The real cost of printing

The low purchase cost of modern budget printers can make them appear to be a much more sensible investment than their more expensive counterparts.

However, when you hand over your cash, you’re not only buying a printer but tying yourself into a programme of replacement toner cartridges and other consumable items that you’re stuck with for as long as you continue to use the printer.

Make sure you investigate the prices of these items before you make your purchasing decision.

If your printer is for personal use, it’s possible that it will last you a very long time before you have to replace the consumables, but if your cartridges should all run out at around the same time you could be in for a sudden, nasty shock.

For example, HP’s Color Laserjet 2600n can be purchased for £210.33. It comes pre-installed with toner, so discounting the cost of your electricity, your first five reams of paper can essentially be printed for nothing if you’re printing in mono.

If you’re printing in full colour all the time you’ll get through about four reams of paper for light coverage.

Once you’ve printed your ‘free’ pages, you’ll need to replace your toner cartridges: Remember, for a colour laser printer that’s a total of four cartridges, one for each of the cyan, yellow, magenta and black shades.

For this printer that’ll set you back a total of £249 – well over the cost of a new printer complete with toner.

IT departments keep reserve stocks of toner bought in advance and would be likely to notice what’s going on here, but home users are unlikely to exhaust all their toner cartridges at exactly the same time, which masks the fact that you’re paying over the odds for your consumables.

By contrast, Dell’s 3100cn comes fitted with large 4,000-page toner cartridges meaning you’ll get through around eight packs of paper before it’s time to replace them.

When you do, it’ll cost you £195.07 to swap out the lot. This is a massive saving when compared to the HP printer.

However it’s not just toner that needs to be replaced. There are imaging drums, fusers and sometimes belts that need replacing at longer intervals, often costing considerably more than a toner cartridge and sometimes a significant sum when compared to the price of the printer.

The HP has imaging drums built into the toner cartridges and the fuser is designed to survive for the life of the printer, but the remaining printers require additional components that need replacing at intervals of around 20,000-50,000 pages and they cost approximately £115-£150.

It may be that you never print this many pages, but when you do, be prepared for an extra expense.

We’ve factored in the prices of these extra items (where available) to our running cost calculations and worked out that the Dell 3100cn is still around twice as cost-effective to run as the HP Color Laserjet 2600n.

Let’s say you know you want to print 4,000 pages, would you rather buy a Dell 3100cn for £339.58 or two HPs for £420.66?

This is part of a group test on budget colour laser printers. Other articles are:
Introduction and editor's choice
Canon Laser Shot LBP 5200
Dell 3100cn
Epson Aculaser C1100N
HP Color Laserjet 2600n
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL
Lexmark C510n
Oki C3200
Xerox Phaser 6120
The Real Cost of Printing