.

Manufacturers of laser printers are generally rather coy about the need for maintenance items.

So, when choosing a printer, visit manufacturers’ websites and search their Supplies or Accessories sections to see what items may be required and, more significantly, how much they cost.