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Issue #0729/3 - Two laser printers can be bought in the UK for less than all but five inkjet printers – and the Cost of Printing is acceptable.

A fitting follow-on from the Lexmark story (and last week’s article highlighting pricing on the Samsung CLP-300 colour laser printer) is the fact that it is now possible to buy a mono laser printer for about the same price as the cheapest inkjet printers.

HP LaserJet 1018

Dabs in the UK is selling two mono laser printers for around £35 excluding VAT. These are the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 1018 at £34.47 and the Samsung ML2010 at £35.99. This is an extraordinary situation and there is also a second Hewlett-Packard laser printer coming in at just under the £40 mark – LaserJet 1020 at £39.21.

Epson Stylus D92

There are only five printers that can be bought for less than the LaserJet 1018 – four of them from Lexmark and one from Epson!

If we use the solitary Epson model (with its more economical supplies) as the inkjet comparison for these two low-price lasers, we can make some interesting observations.

Perhaps it is first worth mentioning that laser printers have a historical reputation for being far more reliable and much faster than inkjet printers. Particularly where low-end inkjet printers are concerned, print speed tends to be slow with correspondence quality pages often produced at little more than one or two pages per minute, making speed comparisons very significant.

Samsung ML-2010

Indeed, one of these two lasers, the ML-2010, is a 20ppm machine – fast enough for busy small offices and workgroups, let alone for personal printing and for home use. By contrast, one might consider the LaserJet 1018, at 12ppm to be rather sluggish even for a home environment and, by comparison, the D92 would be positively pedestrian.

Inkjet has always been accepted as being more expensive per page on ink than mono laser printers but, the assumption has been that the low page volumes printed by most inkjet owners render laser printers too expensive an option anyway, even before the running costs were taken into account.

For instance, if we take another 20ppm mono laser printer and print only 100 pages per month over three years, the long-term CPP would be upwards of 4.5 pence per page – and could be as high as 24 pence per page!!

At 3.08 pence per page (over three years) in mono, the D92 is cheaper to run. What should be noted here though, is that the Epson inkjet printers use colour inks for cleaning even when printing in black only. Taking this into account, the cost per mono page on the Epson would rise to 4.01 pence – still lower than any other laser printer.

With the LaserJet 1018 and ML-2010, we now see that the balance has changed completely not only because the hardware prices are so low but also because the pricing of the toner actually means that the nominal mono CPP is not astronomical. This is especially so with the ML-2010, which has a healthy 3,000-page toner priced at less than £40. This gives a nominal CPP of 1.30 pence.

Ultra Low-Cost Laser Printers

This is not normally the case with low-price laser printers. Compare it to the toner for the Lexmark E120n. Here, the nominal CPP works out at 2.44 pence and, at a hardware price at about £85, we are looking at a long-term CPP of around 5 pence. This puts the laser firmly above the Epson inkjet on Total Cost of Printing.

Bizarrely, the only one of the three printers with a toner cartridge that costs more than the printer itself is the Samsung but – remember the 3,000-page yield of this cartridge in comparison to 2,000 pages with the LaserJet.

Ultra Low-Cost Laser Printers

Note: Don’t think of trying to buy a new laser printer instead of replacement toner cartridges because both of these laser printers ship with toners offering only 1,000-pages, not 2,000 or 3,000 pages!

For the home user, what makes the Epson the more attractive choice is that it is a colour printer and this is more-or-less a prerequisite for home printing. But, for the small office with low-volume mono only requirements, these two laser printers represent an amazing opportunity for low-cost printing.

Note that for this group of printers, the long-term Cost of Printing over three years shown in the accompanying table is calculated on the basis of 100 pages per month; is based on the use of maximum capacity supplies; takes into account any standard, or starter, supplies shipped with the device; and also includes the cost of purchase. All prices are sourced from dabs.com in the UK and are quoted without tax.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Pricing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.