Small colour laser printer, or inkjet with continuous ink system?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I need a new printer for the home. It needs to be capable of printing in full colour.

I have a sort of love-hate relationship with inkjets - I know they’re evil, wasteful things that exist solely for the purpose of creating a drug-like dependence on refills that are dished out by the [del]dealer[/del] manufacturer in tiny, expensive portions like some absurd sort of caviar.

And I get the conventional wisdom that laser printers are cheaper, but…

… Looking around, I’m not sure that this conventional wisdom about laser printers actually holds true for the small-scale colour models intended for home/small office use. The consumables for these seem pretty pricey.

Shopping around, it looks to be about £125 for a ‘rainbow pack’ of toners for the Small Samsung laser printer I looked at - with a yield of 1500 pages - so about 8 pence per page.

Compare this to a rainbow pack of colour ink carts for an HP printer at £13 for 175 pages - that’s about 7.5 pence per page. Really, about the same price as the small-scale Laser.

And if I get either an inkjet with built in continuous ink system, or an aftermarket bolt-on, the cost per page of inkjets drops to a quarter of the above.

So it doesn’t seem like it can be true that laser printers are more economical than inkjets, at the small end of the market (I expect this probably changes for laser printers where the toner comes in bottles that just plug in, or for mono lasers, but that’s not really comparing apples with apples).

Inkjets waste a lot of ink keeping the heads clean, but then laser printers waste toner (there’s a waste toner container to catch it).

Am I wrong? If so, please show your workings

2

Two words: refill kit.

If you get an inkjet get one that you can use a refill kit on. It makes them vastly more economical.

3

What inkjet manufacturers don’t tell you (but you correctly surmise) is that they use ink even when they’re not printing. The heads have to be clean and moist. You also need to look at your expected coverage. Printing text assumes 5% coverage; are you going to be printing coloured text or presentations or photographs? And how are the manufacturers calculating their cost per page?

IME laser printers do not waste significant amounts of toner.

Which Samsung printer were you considering?

4

The CLP-325w (along with a number of other similarly sized offerings from other manufacturers)

5

The small ones seem to. I think maybe it’s just that laser printing gets less economical the more you try to scale it down. The Samsung CLP-325 requires a waste toner bottle change every 5000 pages or so (link)

6

Yeah - that’s why I’m thinking of the continuous ink system options - then, refilling doesn’t even involve removing the cartridges - you just inject ink into an external bulk bottle for each colour.

7

Every time I’ve had to change a waste toner bottle, it had very little toner in it.

You might note this review of the CLP 325 on Amazon:

8

Didn’t work well when the boss wanted to save money on refills. Guy who do it for a living admitted at the time to a 70% success rate. Mine was about 50%.
The carts become damaged over time and don’t make contact with the electronics.
YMMV with home use.
We got an HP laser from Ebay of all places, for home use about six months ago and haven’t replaced any toner yet.

9

After Christmas I bought a Brother color laser printer at Staples for $80 and it has been fantastic. We don’t do a ton of printing, though, probably less than 200 pages since then.

10

I think the laser vs. inkjet option lies in printing frequency. If you print everyday then inkjet is okay. If you print less frequently then laser is the way to go. When I had an inkjet I would always have to clean the inker before I could print – waste of time, waste of ink, and a general pain in the ass.

With Laser, I just turn it on and print. It might have to warm up and stuff, but I don’t have to babysit it.

11

Epson has been advertising that their line of workforce printers have a lower per page cost than a laser.
I bought a WP-4530 all-in-one.
The ink tanks are huge compared to other inkjets I have used and the cost less.

12

I used a number of printers in a volunteer job I had a few years ago. I developed several rules based on printing 25000+ pages/year through MANY printers.
[ul]
[li]Use a laser printer. More pages, less hassle.[/li][li]If you are doing simple B/W (And don’t need a scanner/copier), get a Brother HP 2040 or something in that series of printers.[/li][li]If you need a Multi-Function, get the Brother MFC 7840 or that series.[/li][li]If you need a color printer, and care about the image quality, DO NOT get a Brother. Go for the Samsung CLP-315W series.[/li][li]Do not use Epson, HP, Canon, or Kodak, unless you have access to an HP Laserjet 4000 series printer. Those you can run forever.[/li][/ul]

My reasoning:
[ul]
[li]I killed 3 Epson Printers in under a week. And spent my entire time replacing cartridges.[/li][li]Canon made a good printer, but it was slow. [/li][li]HP’s used a TON of ink, or had much smaller quantities in the reserve. [/li][li]The Brother color printer was huge, heavy, and would not color match. Purples came out pink, no matter what settings we tried.[/li][/ul]

I have a Brother HL-2040 that I bought nearly a decade ago. I’ve replaced the drum kit 3 times. Never gives me problems.

The Brother MFC printer I have is over 6 years old. On it’s third drum. A bit kludgy for scanning, but excellent for printing.

The Samsung Color is new; just 2 years old. Managed 2500 95% coverage pages in it’s first weekend before toner began to run out; but you can replace each color individually.

Hope that helps!!

Eli

13

Yes, well, every refill kit we’ve bought have said rather plainly that you can only refill the cartridges so many times, everything eventually wears out.

That’s why you do research to figure out which printers/cartridges are easiest to fill and go with those, to maximize your success rate.

And it wasn’t for home use, originally, it was for my spouse’s business back when he was still able to work.