Printer Schemes

[JamesB]

Originally Posted by Flint

At a glance, the OP appears to be how many businesses pay for printer/copier/multi-funtion units--that is, lease the equipment, pay a monthly fee per the actual use of the machine and for toner, parts, service. That's toner, not ink. Laser units are more expensive up front and less expensive to keep running, regardless of purchase model. Ink printers I refer to as an 'easy-bake oven' because that is about how robust and practical they are.

I remember the good old days before the ink jet manufacturers started to supply printers with low fill "starter" ink jet cartridges. In those days it was cheaper to buy a new base level Lexmark printer than buy a set of replacement inks for your already owned Lexmark printer. No, they didn't profiteer from the ink sales.

I switched to LASER printers for my black and white home printing bout 15 years ago (one Epson that died after a lightning strike hit the power lines, a used HP4+ that cost me $75 and was still going strong when I gave it away in 2008, and a Dell 1720dn), and really haven't looked back.

Just before Christmas, we needed to do a run to Staples to buy new ink cartridges for our home inkjet printers to print our Christmas cards, and came home with a Brother MFC-9125CN Color Laser Fax/Scan/Printer instead.

Even with the short fill "starter" toner cartridges that came with the printer, with the printer on special at $250+tax, the 1000 page rating for each of the four "starter cartridges" (about 1/2 to 2/3 of normal cartridge capacity) indicated that the entire printer was going to cost less than just the cost of ink cartridges that our aging and more and more unreliable ink-jet printers would need to achieve the same number of pages. It was a no brainer. We're still running on the "starter cartridges", with the black indicating it is low and we should think about replacing it soon. I have a new 2200 page black cartridge ready to go in.

As for the per page costing of printers, where I used to work, over a decade ago, our office copier was on a 1c/page maintenance contract which covered all repairs and consumables except paper. We'd get regular phone calls asking for the counter number. With paper costing about 1c/page, we had a simple formula for costing print runs.

When the copier counter hit 1/2 million pages, then the price/page went up to about 2c/page ... to reduce our copying costs back to 1c/page we'd need to lease/buy a new copier. At 1 million pages, we were given the option of paying for all maintenance and consumables or buying a new copier.