Self Help Series: Make an Informed Printer Purchase

Table of Contents for Self Help Series: Make an Informed Printer Purchase

  1. Self Help Series: Make an Informed Printer Purchase
  2. Comparison  - $50 Printer vs. $150 Printer
Submitted by Bill Gilbert on Wed, 06/16/2010 - 09:59

 

 

So, you need a printer? Over the nearly 30 years of working in the computer field (and about 10 years in retail computer sales and service), I can honestly say that I’ve seen just about all of it. Examples like “Wow, that $39 special at Wal-Mart looks good.” or “I need a high-quality photo printer, so I’ll just spend $300 – it says ‘Photo Printer’ on the box.” How about “Well, I’ve got kids who print…” The bridge between office printer, home-office printer, and personal printers is long gone; Now it all depends on your needs. Get ready to put your thinking cap on as we dig deeper and really think about all this, you may be surprised by the facts.

 

HP Printers

 

 

You can certainly purchase a $50 printer to print your documents and photos and they will look good. But how many pages will you get from the cartridge? And just wait until you see the price of the replacement cartridge! But do you need to purchase a $500 printer just to get a decent amount of pages in that cartridge? And what about those $300 color laser printers; will those do the job? Laser printers have been renowned for being cost efficient in offices small and large. But is a laser printer cost-effective for home-office or residential use?

 

This article, and ones to come, were not written to fully cover the 400+ printers you could buy; rather, this is to show you how much it would cost to operate each printer based upon the cost per page. By downplaying the prices and capabilities of the printer and focusing on the ink and toner cartridges, I hope to steer you into making a better selection in the area of printing.

 

My methods:

1.) I limited my research to focus on Hewlett-Packard printers only. HP is the largest manufacturer of printing technology for home, home office, and small-to-medium business consumers. While there are many other printer manufacturers in the market, I chose to compare Rome apples to Red Delicious apples, instead of bananas to grapes.

 

2.) I based my findings solely on manufacturer’s ratings of the various cartridges – seeing as all of the manufacturers’ do put the ratings on their respective websites (though some of them do take a bit of investigative research to find them).

 

3.) Wherever a ‘High-Capacity’ cartridge option was available, I also included it in the research. While the much higher yield is desired, as you will see, the price offset of some of the cartridges might not give you the savings you seek – again, this is based upon your printing needs and requirements.

 

4.) All prices are Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Pricing at press time. In the case of some of the color cartridges, where a ‘Value Pack’ containing all of the necessary cartridges was available, that pricing was used and is noted.

 

5.) Page yield is the number of pages a user can print with a given printer and cartridge, based on the ISO/IEC 24711 standard for determining inkjet printer page yields as well as the ISO/IEC 19752 and ISO/IEC 19798 standards for determining monochrome and color laser printer page yields.

None of the printers in this series were actually reviewed in-hand. Rather, the research done was through years of experience and thorough investigation. Ultimately, we will look into a few comparisons between prices, technologies, and also throw a rather high-end old printer into the mix. Enough of the hype – it’s time to get to the meat and present numbers in our first printer dual.

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