Time to dump your inkjet?

One of the great irony of owning a inkjet printer – also known as bubblejet printer – is that its refill cartridge would often cost as much if not more, as new printer itself, making it cheaper to own but expensive to run hardware.

In an recent article in Techworld, PC Advisor has indicated the total cost of the ownership of such an inkjet printer to be as much as twice as against color laser printer owned over a period of 3 years.

Everyone knows colour inkjet printers are cheap: you can buy one for £25, and they're given away with new PCs in the consumer market.

But everyone also knows they're expensive to run. Depending on the manufacturer and model, a new set of ink cartridges will often cost as much as the printer. In tests run in 2003, Which? magazine famously compared the cost of HP’s ink – at £1.70 per millilitre – with vintage 1985 Dom Perignon at £0.23 per millilitre.

Purchase price

Which? came to the conclusion that unless printing high-quality photos was your priority, on the running costs of consumables alone, you were better off with a colour laser.

But what about the purchase price? Which? ran its tests two years ago, when even entry-level colour lasers cost between £500 and £700, whereas an entry-level colour laser is now around the £300 mark.

Total cost of ownership

In a report aimed at helping schools decide the best-value printers to buy, Sheffield City Council calculated total cost of ownership (TCO) over the lifetime of a printer.

Adding up all the running costs – ink or toner, paper, maintenance and even electricity – SCC worked out that a colour inkjet costs a minimum of £0.38 per page to run; a colour laser costs a minimum of £0.07 per page.

If you print, let’s say 50 pages a week over 50 weeks of the year, using SCC’s cost per page figures, the running cost of the inkjet for a year will be £950, and for the laser £175.

Now put these figures into a simple TCO table that compares an entry-level inkjet with a colour laser that costs 16 times more than the inkjet to buy.

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