August 19, 2010
Disclosure: Dealhack is a blog that helps consumers to find
the best deals online. Dealhack has affiliate relationships with
123inkjets.com, 4inkjets!, and Clickinks.com.
Printers are inexpensive these
days, both laser and inkjet. You can get a good color inkjet or
black-and-white laser for about $100-150; a color laser printer would
generally run $200-400. But once you get a printer, you quickly find
out
that the major cost of ownership is in the supplies: ink cartridges,
laser printer toner, etc. If you print 30-40 pages a day, you may find
out that you need a new ink cartridge every month. At $35 per new
cartridge, you are suddenly spending over $400/yr to run your $100
printer.
You can dramatically lower your operating costs by buying
re-manufactured printer ink cartridges and laser printer toner rather
than the ones from the printer vendor or new OEM parts. We have looked
at three online retailers of printer supplies: 123inkjets.com, 4inkjets!, and clickinks.com. In all cases the re-manufactured
supplies were 30-40% of the cost of the new ones while offering (at
least according to the sites and reviews) simlar performance. For
example, in looking at HP C8767WN (HP 96) black ink cartridge for HP
Deskjet 6980, re-manufactured cartridge would run $9-10, while a new
one will be over $30. Both have the same yield of about 800 pages.
Comparing those three sites, 123inkjets.com and 4inkjets! had similar interfaces and extensive
selection. Clickinks.com was OK but selection was slighly
smaller and we did run into one bad link. Which of these three websites
offered better deals? Since there are so many cartridges, we did a
sample comparison of prices using Lexmark X125, P350, and Z55, Brother
MFC-7400C, HP Deskjet 6980, HP Photosmart 8450, HP LaserJet 4050se, and
a few other printers. 123inkjets.com and 4inkjets! were fairly similar in their prices,
with 4inkjets! having slightly lower prices in more
instances. Clickinks.com was more of a wild card, with prices
being sometimes meaningfully lower or meaningfully higher than their
competitors. For example, re-manufactured Lexmark 18L0032 black ink
cartridge for Lexmark Z55 was (after coupons) $17 at 123inkjets.com, $14.50 at 4inkjets!, and only $12.95 at clickinks.com. On the other hand, Brother LC04BK
black ink cartridge was $3.99 at 123inkjets.com and 4inkjets!, but $4.75 at clickinks.com. HP LaserJet 27X Black Print Laser
Toner Cartridge for the LaserJet 4000 and 4500 was $110-144 for the new
one, but only $31 (clicklinks) to 49 (123inkjets) for the
re-manufactured models. Check pricing at these sites for your printer
model and find the best deal for your printer.
You can save even more by getting a Refill Kit. For example, a HP 97 /
HP 95 Tri-Color Ink Refill Kit is $16.95 at 4inkjets! and can provide about 6 refills or about
$3 per refill. A re-manufactured cartridge would cost $10-13. But you
have to do some work re-filling empty cartridges yourself.
If your heart is set on buying new cartridges, make sure you check the
vendor's site. In some cases we found that for new cartridges it was
the vendor that had the best prices (for example, HP Store in many
cases was cheaper for buying new inkjet cartridges).
If you are planning on buying a printer, understand the operating costs
involved and plan in advance. Estimate how much you will print and
compare the costs of printer cartridges. Let's say you want to buy a
color printer and are choosing between a $100 inkjet and a $300 color
laser. Note that while laser toner cartridges cost 3-4 times more than
inkjet cartridges, they print about 10 times as many pages (typically
5,000-30,000 vs. 500-1500). If you are only planning to print 1,000 pages a
year, it's cheaper to buy an inkjet because you'll likely spend less
than $20/yr on ink. If you think you'll print 50+ pages/day, you may go
through 10-30 inkjet cartridges or one to three laser toners in one year. Depending
on the model, the ink is likely to cost $100 more a year than the
toner (assuming re-manufactured cartridges, the gap is much higher when using new ones). Given the better quality and faster printing with laser, it well
may be a better choice in this case. Most printer specifications will give you a cost-per-page estimate: remember that they are quoted for new cartridges. So if an inkjet printer specification talks about 8 cents cost for black-and-white page, with remanufactured cartridges you can bring it down to about 4 cents (and with refill kits the paper becomes your main cost).
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