A well-informed consumer is a wiser consumer.  There are many cheap printers on the market. However, the purchase price of a printer really doesn’t tell you much about your cost of printing. After all, you need to buy paper and ink cartridges to keep your printer printing.
Unless you do very little printing, you will pay more for your paper, cartridges and other running costs (service contracts, electricity, depreciation, etc) than you would spend by employing professionals to do the job for you. If you look at a printer advertisement, you’ll learn about some of the following items: the number of pages printed per minute in text and colour, the time to print a certain size photo in black and white or colour, the number of cartridges or tanks the printer holds, the quality of the photo reproduction, the and resolution.
However, in most printer advertisements, you will not see the high cost of the premium paper needed to achieve the high quality printing that your cheap printer may produce. The replacement cost for a black or colour cartridge is nowhere to be found.
About the only thing you will see with a dollar sign is the low purchase price of the printer. This can be very misleading. As a consumer, you need to know that the major printer manufacturers are selling their printers at or below cost. They have adopted the marketing practice used in other industries. That is, they sell their initial product at cost or below, and expect to make their real profits on the high mark up of their consumable supplies or services. | SMALL EXAMPLE OF CARTRIDGE TESTS CONDUCTED by Business Equipment Research & Test Laboratory (BERTL) AVERAGE YIELD BY PRINTER TYPE, CARTRIDGE MANUFACTURER AND TEST PATTERN, EACH YIELD VALUE REPRESENTS THE AVERAGE OF MULTIPLE CARTRIDGES |
| HP Advertised Yield (What they say you get) | HP Designed IDC Test Pattern (HP claim 5% coverage) | BERTL Test Pattern (generated at 5.34% pixels on ISO A4) | 16% Page Cover (based on pixels sent to print) Now Fairly Typical due to Internet and other graphical documents. | | LASERJET II / III -92295A | 4,000 pages | 3,135 pages | 1,843 pages | 10.56 cents | | LASERJET IIISi / 4Si -92291A | 10,250 pages | 7,936 pages | 5,514 pages | 7.05 cents | | LASERJET 4 / 4+ / 5 -92298X | 8,800 pages | 7,826 pages | 5,258 pages | 6.12 cents | Note: The above cost per page covers only the cost of the toner cartridge. On top of this price you must add the cost of maintenance kits (fuses, etc) and any service contract. (Courtesy of Carmel Rowley, BERTL/Digital Times.)
The main point we want to make is this: The real cost of printing is not the purchase price of the printer. You, the consumer, should be informed of the on-going or real cost of printing. Then you can decide how much you really want to pay for your printing needs. - Cost of ink
- Cost of paper
- Time your employees spend to print
- Repair and Maintenance and service contract
- Depreciation
- Wasted paper when something does not print properly
PLEASE DO YOUR OWN CALCULATIONS AND SEE HOW MUCH YOUR BUSINESS SPENDS ON PRINTING AND PHOTOCOPYING.
YOU CAN CUT YOUR EXPENSES BY EMPLOYING US TO DO THE JOB FOR YOU.
Our commercial printing services offer printing at affordable rates. We are also well-equipped and have the knowledge to run printing machines to ensure they produce quality prints and affordable rates.
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