Cheapest running printers

Hello everyone, I want to buy a printer but my main concern is a lot of printing to the lowest sustaining cost. I still haven't decided if I'm going laser mono/color or inkjet. What would you propose for all 3 types of printers?

Spitfire said:

Hello everyone, I want to buy a printer but my main concern is a lot of printing to the lowest sustaining cost. I still haven't decided if I'm going laser mono/color or inkjet. What would you propose for all 3 types of printers?

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Your best bet is to get a mono laser; it is by far the cheapest way to print.

yes I know about that one but I would like to compare all 3 types, what models would you recommend ?

Spitfire said:

yes I know about that one but I would like to compare all 3 types, what models would you recommend ?

Click to expand...

Your original thread stated you wanted the lowest printing costs so there is no contest there,
a mono laser wins hands down which you already know.

As far as the colour laser or inkjet printers are concerned they do a far nicer job
but the cost goes up considerably for all the extra pretty colours.

A colour printer (laser or inkjet) can be pick up extremely cheap but buy cheap pay twice comes to mind;
the running costs on a cheap colour printer are usually far higher than their more expensive cousins.

So to put it nicely its impossible to say which printer or model would suite you better without knowing exactly
just what you had in mind when you said a lot of printing (Not precise enough).

If you really want to do a whole lot of printing / colour then a local Copy/Print shop may be the better cost effective option for you..

It is probably cheaper not print the photos off at home but to use a local facility or upload them to be printed by an online company like Snapfish or Kodak (there are others too). The printed quality is often better too.

Cheapest and easiest: mono or color laser, without doubt. Copy services will charge you a lot--maybe 50 cents per page or something. Also fairly cheap, if you want to refill, is an inkjet, but you have to devote a little time to it. An inkjet with OEM ink is rather expensive.

Costs in the U.S. for 8 1/2" x 11" can vary between maybe 3-5 cents per page to 80 cents per page, depending on the printer and how it is used.

For photos, consider commercial photo services. Inkjet can sometimes be competitive with these--it depends.

Want better information? We need more information.

I would recommend mono laser printer..Just wanted to know your expected price..coz there are many cheap mono laser printers with good quality available in market!

If you're willing to do some work I have nothing but praise for the Epson Workforce Series of printers set up with a CISS. Well only the earlier generations. I have a Workforce 30 and with a CISS attached it prints B&W documents blazing fast, color speed is reasonable, you won't be self publishing illustrated novels but it's still plenty fast. The newer Epsons require a battery operated chip system to work so I don't like that, but the older Workforce printers worked great with button reset chips, ARC chips I never could get to work, that was probably good for even earlier generations of Epson printers.

It also does color photos fantastically when converted to dye ink. Now the work part is you need to print every few days to keep the system working perfectly and it's a good idea to fit in a waste ink tank. And installing the CISS requires a bit of printer modification. And every 6 months to a year it's a good idea to reprime the CISS because air bubbles work into the cartridges but aside from these little regular maintenance I have to say it's amazingly economical with cheaply available inks from Ebay.

There are differences in ebay ink too. I've had my best experience with the ink and button reset CISS from AAADeal ink store on ebay. Ships from the US and is a very good color match for the OEM inks. It is only dye ink but I find on photographs it lasts as good as Canon's OEM dye ink when I ran tests on it.

I've probably printed thousands of pages of documents on mine and hundreds of photos. So I'm happy with it. So I think with a little work the Workforce 30 is great. I also like that it's a single function only printer so it's compact and pretty inexpensive I bought a spare so if mine goes I still have a backup because Epson is phasing out these older generation printers for the newer ones which are harder to convert to CISS. That way if it breaks I'm not throwing out a scanner and copier either. I actually use separate higher quality scanners for my scanning purposes.