Actual toner consumption

Hi I'm new here.

I recently bought a Samsung colour laser multifunction for a club based operation and got chatted for buying a colour when black would have done given the higher cost. I started to think that perhaps the cost of each print shouldn't be much difference given the same content printed in black or colour (the purchase cost was obviously higher).

By that I mean, supposing I had a single page with an average text content on it and an orange crest on the top. If I set the printer to print black only, the crest will obviously be black (or a shade of grey) and let's say hypothetically that it used 2 Nano grams of black toner to print the text and 10 Nano grams of black toner to print the crest. Now I switch to colour and print again. Wouldn't it be logical to use 2 Nano grams of black toner for the text, 5 Nano grams of magenta and 5 Nano grams of yellow for the orange crest (or obviously the right amounts of the correct colours)?

If what I am suggesting is correct, there isn't a great deal of difference in the cost per print provided the cost of the colour toners is close to the black.

I have had very little luck trying to track an answer down via the net. However one respondent to a forum suggested you simply add the cost of the colour toners together and divide by the advertised page yield of the smallest toner, which is obviously incorrect.

Hoping someone can shed some light on it.

Cheers...

The running costs of a colour laser is between 4 to 6 time that of a mono laser so trying to compared them side by side is useless, even if you run blank pages through a laser it still cost you something..

Hi,

there are also calibration cycles after power-up (they consume both toner and some life of printer parts).
Transfer belt also is consumable part, sometimes can be reset (only its counters, but surface of transfer belt cannot be improved, may be only cleaned).

Ł.

Thanks guys.

What I was trying to establish is the cost of the toner only, not an amortised cost of the printer and wearing parts. That said, are you saying if I print only black in a colour printer, it's still going to cost 4 to 6 times the cost (per sheet) of a mono printer. And there is still a consumption of toner for a blank sheet.

Cheers

Your colour printer will use all of the cartridges to help produce black unless it’s one of the higher quality printers which are capable of good black text without the need to use the other cartridges.

What @Lukasz was referring to was that the sheet has to pass through all of the colours by way of a belt system and that has to be cleaned with every pass and so it dumps any unused ink into a waste cartridge, so that effects the total cost too.

Colour lasers are extremely costly to use as a standalone mono printer, inkjets are a far cheaper alternative..

Thanks again.

I don't want to seem like a dog with a bone but I checked the usage counters of two colour laser printers of the same model (Samsung CLP 620ND). The first one has been used by my teacher wife and has almost always used colour and multiples of the same image (for each student). The volume of toner usage is fairly uniform and the printer is on its second set of toners. The other printer was used to print mainly black text with the occasional colour inclusion. It's about half way through it's second black toner (large volume) but is still on the first set of (starter volume) toners which would sort of indicate some proportion of usage of colour versus black. I guess it's a shame the manufacturers can't give you more information on what volume of toner is used and what is discarded.

Hello Hat,

I was thinking of something a little different (reset the transfer belt when his life meter reaches 0), but yes, it is true that color printers consume all the toners even when printing a blank page. New models of laser printers carry out calibration directly on the transfer belt, so do not have to consume the paper (but still consumes all toners).

Video shown above refers to an older printer "HP / Canon". Older "HP / Canon" is somewhat different from Samsung - the printer has a transporting belt, which moves a sheet of paper - each of the toner image is transferred separately on a sheet of paper until the composite image.

The Samsung (CLP-620) toners first create the image on the transfer belt, and then composite image (from all toners) is transferred to the paper. Newer "HP / Canon" doing the same.

Transporting belt is in older color laser printers, and is quite resistant to damage and dirt.
Transfer Belt is in a newer color laser printers, to get a better print quality (less misalignment), but it is very sensitive to contamination and mechanical damage.

The introduction of the transfer belt enabled the development of cheap color laser printers, in which there is only one imagining module (one laser module and one OPC drum - Samsung CLP-3xx are fine example).

Ł.

All of that effort in trying to calculate actual toner consumption is useless because the reported page yield by the manufacturers is a very rough estimate. There is no way to calculate precise toner usage because all prints vary in content and how much toner is required to produce the image. Unless you use the printer to print many pages of the same page throughout its life, you`ll never be able to account for every last particle of toner used to get a precise page yield. Even printing the same page over and over calls for each copy to use a varied amount of toner. The toner gauges in laser printers are there to give an idea of what`s left and if the company is greedy, they`ll program the chips to say toner is running very low even if the cartridge is still half way full.

It`s also an inarguable fact that a one cartridge system is cheaper to own than a four cartridge system, so your organization was right to think your selection of a color printer to be wasteful as they have no need for color printing.