Choosing office printers

The two basic choices for an office printer today are the inkjet type or the laser printer. Both, in turn, are available in either color or black and white printing styles. Which is best for you?

Just as with computer monitors, the office printer has changed dramatically over the past few years. Lasers, once very expensive, have seen a sharp decline in price. Inkjets are now often given away with other purchases. But the stated purchase price isn't the only figure you want to consider. Running cost and usable lifetime are equally important, for they determine the true cost over the long run.

Inkjet Printers

Inkjet printers function by shooting a small jet of fast-drying ink from a cartridge onto paper. They can produce stellar output, sometimes almost indistinguishable from a photograph made from a film negative printed on special paper. Today, they're low cost to purchase (often less than $50) and may last as long as several years.

But, they do have some drawbacks.

Inkjet printers are cheap, but - as the marketing adage goes, give away the razor and sell the blades - the cartridges can add up. A basic four-color inkjet cartridge (black and 3-primary colors that combine to make a range of tones) runs anywhere from $20-$40 or more. If you only print a few pages per day, the cost per sheet may be as low as 10 cents. But it will generally range between 25-50 cents per page. Still, that's not a huge expense at small volumes.

But, for large volumes, the cost of cartridges can balloon into something substantial before you know it. Since they only last a few hundred pages, you may have to replace one often. Even a black-only inkjet cartridge, which might be as low as $10-$15, can last only as long as 400 pages for average documents with no graphics.

A color inkjet cartridge will often last less than half that and the cartridges are double or more the price of just black. Full color documents with complex graphics can consume a color cartridge in a few dozen pages.

The most serious drawback, though, comes in at ultra-low volumes. If you print a document only occasionally, the cartridge may not work at all after a while. The ink at the nozzles has a tendency to dry out, making printing impossible if the printer sits unused for a few weeks.

Laser Printers

The initial purchase price of laser printers is typically higher. But sometimes the total cost difference is minimal depending on your use.

A quality black and white laser printer can be purchased for under $100. Desktop color laser printers may go anywhere from $200 or higher. A high output laser printer can be as high as a few thousand dollars.

Cartridges are more expensive, too. A black and white toner cartridge starts at about $40 and may be as much as $100. Color cartridges are $150-$200. However, they may print as much as 3,000 pages before running out, so the cost per page is typically much less than with inkjets.

Depending on the type of document (and the cartridge cost) 2 cents per page is achievable. The average for printing a page is in the 10-25 cent range for a color laser printer. In part, the higher price is due to the increased amount of graphics that tend to appear on a color page.

A good laser printer can reliably print many thousands of pages, producing several hundred to a thousand or more per day for years before wearing out. They also don't suffer the same low-volume problem as inkjets. Laser toner can sit unused for months and still print a clean, crisp page on demand.

Choose according to your personal circumstances, but keep in mind the longer-term costs.