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