what type of printer for low cost/page $$ B&W printing?

[amheck]

Looking for a new printer recommendation, I think...

I print out a lot of articles and such for school. I currently have a low end Brother MFC color ink jet that works fine for my scanning/color printing/faxing needs. I also have a Brother 2170w laser which I used for a while, until the toner went dry. Then I purchased a generic cartridge from somewhere in the hot deals section, and I can't get anything to print. I'm a little leery of spending $50 on the Brother cartridge only to find out that the thing won't print anyway.

I suppose I could use my ink-jet, where I have been having somewhat good luck with the generic inks, but I do miss the wireless capability and speed of the laser. Just trying to decide what can get me the lowest cost per page, with a minimal $$ investment now. Duplexer would be nice, but not totally necessary.

Any ideas/suggestions, etc?

 

[Soundmanred]

I have the HP 1006 and buy toner carts cheap from that Swiftink place and it works great. The printer was less than $100 and the carts were around $25 I think. It prints a ton of pages and looks great.

 

[nerp]

I use a LaserJet 1018 budget laser and a couple Samsung ML-2510s and both have been real champs for me.

 

[Nohr]

You can get a Brother HL-2140 for $59.99 shipped at Newegg.
Use promo code: EMCLMLS54

It's a solid b&w laser printer.

 

[0roo0roo]

laser
some you can use refill kits on as well, you can lose a bit of quality but its even cheaper than a refurb cartridge

 

[amheck]

You can get a Brother HL-2140 for $59.99 shipped at Newegg.
Use promo code: EMCLMLS54

It's a solid b&w laser printer.

I assume that uses the same cartridges as the 2170w? Worst case, I possibly could order this 2140, test out the cartridge in my existing 2170w, and then if that printer is really done, then at least I have the 2140.

 

[MalVeauX]

You can get a Brother HL-2140 for $59.99 shipped at Newegg.
Use promo code: EMCLMLS54

It's a solid b&w laser printer.

Heya,

That!

Also, you can get toner refiller kits for a 3rd of the cost of the cartridge and reduce your cost even more. I refill the toner on my samsung 1210, the toner powder costs me $3.

Very best,

 

[thecoolnessrune]

He said he missed wireless so if he wants that he should take a step up to the HL-2170W. $135 from B&H Photo.

 

[bryanwheeler1]

Inkjet is the best solution because they are with low maintenance and with good quality,

 

[Lemon law]

He should find out why his 2170w does not print before sours on refills on a N of one basis. Maybe the drum or fuser has problems.

But even then, its hard to get below a penny a page consumable costs with a low end prosumer laser. If our OP is really interested in low costs printing, get one of the old old business class HP lasers that can deliver at under a 1/2 cent. It may be big, ugly, make a lot of noise, and require a serial or parallel cable.But they built like tanks and having 200,000 pages on the counter is just starting.

 

[0roo0roo]

Inkjet is the best solution because they are with low maintenance and with good quality,

well low quality actually. even a cheap laser has better print quality for text than even the best inkjet on fancy paper. cheap laser + cheap paper is very cheap per page. get one that works with refill kits and you got an extra 2-3 refills per cart dropping the cost per use even lower. plus its fast and quiet.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Good news about Laser is most of the parts that tend to go bad are in the cartridge. Problem with generic carts is they could be refurbs. In which case they may have just been refilled and not had the necessary parts replaced. So there is a good chance that a new name brand cart would be all you need for your current printer.

 

[skulkingghost]

I bought a samsung ml-2510 and its an excellent deal, cost me $60 and came with a toner cartridge good for 1000 pages, once that was used up I picked up another cartridge for 27 shipped off ebay that is good for another 3000. They are great home office printers.

 

[Lemon law]

I bought a samsung ml-2510 and its an excellent deal, cost me $60 and came with a toner cartridge good for 1000 pages, once that was used up I picked up another cartridge for 27 shipped off ebay that is good for another 3000. They are great home office printers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other words, the cost per page in consumables is 2.7 cents per page. Or if the refill cartridge will do 3000 pages, 0.9 cents per page is getting economical.

Where I come from, that is hardly anything to brag about. It may beat the hell out of the average ripoff prosumer inkjet no armed bandit, but I can refill my wife's non chipped canon inkjet and come up with 1/4 of a cent per page consumable costs for B/W printing. And a penny for color output.

But I still have a backup brother all in one laser that costs the same 2.5 cents per copy in consumables, but I seldom print, and hence do not have to worry about clogging if I do not use it regularly. Meanwhile every time I need to incoming or outgoing fax, it saves me $10.00 gas in a trip to town. And in terms of page per minute output, a laser will beat an inkjet 10 to one.

 

[skulkingghost]

@lemon law,

I am a bit confused over your math. The samsung ml-2510 is a laser printer, it costs 27 shipped for a new cartridge to print 3000 sheets of b&w.

27.00 / 3000 = 0.009c per page. If you add in the cost per read of paper (about 4$/500 sheets = $24. $24 + 27 for ink / 3000 = 0.017c per page, so 1.7c per page.

I am guessing you are including the price of the printer? Also 2c or less per page is great for anyone and is quite economical, for $1 printing 50 sheets of text is not bad.

 

[jjmIII]

You can get a Brother HL-2140 for $59.99 shipped at Newegg.
Use promo code: EMCLMLS54

It's a solid b&w laser printer.

x3.......great cheap printer

 

[bryanwheeler1]

well low quality actually. even a cheap laser has better print quality for text than even the best inkjet on fancy paper. cheap laser + cheap paper is very cheap per page. get one that works with refill kits and you got an extra 2-3 refills per cart dropping the cost per use even lower. plus its fast and quiet.

