Supplies on demand: subs, tanks and alternatives
Almost any printer has ongoing running costs. How do you work them out, and how do you keep them low?
Unlike most other devices, buying a printer commits you to some level of ongoing running costs. Whether that’s simply paper, an ink subscription, or a huge stack of maintenance items, those costs can quickly add up. And crucially, not all printers are equal.
Look inside a typical inkjet and you’ll usually find at least two ink cartridges. The “starter” cartridges ones that came in the box might last for as little as 100 pages, some even less, after which you’ll need to replace them. Some inkjets have four, five, six or even ten cartridges to keep an eye on. There might also be a replaceable maintenance box, which is essentially a tank to catch drips of wasted ink.
Laser printers offer a different consumable conundrum. The simplest mono devices take a single consumable, combining black toner with an imaging drum, but a colour laser will have four: black, cyan, magenta and yellow. Where the cartridges don’t also include a drum, you may need to buy separate replacements, although typically not more than every 10,000 to 30,000 pages. There may also be a waste toner bottle lasting around 15,000 pages and – in printers designed for heavy office use – replacement transfer belts or fuser units.
We calculate the running costs of a printer by finding every consumable at the lowest price possible, which we divide by the number of pages it’s expected to last. Finally, we add these up to give an estimated cost per page.
Manufacturers work out their toner and ink cartridge capacities by running a set of ISO tests. You won’t see exactly the same results in real life – in particular, you can expect to go through more ink and toner if you print a lot of photos. However, because manufacturers follow the same calculations, their figures should let you make a fair comparison between two different printers.
There is a big caveat, though: lasers and inkjets use different test standards, and their estimated running costs may not be directly comparable. One extra consideration is that a laser printer is ready to pick up wherever it left off, while an inkjet may need some head cleaning if it’s been left off for a few weeks. If you’re buying a printer that might spend months unused, we’d recommend a laser.
Print more, pay less
With all this in mind, how do you minimise what you pay to keep your printer running? The first and most important advice is to consider consumables when you buy your printer. Always investigate the price and availability of highcapacity supplies, and give serious weighting to printers with lower costs.
If you’re buying an inkjet, by far the best way to pay less in the long run is to choose a device with refillable tanks, such as those made by Epson or Canon. While these cost more up front, their running costs can be less than a tenth of a conventional inkjet, meaning that unless you print only tiny quantities, you’re likely to save money in the long term.
Inkjet makers including HP offer the alternative of an ink subscription, where you pay a fixed amount to cover a certain number of pages per month.
Subscriptions are typically cheaper than buying ink cartridges yourself, with the extra advantage that the printer automatically orders new ink as it’s needed. HP is currently selling inkjets with several months of free Instant Ink, potentially amounting to thousands of free pages, but the service’s long-term costs aren’t as low as those for an ink tank device.
Whenever there’s a choice, we always recommend buying the highest-capacity toners or ink cartridges available. While these cost more, this is almost always offset by the extra pages you’ll get
– it’s almost unheard of for the cost per page to be higher. Similarly, we recommend shopping around: find the part number, and use it to search Google and online resellers. Don’t just opt for Amazon. While it can offer the lowest prices, we often find that uk.insight.com and ebuyer.com are as cheap or cheaper.
You may also be wondering whether you could save money by choosing third-party supplies, rather than genuine branded ones. It’s not generally something we recommend, particularly for an inkjet. While some supplies do promise a lower cost per page, we’ve experienced leaks and failures from third-party inks and toners. In past testing, some thirdparty inks have caused blocked print nozzles, while others haven’t lasted as long as the OEM inks we tested. Significantly, the colour performance of non-genuine inks can be very poor, leading to weak photo printing, and pictures that fade more quickly.
However, it’s your legal right to use non-genuine inks in a printer without invalidating your warranty. That said, manufacturers can refuse to fix any damage they cause; for example, if a cartridge leaks and destroys some circuitry. Also note that some product features may not be available; in the case of HP, you can’t enable HP+ services on a printer without agreeing not to use third-party supplies.
“Lasers and inkjets use different test standards, and their estimated running costs may not be directly comparable”