Jeff Rickard

I know I’ve gotten behind on my posts for 1760 MortgageGuide, so I decided to submit a little something about the cost of printing from your home office. I’ve worked with a lot of Realtors and Mortgage Professionals, and I know that they tend to do a lot of marketing straight out of their home offices but I wonder how many do the math and figure out exactly what it’s costing to print those fliers on your handy-dandy inkjet.

Just about everyone has owned an inkjet printer at one time, and experiences differ from person to person as to how well they liked or disliked that printer. I had an Epson several years ago that I used so infrequently the cartridges almost always dried up before I had the chance to expend them, the print head always seemed to be clogged when I did want to print and then I would get these weird stripes down the page. Not the best experience in the world and it put me off Epson’s for years.

Working in several marketing departments throughout my professional career, I’ve had a chance to work with a lot of different kinds of printers and print technologies, from an old black and white laser printer that boasted a smoking fast 1 page per minute print speed over an Appletalk connection, to a Xerox Phaser that used solid wax blocks of ink and boasted 30 pages per minute.

Inkjet printers are cheap. They’re practically given away at every store that stocks them - heck, I saw a stack of HP inkjet’s at Big Lots just before Christmas and they were $20 each - $20! The catch is that they’re given away because the manufacturer knows they will make their money back on the consumables ten fold. It’s kind of like a cell phone - they are given away to get you into the plan and once you’re signed up, everything you really want to do is an ‘extra’ charge.

Laser printers are more money out of pocket up front, but tend to save you money over time as you use them because the per page cost is so low when compared to an inkjet printer. On top of that, the quality of laser over inkjet can’t be denied. If you are pushing a lot of marketing materials out of your home office, you would be surprised at how much cleaner, crisper and more professional looking a piece printed from a laser printer will look when compared to something off of an inkjet.

Let’s take a look at some numbers - this is from an article on SmallBusinssComputing.com.

“While the (inkjet) printers are almost given away, the refills bring in a fortune for the big-printer, original-equipment manufacturers (OEM). According to Lyra Research of Newton, Mass., the cartridge replacement market is now worth $21 billion annually. HP, for example, makes over $10 billion a year from ink cartridge sales, and Lexmark earns over $2 billion from ink supplies, more than half its total revenue.

Shulman gives the example of a Canon i320 Color Bubble Jet Printer. The cost for the hardware can be as little as $55, depending on discounts and where you buy it. The average cost of the ink from Canon is $19 but the yield from that, he says, is a measly 170 pages. Even if you print very little, the cost quickly adds up:

Seven pages a day times 300 days equals 2100 pages — an ink bill of $235.60 per year. If you own the printer for three years, the cost of cartridges comes to over $700 or about 13 times the original cost of the printer. For the Epson Stylus C62, Shulman concludes that the ink bill would be over $1000 for three year’s worth of printing.

Of course, seven pages a day is a conservative estimate — some SMB businesses print a lot more. Let’s say your company prints 50 pages a day, 300 days a year. Using the above example, that equates to printing 15,000 pages annually. At that same rate, your annual ink cartridge bill would total $1,596.”

Okay -so, using the first set of numbers - 2100 pages in a year at $235.60 = $0.11 per page.

Using the second set of numbers, 15,000 pages in a year at $1,596 = $0.10 per page (round up from the .006 and you’re at $0.11).

Most commercial copy places offer better pricing than that!

Have you ever looked at what you are spending on inkjet cartridges in a year? Is it anywhere near the numbers above? Of course, it all depends on how many pages you are printing and how many cartridges you’re buying. Now, let’s take a look at the laser printers numbers from that same article:

“In comparison to ink jets, laser printers are quieter, faster and remarkably hassle free. But it’s the math that makes them stand out. The numbers are as follows:

An HP laser printer with an estimated machine cost of $400, combined with a $115 toner cartridge, yields 8000 pages. Printing 40,000 pages costs you $400 plus $460 for the ink for a total of $860. A Brother 1440 laser printer works out at about $930 for the same number of pages. That comes to around two cents a page, or eight times less than an inkjet printer.

SpencerLab, a digital-color laboratory in Melville, New York, tested the HP LaserJet 1320 and the Dell 1700 Laser Printers. According to Catherine Fiasconaro, director of SpencerLab, even when you calculate the cost of the toner and the drum (which has to be replaced about every 20,000 pages), HP high-yield monochrome cartridges cost about two cents per print, with Dell costing slightly more.

Adding to the allure of the laser, printer prices are continuing to fall and the range of available products is steadily mounting. According to Trina Wolfgram, a marketing manager for HP, the HP Color LaserJet 2600n prints eight pages-per-minute, at 600 x 600 dots-per-inch (dpi) resolution. It has a recommended maximum monthly volume of 35,000 pages. Its estimated street price is $399.

If you don’t require that much printing volume, the monochrome HP LaserJet 1020 — rated at a maximum monthly volume of 5,000 pages — prints up to 15 pages-per-minute and offers 600 x 600 dpi output. It has an estimated U.S. street price of $179.”

Again, looking at the sample numbers, a laser jet could produce 40,000 sheets in a year at a cost of $860 - that’s just $0.02 per print!

I think most people feel laser printers are a luxury purchase due to the higher cost of the machine itself coupled with the cost of the toner cartridges and that puts people off and drives them to the inkjet market where they perceive themselves to be getting a ‘deal’. But it doesn’t take long for your inkjets cost, purchased at a steal, to catch up to you via consumables if the numbers above are accurate. In the long run, a laser printer will save you more money and produce a better product.

Again, I hope this has been informative.

~P

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