If you have to concern with only text,then nothing better than inkjet.And many of the models are available in inkjet category which produce excellent image printing also.

 

[Brian Stirling]

I think the current cheapest inkjet printer on a per page consumable is the Kodak's at about 2.5 cents/page (B&W) and 5 cents/page (color). I have no personal experience with them but the data suggests the Kodak's are the cheapest to operate. Laser is likely to be even cheaper per page for consumables (toner) but they do eat up a lot more electricity so if you have them turned on for long periods of time and only print a modest amount the electrical cost could surpass any advantage in ink/toner they provide.

For high volume it may make sense to have a laser AND an inkjet...


Brian

 

[Lemon law]

Brain Sterling, IMHO, manages to be magically right and wrong at the same time.

While I am not all that familiar with Kodak Printers using OEM cartridges, almost all higher end Canon printers, both chipped and non chipped, come in at 3 cents B/W and eight cents color using OEM cartridges under optimal conditions. Yet I have a unchipped Canon Ip4000 I refill, and I figure I come in at well under 1/2 cent on B/W and under a cent on color on plain paper.

But the one thing that kills inkjet printer economy is leaving the thing on every time your computer boots. And no, I am not talking electrical savings, I am talking about every time ANY inkjet powers on, it runs a cleaning cycle that wastes ink. The maker tells you its to clean your printhead, and in a sense they are right, because its needed once a month or so,
but for the typical user, it wastes way more ink than needed. In the long run, incredible amounts of very expensive OEM ink. So if your inkjet printer does not have an off switch like my Canon does, just unplug the electrical supply until you need to print. Or you want to run one and only one precautionary cleaning cycle.

Yet I agree with Brain, its good to have a B/W laser also, especially since my wife's inket I network does only printing, and my laser can print, copy, color scan, and fax with or without a computer. Yes I net work it also meaning my wife and I can use either printer, yes I mostly leave the laser off using its off switch to save the 8 watts of standby power, and if I do not care how long it takes to get a bunch of B/W copies, I use the inkjet because its cheaper.

But if I need 50 fast B/W copies, the laser will bang them out before the inkjet finishes the fourth copy. Inkjets are seriously slow.

 

[0roo0roo]

lasers dont use a lot of electricity.
when idle its a few watts if that. when printing its not much for a very short amount of time. its basically a non factor.
thing is laser prints crisp on the cheapest paper. inkjet looks like sh*t unless you use expensive paper which always pushes it into being more expensive by default.

 

[Brian Stirling]

I haven't used a personal laser printer for about 20 years so it is certainly possible for them to have gotten more electrically efficient since then but when the printer is printing the fuser has to eat a lot more power. The laser I once owned and used ate so much power I had to run a separate circuit to the CB box because the light would flicker when printing as the fuser cycled on/off.

If the inkjet eats ink when you turn it on then what if you leave it on? Face it, the printer makers make money from selling ink not printers so they have no interest in having the printer use it sparingly. The Canon printer I use at work, a MP160, goes through a black high capacity tank every 500-1000 sheets of paper and at a pretax cost of about $38 that works out to about 5 cents per page. I have never used the refill kits and can't comment on the actual savings going that route.


Brian

 

[Lemon law]

To Brain Sterling,

I can certainly comment on refilling my Canon inkjet, and if a boob like me had never had any success refilling Lexmark or HP cartridges and went to 100% success rate on my Canon, I can only say refilling the BCI-3&6 family of cartridges of cartridges is super easy.

But no matter what printer brand you use, your refill ink must match the printer type its used in, if not, you are asking for a clog or print head burn out. Beware of refill kits that say they work in any printer.

But for the same web site where I learned, try:

http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/

Sadly edit in, the Canon MP160 is more in the no armed bandit class, using tiny cartridges with almost no ink in them, and so small its its hardly worth the labor refilling them. All printer manufacturers have some in that class, buy em cheap and repent at your own leisure as they rip you off on refills. 500 B/W prints per cartridge, I seriously doubt it, its more likely a 100 at best.

 

[Brian Stirling]

Yep, the ink tanks for the MP160, even the "high capacity" tanks are pretty tiny. The printer only cost about $70 but they make that up with high ink prices. For many home users, however, the usage rate is often so low that they could go a year on even those small tanks.

The MP160 I'm using is for my company and until recently it has seen little more use than a typical home use so the ink costs were a big issue, but the project I'm working on now is eating up a cart in a little over a week and at $38-$45 per that's reaching towards the cost of a car loan per month! I've had this printer for 3 years and taken it to all the projects I've worked on and it has served me well both as a printer and as a scanner. I'd guess that in those three years I've gone through about $1500 in ink or about 20X the purchase price


Brian

 

[Lemon law]

For what its worth, I did the painful research on the MP 160 black cartridges. ( They seem to hide the figures so its not easy to find ) The standard black cartridge seems to hold 14 ml of ink and the high capacity holds 22 ml. More ink than I though but priced more than twice what I would pay for a Canon OEM BCI-3bk cartridge for my Canon ip4000--27 ml of ink for $14.00.

And since some ink remains unused in the cartridge sponge when the cartridge is depleted, your high capacity MP 160 cartridge ends up costing about $8700/gallon. for the ink it probably costs Canon $50.00 to make. I have seen costs going over $10,000/gallon on other inkjets, it does show the temptation to gouge the user on ink.

 

[RXD]

Choosing a printer that fits your needs can be an overwhelming task. There are several different types of printers, they come in all shapes and sizes and a there are a wide range of manufacturers to choose from. For some people, size and portability may be an issue, while others may be concerned about color quality, speed or the expense of ink cartridges. Whether you are a home user, an aspiring writer, amateur photographer or a small business entrepreneur there is a printer that is right for you.