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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

Say you have a kid in elementary school. Say you need to print something for a school project or even a home craft she's doing urgently (because if course kids don't plan long term - else they wouldn't be kids). BW prints look ugly. Color lasers are crazy expensive. Inkjets suck but the come with reasonably priced nice colour and photo paper printing options with a scanner built in. The inks are expensive but you're not printing much anyway. It's a hell of a lot more convenient to just fire a print from the printer at home than check if the nearest print shop is open and mount an expedition

(Source: Switched from laser to inkjet)

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> Color lasers are crazy expensive.

Not really. Honestly, I find the space taken by the duplexing color laser all-in-one I have from Brother a bigger deal than the up-front price was, but it's fast, excellent quality, and total cost of printing is much lower than a cheap ink-jet.

Color laser printers are not expensive, but their toner is not that cheap. I think it was estimated to be about 15 cents per color page. If you know better, do let me know - that's what's keeping me away from them.

I think the goal for consumers here is to look for a printer with a separate black cartridge and print most of your output in B+W mode and not full color.

it looks like brother's do? I'm looking at HL-L3210CW ($199).

Most inkjets are more expensive than 15 cents a page even if you don’t count the loss from dried cartridges, priming and cleaning cycles etc.

Toner alone looks to is about $0.10/color page by rated capacity for first party toner, for compatible third-party cartridges, a bit less.

If the printer uses four-color toner so it has pure black, your cost for B&W pages will be significantly less.

> Say you need to print something for a school project. BW prints look ugly.

I admit my kid is only in second grade so far, but I disagree with you that color is mandatory. We've been very happy with the B&W laser.

I picked up a Canon color laser for $180 last Black Friday. They’re way cheaper than they used to be.

Good to know! Will consider for my next replacement

They are not that expensive anymore. You can buy a Brother HL-L3210CW for $199, or you can get a second hand printer (I paid $5 for a Fuji Xerox CM205fw).

Color lasers are not crazy expensive anymore. I bought a Xerox color laser about 8 years ago for under $300. It's one of the best hardware purchases in terms of value for money I've ever made.

Don't buy modern Xeroxes though! I have a Versalink with huge useless OS that takes forever to boot and errors that require multiple reboot to 'fix'. Guy on the phone said it was because of drivers on client machines (what sort of crap printer crashes when there is a wrong driver installed?) but evrn with his updated version it hasn't fully gone away. I've had Xerox for 20 years but this will be the last one.

That's unfortunate to hear. Thanks for the info.

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