THE TRUE COST OF PRINTING
Only time will reveal exactly how much your new printer will cost over its lifetime, but analysing likely usage provides an estimate
The upfront purchase price of a printer is only a small part of the true cost of printing. The figures that will hit your wallet hard repeatedly over the full length of your ownership have more to do with the costs of ink.
It’s impossible to model these accurately before you buy. Not only will your estimates of future printing be guesswork, but the claimed capacity of an ink or toner cartridge will be stated in terms of ISO-standard pages, which might not reflect the kind of print jobs that you run. Then there’s the fact that some printers, particularly inkjets, waste a certain amount of ink in cleaning and declogging the print heads.
All the same, we’ve given it our best shot to offer some idea of how much each printer might actually set you back over the years.
To do so, we’ve taken the upfront purchase price of the printer and combined that with the costs of printing 2,500, 5,000, 7,500 and 10,000 pages, with one third of them colour and two thirds black-andwhite. Many businesses will print a smaller proportion of colour pages, while home users might print more.
As the figures below show, there’s a huge disparity. Cheaper consumer models, such as the HP Envy 7640 and Canon Pixma TS9050, could cost you almost twice as much as some more expensive models once you reach 5,000 pages. The Epson EcoTank ET-2600 might hit you to the tune of £224 on purchase, but it could save you hundreds of pounds over its lifespan if you print a lot. Some lasers and business inkjets, meanwhile, work out cheaper than the lower-cost inkjets over the long term.
Bear in mind, however, that many home users may print less than 1,000 pages per year, putting total usage over a five-year lifespan at less than 5,000, while business printers could easily have monthly workloads of over 2,500 pages per month.
The message? If you’re buying a printer for home use, a cheaper model with higher running costs may still work out; for those buying a printer for business, it’s better to pay more upfront if it saves costs later.