THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

The first question you should ask is why do you need a printer at all? Do you need to print off those documents? The only time I regret not having a printer is printing boarding passes for flights.

I need the printer, otherwise I wouldn’t be reordering ink every 6 months.

That came off as really snotty. Sorry about that.

Are you printing a lot of black and white documents (or stuff that doesn’t need to be color) from your all-in-one? If so, I’d consider getting a mono-color laser and using the all-in-one strictly for color. That should greatly reduce your ink costs.

I purchased a cheap Samsung laser printer about 5 years ago. ($70 on sale) In order to keep costs down, I bought some toner refill powder on ebay that I use to refill my toner cartridge (cost me about $15 for about 10 refills). I’m only my 2nd cartridge (the drum eventually wears out, bought a generic one for $35) and I am still on my first ebay order of refill powder. In all, I’ve spent about $50 for many, many thousands of pages not including the cost of the printer itself.

For color, I still use my Canon Pixma IP5000 which I bought 6 or 7 years ago. I’ve replaced all of the inks multiple times, but I always use Staples store brand which I find is identical in quality to the Canon ink. Costs about $60 to replace all of them, but I replace them rarely and the printer is so good that I hate to replace it. It would probably be cheaper to just order all my photos online, but improbably, the quality from my printer is far superior as long as I use high quality (buy in bulk when on sale!) paper.

My wife (a schoolteacher) typically prints a couple hundred pages per month on our printer (I print maybe 10 pages per year). I’ve gone through 3 decent consumer-grade printers and countless cartridges in the 12 years we’ve been married.

Key points:

1. Most printers include “starter” ink cartridges that typically don’t have as much ink in them as OEM replacements.

2. Many office supply stores have cartridge recycling programs that credit you a few bucks for each returnable.

3. I personally don’t buy printers that use a tri-color cartridge (why should I replace a cartridge that still has two colors left just because one is out?). My current printer has 6 cartridges - one black, and 5 color.

4. YMMV, but some OEMs make it difficult to use non-OEM ink, and when my workplace mandated using non-OEM, we had a ton of problems with printers leaking ink and gumming up inkjet heads. I ruined many decent shirts and pants working on them when I had an entry-level IT job.

5. You might want to do a cost-benefit analysis of purchasing a laserjet. The initial cost is high, if you want to do color, but it’s definitely something that will be in the mix for my next purchase.

6. Depending on your municipal rules, you may have to pay to dispose of your old printer and, regardless of that, there’s definitely a societal cost to treating electronics as disposables.

I’m really not certain where the cost/benefit comes out. It’s certainly close, but for me, I hate configuring new printers, and point 6 is a big deal.

I’m not sure why you’re not switching to laser—toner doesn’t dry out. I use a company called Toner Refill Kits (it’s at tonerrefillkits dot com) for refills and I love them. I’m not a spambot and I don’t get anything from sending more business to those guys, I just happen to really like both them and laser printers.

I’d start considering it the third time through the cartridge.  If it is an elite printer, I might let it go through the cartridge a 4th time.

I need the all-in-one, and I never checked to see if Lasers do that.

My printer (Canon PIXMA) has 6 cartridges, two of which are black.  Most of my printing/copying is black and white, and yet it still goes through the color somehow.  I’m not smart enough to figure it out, other than the printer doesn’t recognize it as black and white, so it gets into shades of gray.  Or something.

Having two printers, one for color and all-in-one stuff, and the other for strictly printing/copying b&w is something I hadn’t considered.  We don’t really have the space, but I suppose with wireless printing, I should be able to work around that.

@8/tango

Conspiriacy theory incoming…

your printer is using small amounts of color ink under/on top of your black ink so it runs out quicker…

Three days ago, I bought a new printer because the old one was running out of ink.  The new printer was on deep discount (70% or 80% off), and came with XL ink cartridges instead of starter ones.

So I paid $50 for a new printer instead of $70 to replace ink cartridges in the old printer—and the $50 actually bought me twice as much ink.

For a simple black and white laser, I highly recommend Brother printers. I’ve had good success with the one I’ve owned for 4 years, the ones I recommended a past employer purchase (now going on 6 years), and the half dozen friends/family who’ve bought them after asking for my advice. Models like these have done well in my experience:

http://amzn.to/ra3BDr

http://amzn.to/naUiTL

And if you don’t need your MFC to have color, maybe one of these is worht a look:

http://amzn.to/rj6OP8

Ideally, you’ll be able to wait since the holidays invariably bring good deals. As always, though, check the cost now for replacement toner.

If you’re in no hurry and want a site to monitor for deals, I recommend dealmac.com (which is also useful for other computer peripherals and such).

Conspiracy theory countered…

Printers use colored ink to make your blacks richer. I would change the print settings to draft or something similar to use as little as ink as possible. I’d also see if I could disable color ink features by specifying printing in grayscale.

Personally, I avoid printing with my own computer as much as possible and haven’t had to change ink before my printers died. Between school, work, libraries, etc (including printing all boarding passes at the airport) I’ve managed all right.

I bought a Kodak ESP 5250 for $100. It is an All-In-One printer. It has wireless built in so any of my computers can print. The black cartridge refill is $10 at Walmart. I have found it to be the best deal for black ink.

Conspiracy theory expanded…

Some ink has digital timers on it that automatically shut it down after a certain amount of time (no seriously, found it in consumer affairs regarding an interview with HP’s “ink scientist” [real title]) whether or not it gets used up or not. Either it is to keep the ink fresh or it is to force you to buy more ink, depending on your cynicism.

If you are continually going the same amount of time between getting color fill-ups regardless of your printing usage, this may be the problem.

I don’t know a solution, though.

I have two HP printers.  One I use for printing photos and the other I use for printing everything else.  As mentioned above, changing the setting to “draft” will save ink. 

Last year, I did some research for the school I work at and found that there is a difference among printers when it comes to the cost of ink cartridges and the output of those cartridges.

I also signed up at HP.com and often get offers for discounts, so I never pay full price for ink.  They will also ship cartridges the next day for free if you order online, so I don’t worry about running out of ink.

Print using black ink only? AND in Draft mode? Just don’t let your colors dry out by using that method exclusively.