Which Printer to buy?

[letshavesome]

Hi all, not sure if this is in the right part of the site.

I'm looking for a printer which is fairly cheap and has low cost running. I am only going to print off vouchers and tickets (so mainly text based stuff) from the net. I've been told a printer which individual ink cartridges will work out cheaper. If I can save more money and fill it myself (which hopefully will be easy) that will be a bonus too. Cartridge world told me to look at the Canon PIXMA iP3600 and that each colour is £6 and black is £7. Not sure if this is cheap?

Any help would be great!!!!

Thanks

James

[vinnyT]

Have you ruled out a colour laser printer? If all you are doing is the tickets and vouchers a laser, while initially more expensive, would probably be cheaper (plus the toner does not dry out, unlike inkjets).

I have had a konica.minolta 2500w for two years now and still not had to replace the toner, and the output is excellent. There are plenty of good low cost lasers that would do for you.

[Saracen]

Running costs of lasers is a minefield to work out though, and it isn't simple with inkjets either.

Generally, mono lasers will be the cheapest, often by quite a long way. After that, it very much depends on which laser and which inkjet.

A good general guide is that the more the printer costs to buy, the less it'll cost to run.

Cheap colour lasers are often fairly cheap (for a colour laser, that is) to buy, but the bite comes when you have to replace toner cartridges. I was looking at an HP colour laser a few days ago. At £130, it was pretty cheap for a colour laser, got good reports on print quality and even came network-ready with built-in ethernet.

Wow, I thought. Then I looked a bit further and it turns out that the "starter" cartridges only do a few hundred pages, and then you get to buy a new set. And with four of them, at about £65-£70 EACH it was going to cost about double for a set of cartridges than it did to buy the printer.

The strategy seems obvious - get you committed to expensive consumables by subsidising the printer. And inkjets have been believed (though manufacturers deny it) to have been doing the same for years.

Another good rule of thumb is that to get best value, you need to have a pretty good idea of how many pages you'll print. If you only print a dozen or two pages a month, running costs probably aren't a big concern compared to the purchase cost of the printer, and the durability of the machine probably isn't either. Obviously, if you print thousands of pages a month, you need a printer with a duty cycle designed to cope with that or you'll be replacing the printer every few months too.

As for running costs, you need to look at the costs of the cartridges, but you also need to look at capacity. Which gives better value, a £5 cartridge that does 300 pages, or a £10 cartridge that does 1500? By the time you've printed 1500 pages, obviously the £10 cartridge does, because the cost per page is 6.67p per page (for ink), compared to 1.67p per page for the "cheaper" cartridge.

But what does the printer cost? If you have to pay £50 more for the printer with the higher cartridge capacity (and lower cost per page), you've got to print quite a lot of pages at a 1p per page saving to justify the extra £50 cost (5000 pages). So how long, at those costs, will it take to print 5000 pages? At 100 pages a month, a bit over 4 years ..... by which time, you'll probably be buying a new printer anyway. On the other hand, if you print 500 pages a month, you'll blow through that 5000 pages in 210 months, and be wishing you'd paid the extra £50 and bought the printer with the lower running costs.

One question worth considering is whether you need colour? If not, mono lasers are typically very cheap to run, with costs often around 1p per page. I bought a cheap (£130-ish) HOP mono laser a couple of years ago, and cartridges (which last several thousand pages) cost me about £15 (thanks to eBay ). I bought it specifically because it had a duplex capability and a lot of my printing need was double-sided forms. The time it saved was very valuable, and when printing reference documents, it even saved money by printing double-sided without me having to waste either time by manually turning pages around, or the cost of using double the paper .... and the extea storage space because I'd got twice as many sheets. It was that duplex print that sold that machine to me, and Canon certainly used to do a fairly cheap inkjet (Pixma 4000 IIRC) that had duplex too, though I haven't used it and don't know how w3ll it works.

Oh, and on running costs, be careful to check if it's only cartridges that need to be replaced. With some lasers, the cartridges are fairly cheap, but if (over the life of the machine) you have to replace fuser units, transfer belts, etc (as user-replaceable items) the running costs over the life cycle of the machine are nowhere near as low as they seem of you just look at cartridge costs.

A similar logic can apply to inkjets. Having separate cartridges can seem like it offers a considerable saving. But does it? Some printers do a cleaning purge every time you change cartridges, and that purge can use a significant quality of ink from all cartridges. So, unless you replace all cartridges at the same time, you risk wasting a good chunk of the capacity at least three times by changing each of the other cartridges in a four-cartridge machine.

And by the way, most inkjet machines will do a cleaning cycle when turned on, and when they've been idle for too long. So it's often a good idea (cost-wise) leave the machine turned onto print a dummy page periodically if the machine isn't used daily.That, by the way, is also another argument in favour of lasers since they don't waste toner by cleaning nozzles regularly, as they don't have any.

And all this, letshavesome, gives you a problem. Unless you've got up-to-date data from someone that's done an analytical study of the running costs of specific machines (and I have, but not recently enough to be able to comment on specific machines that are currently available), you're going to get no better than anecdotal opinion and finger-in-the-air opinions on running costs.

Like I said, it's a minefield.

[letshavesome]

I won't be using it much at all. Its things like tickets for trains or money off vouchers, that's all. So if there is a specific brand that I can get that would be very helpful. If I can refill the cartridges myself then that'll be even better!!

thanks

[Professor Frink]

I have the Canon PIXMA MP620 and love it. It's probably got too many bells and whistle for you though. The iP3600 looks okay for your needs (separate cartridges) and not too badly priced. My mate works at Cartridge World and recommend Canon because of the refill cost and quality.

[letshavesome]

Hey,

I was looking at these printers

Epson Stylus SX100 All-In-One Inkjet £30

Epson Stylus DX4400 All-in-One £40

Brother MFC-235C £42

Any good for what I'll be using them for?

thanks

[i4000]

I'm a fan of Epson printers, check out this sweet deal here http://hotukdeals.com/item/318895/ep...-printer-save/ £30 and you get a scanner for free .

For vouchers etc. there's no need to stick with the manufacturers' own ink, for replacement cartridges I always use ProJet inks from SVP (http://www.svp.co.uk), for this printer they are £1.32 each (just search for the Epson part numbers and the compatible cartridges show up) buy them in bulk (3 sets at a time) and it's still cheaper than the Epson stuff.

Just saw that you already clocked that printer in you last post