One of the most heavily used pieces of equipment in the Home Office is the printer. They come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and prices. Everyone has their own personal preference for a brand name. For many years, I used only HP printers, but today I am using the Canon models. The most popular brands include HP, Epson, Brother, Samsung, and Canon. Each brand has models that range in price from less than $40 to over $500. The model line ups include Laserjet Black, Laserjet Color, Inkjet Printing Only, Inkjet Multi-function, etc.
The following information is based upon my personal preferences for a multi-function inkjet printer. There may be other considerations and requirements that are important to you.
Back in the early 80s, Epson had the market cornered with the MX series of printers. These used a dot matrix print head and ribbons. A very popular unit – the MX80, cost about $400 new. Star Micronics (a Japanese company) came out with the knock off clone for about $200. The printer price wars had begun.
The business model for today’s printers is to get the customer hooked by offering low cost hardware. The company then makes their money by selling replacement print cartridges. A typical ink jet printer lasts anywhere from 1 to 5 years. Prices for the printers range from $40 to $200. All printer brands/models have some sort of problems – some worse than others. A replacement set of ink cartridges costs about $80. If you go through 3 sets of cartridges per year, then you are going to end up spending $720 over four years. If you use no-name replacements, then you can cut that cost to about $360. If you refill your cartridges, then the four year costs for ink would be about $72.
For a number of years, I used HP inkjet printers. HP made some of best test equipment, so it seemed logical to me that they would also make the best printers. In order to reduce the cost of ownership, I opted to refill my ink cartridges. I was pretty successful with the black ink units, but was never satisfied with the results of trying to refill the HP Tri-Color units. The process was always time consuming and messy. My $400 HP printer finally died and I decided to go with a Canon brand. I liked their design of separate ink cartridges for each color. So I only had to refill one color at a time. The process was very quick – less than one minute and was not messy. A cartridge refill costs less than $1 and I can get 10 – 20 refills per cartridge. I have never been able to actually determine the number of times that a cartridge can be refilled.
For refill ink, I use FillServ.
My current Canon MX-7520 printer has just died. The black printing abruptly stopped. Normally, if the cartridge is running low on ink, the printouts start getting very streaked. This did not happen. Just to confirm, I purchased a replacement black cartridge at OfficeMax for $20. That did not fix the problem. I then removed the print head and cleaned it. That did not help. So it was time to replace the printer. There are quite a few differences between the models if you look at the detailed specs. The TS8220 appeared to have similar specs and was on sale at BestBuy for $99. I had been refilling the MX7520 cartridges for 4 years, so it would have been time to buy a new set of cartridges, had the printer not failed.
So the real cost of the new printer is $50. No bad for a unit that should give me another four years of life.
I usually print about 500 pages of pager per year. Black printing makes up 80% of use. If I bought two complete cartridge sets each year, my total cost for ink cartridges over four years would be about $700.
Things to consider when replacing a printer:
- My Canon printers use 6 different ink cartridges. The cost of standard cartridge set for my current MX-7520 from Office Max is $87. The cost of a standard cartridge set for a TS-8220 is $87.
- The ink cartridges that come with a new printer are usually not full cartridges – they are somewhere between 25% to 50% of a standard replacement cartridge set.
- If you use standard OEM cartridges, then it sometimes only costs a few dollars more to buy a brand new printer as opposed to purchasing an ink cartridge set for your current printer.
- There is a substantial difference in the cost of printing between some printer models. Example: A new HP printer may only cost about $0.01/page, where the cost per page for a Canon printer can be $0.09.
- Color printing always cost more than black/white printing.
- The cost of printing with Laserjet printers is substantially less than the cost of blank ink for an ink jet printer.
- HP printers seem to last longer than any other brands – i.e. length of time before printer fails and has to be replaced.
- At some point, it can become very difficult to find ink cartridges for older ink jet printers.
- The manufacturer’s estimated printed sheets/cartridge is usually much greater that what you actual get.
- Color cartridges will eventually dry up.
Here is a link to a Canon web site that gives the page yields for different printer models and ink cartridge models.
https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/groups/page-yield