If you buy a consumer printer.
Business printers exist, and for those you pay a steeper initial price, but then the cost per page goes dramatically down.
My Epson workforce original cartridges seem to last forever.
Business printers exist, and for those you pay a steeper initial price, but then the cost per page goes dramatically down.
My Epson workforce original cartridges seem to last forever.
I had an OKI black and white printer for about a decade before it died. I printed many, many thousands of pages on it. (It was in a period where I was doing a lot of research, and I prefer to read research papers printed out.) In those 10 years, I never finished the original toner cartridge. I paid around €200 for it.
I'm on a Brother black and white laser printer now. I checked my Amazon orders, and I ordered my current toner cartridge in 2015. The printer was €98. Toner is around €20. It has network capability and is full duplex.
They're black and white only, but in the rare case that I need something printed in color, I'd usually rather have it done at a copy shop for a few cents since the quality is far higher. (If I'm printing in color, I usually care about such things, but for day-to-day printing, black and white is sufficient.)
I actually bought the printer after 5 years of pain with an HP inkjet printer. I had ordered two new cartridges for it, supposedly original HP. After plugging them in, the printer tells me they are not “genuine”. Speaking to support of the cartridge distributer, I’m told I need to rub the chip at the back with a soft cloth (!), which didn’t seem to work. I called HP support who told me it is a firmware error and then I need to do a factory reset. Problem is the printer is now stuck in a doom loop where it will complain about ingenuity of the cartridges and ask me to inset a new cartridge before I can access the system menu, but I didn’t have any replacements (as the empty cartridge wouldn’t work either). I ended up throwing out the printer. For the sake of your own well-being and wallet, don’t buy HP printers!
Super happy with it, I print a lot of postage labels and other stuff with it.
"Prosumer" printers are pretty good, regardless of technology, I think.
I own an Epson Workforce Pro WF-5620, it's an inkjet MFP, does full duplex for both printing an scanning, wifi connected, scans to google drive/dropbox, etc.
I shed about EUR 220 (250$) for it back in 2016, and I just changed the color cartridges for the first time about one month ago (I had changed the black one about one year ago, and it's 80% full). The newer, larger ones, will probably last forever.
While it IS possible to buy compatible ink for a lower price tag, I think the cartridge price (around ~30 EUR for the XL version) is totally reasonable for the amount of printing it provides.
I must say that the cartridge price increased a bit over the years, but that seems true for most (all?) models.
Here's a secret of printer procurement, at least for laser printers: Usually, the more expensive the business printer is, the less it costs to print per page (including toner). With even a moderate amount of use, you save money by purchasing a better printer up front. That is, you can spend your money on a better printer, or spend even more money on toner. It's that obvious a choice.
Just do the math: Estimate pages per month (your old printer may have a log). For various printes, look up the price of a toner cartridge and the number of pages of print it supplies. With a spreadsheet you can calculate the lowest lifetime cost, and I bet it's for a better printer than you expected.
I printed about 50 graphs+text pages on new cartridges, now one's low the rest are about half.
WTF.