Printing: inkjet or laser?

Thought for the Day

“You can complain because a rose has thorns, or rejoice because thorns have a rose.”

~Abraham Lincoln  

Q: What’s more economical in the long run as far as the cost of a single printed page, an inkjet or a laser printer? Or is it less expensive to have your copies done at a copy place? 

A: While the average per piece cost of a color copy made on a laser copier is considerably less, the question of whether it is better to get one than the other depends more on how often you need to make copies and what quality you need.

If you are in the market for copies or photos once in a while and not dozens at a time it might actually make more sense or have an inkjet printer as opposed to a laser printer.  An inkjet printer is less expensive to buy and maintain.  Inkjet printers range from under $100 to $1000+ while laser jet printers range from $300 to $6000.  The cost of cartridges is also an important factor.  A typical laser cartridge may cost $70 and yield 2500 pages, or about 2.9 cents per page.  A typical inkjet cartridge may cost $35 but yields only about 250 pages, resulting in a per piece cost of 14 cents per page.  Obviously the actual cost of the pages you print will depend on the printer you have and the cost of the cartridges.  I looked mine up on line and the manufacturer says a black and white copy on my laser costs $.025 while a color copy is about $.06 per page.  My inkjet printer costs $.09 for black and white and $.142 for each color page I print. As far as printing color copies at a copy shop, I recently priced an 850 piece mailing at one of the big stores and was quoted at more than $400 for the job. 

Having done the research now, I changed my primary printer to the laser.  The office prints many copies every day so even though it seems that it’s more expensive to operate due to the high cost of the cartridges, the cost per print is a lot less.  Another nice feature of a laser printer is that each color has it’s own cartridge, so if your logo has a lot of a single color in it, that cartridge can be replaced separately, unlike an inkjet printer having a single cartridge for all the colors.  If you use a lot of one color the rest of your ink gets wasted in an inkjet.

An additional note when printing photos.  There are separate cartridges for some printers meant especially for photos. The cost per photo is from $.25 to $.49 each.  And that doesn’t include the price of the special paper you need to have a photo printed.  In that case it might be wise to see what it costs to print your photos at your local kiosk.  Often the kiosks have 4”x6” photo deals for as low as $.15.  If you want larger prints however, doing it at home is still the least expensive way.       

Have a question, or is there something you’ve always wondered about?  Ask Madalyn invites your questions.

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