Cheapest Printers to run

Bootman 650

Bootman 650

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Cheshire, UK.
Often my customers ask me to find them a reliable Inkjet printer that is efficient to run. Cheap Inks that don't run out after 5 minutes!

I've tried most brands and I'm usually unsuccessful. (I've always used lasers but obviously some people don't want to pay that much for a printer)

What do you recommend?
 
The HP Officejets and the Brother business inkjets seem like pretty decent machines; don't own one myself, but a few of my customers have those, and they seem pretty happy with them.
 
Back when I did service work on Epson line of ink jet printers I found that many ppl would buy the units then run them out of ink. They would then return the units to the place of purchase explaining that the printer no longer worked properly and usually would walk out of the store with another NEW printer to which they would them do the same thing again - run it out of ink and return it. Unfortunatly, Epson was (and might still be) offering a nice warranty period which would allow these people to continually use up the ink, then return the units as faulty.

Ink jet printers are CHEAP because the manufacturer depends on its ink sales to make up the slack (read: make profit) from the sales.

If you are going to purchase or sell ink jet printers try to stay away from the low-end consumer models.
 
Inkjets, especially HP are money makers for the companies that build them. At around $25 a cartridge, HP makes more profit from ink than anything else
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/03/16/ink-is-black-gold-for-hp.aspx

Unless they need color, I would rather recommend a laser for around $100 than an inkjet. Byt the time the first toner cartridge runs out, it's paid for itself.
And if they only print color occaisionaly, then a cheap inkjet on the side works well.
 
To the home-based businesses I tend to talk them into a laser printer and once they know the ins and outs they seem to be happy to go ahead with it. Once they've been using it for a week or so they're forever telling me how happy they are with it.

Obviously for home users that aren't printing vast amounts a laser wouldn't be ideal.

Thanks for the replies!
 
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I know the price of an inkjet is hard to get over. However, As others have said the cost of the ink is unbelievable. I always try and sell my customers a good color laser printer. I recommend the Brother line of laser printers because they are a hungry company. They want to expand and take on HP pretty bad. So, You get a really decent printer.

In comparison, The average inkjet cartridge lasts about 300 pages where the typical brother laser toner cartridge runs about 1500 to 2000 pages in typical use. The toner I buy on ebay to get a good price and its worked pretty good for me. My first black replacement happened at about 1170 pages. Most companies base their pages per toner cartridge on about a 8 percent coverage per page.


In my shop I run a Brother MFC-9125Cn that I got for under 400 bucks that is an all in one type.

Brother even offers linux support on their products. They provide linux drivers for pretty much all their printers.

If your customer is just looking at the cost of a printer as the driving force for buying instead of quality then just get a Brother Inkjet for them. Their inkjet cartridges can all be bought seperately instead of having to buy a black and then another box of color cartridges.

coffee
 
I have 6 printers in my shed with no ink. Why? Because I buy new printers on sale for ~$30-40. New ink for them costs $50-60.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Cheapest "cost per page" is a laserjet.
In the long run...with any volume, a laserjet.
Click to expand...

Yup...and decent colour ones are cheap now.

Got myself a Xerox Phaser 6010 awhile back and it is awesome! Images are even quite sharp, and I have an inkjet on backup that I use if I want photo lab-quality prints.
 
I love my HP OJ Pro 8600 Premium. I always run the XL cartridges which last me about 3000 pages. The HP ink is not cheap, but you can find a set of XL cartridges on ebay for about $100, sometimes as cheap as $85. That brings the cost to about $0.03/page which isn't too bad IMO.

Full retail price on a set of HP XL cartridges will run you about $125, but you can quite often find a 20% off deal at one of the major office supply chains (Staples, OM, OD). After tax, the deal comes to about $108 or so, which is a bit more than the Ebay pricing.

I have yet to try the generic offerings of the XL cartridges with chips. They can be had for 1/4 the price of HP XL cartridges.
 
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You guys should check out the Epson ITS series of printers. They are the cheapest inkjet printers to run. Not to buy, but definitely to run.
 
I have to agree with Bubbajoe, the 950/951 hp cartridges for the 8600 series are phenomenal. The 8600 is only 130-150$ @ Staples most of the time, comes with a full set of standard cartridges... it also boasts an 18 ppm print speed which is on par with most 3-400$ laserjets
Only downside ive found so far is it needs a FULL tray to print standard csrdstock :/
 
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