January 19, 2011
How to Save Money on Printer Ink Cartridges, Laser Toner |
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Revised January 19, 2011. Copyright
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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 five online retailers of printer supplies: 123inkjets.com, 4inkjets!, Inkgrabber.com, CompAndSave.com, 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 $8-10, while a new
one will be over $30. Both have the same yield of about 800 pages.
All the sites offered extensive
selection of ink cartridges. Which of thesewebsites
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. Inkgrabber.com and CompAndSave.com tended to have slightly lower
prices in more
instances. For example, re-manufactured black ink
cartridge for HP Photosmart 8450 was $9 at Inkgrabber.com and CompAndSave.com, $10 at 123inkjets.com and 4inkjets!, and $10.45 at clickinks.com. However, these prices don't take
into account coupons, special offers, and shipping costs. For
example, Inkgrabber is currently offering a 13% off coupon while Clickinks has a buy 2 get 1 free on select HP,
Lexmark and Dell remanufactured cartridges. 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
RHPI0006C InkTec Color Refill Kit is $16.99 at Inkgrabber.com and can provide about 8 refills or
about
$2 per refill. A re-manufactured cartridge would cost $15-16. 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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