TCPglobal - news, views and issues on total cost of printing

Issue #0540/1 - At first glance a low cost inkjet printer might seem to be a great bargain as a Christmas present. But, is it really the bargain it seems?

In this final issue of 2005 we take a look at three levels of inkjet printer to identify the scale of costs over three years and how those costs are affected by how much the buyer has paid for the printer itself against the cost of purchasing ink.

At this time of year, as we wish our family, friends and colleagues a very Happy Christmas and a fulfilled and prosperous New Year, many of us are also thinking of those presents under the tree. We may be thinking about what we want, we may be thinking about how we can give others what they want without spending too much of that hard-earned cash.

Autumn is the bumper time of year for the entire retail industry, high street and mail order and this does, of course, have an equal impact on the manufacturers producing the goods for the consumers to buy.

Consumer IT equipment has become a firm favourite for presents around the world almost regardless of age, gender, physical or mental ability. There is almost always something that will suit.

Home printers are an integral part of this scenario for two reasons, either: individuals use Christmas as an excuse to renew their ageing equipment, or; gifts are made to newcomers to home photo printing (I know because I’m giving my mother a photo All-in-One now that she has a digital camera and laptop computer – aged 79 – you’re never too old to learn!!).

In making a choice though, how much thought is given to the actual cost of running these machines over the years it is owned? Are we talking about a cheap Christmas present or a life sentence for the one we love?

One of my mother’s concerns when we were discussing her requirements was that the machine must be economical. For that reason, without any prompting from me, she recognised that individual tanks would be the best configuration. That immediately ruled out a high proportion of the available machines. From there, largely because she is from a scientific background, she is very happy to experiment with refilling, so we selected a machine where this would be a possibility and where the potential for mess from refilling would be minimised.

So, without revealing which machine has been selected, she is setting out with an All-in-One device with individual ink tanks that she can easily and cleanly refill. I should just add that she is also more than willing to play the part of guinea pig in helping me with background research on this matter!

I also have a friend who approached me for advice before buying an AiO for himself at Christmas. His parents have experience of constantly failing and expensive Lexmark AiOs and he was keen to find a low cost device that would be reliable and not cost the earth to run. He has been told of the danger of low-capacity cartridges and has made a sensible choice that he should be very happy with.

For me, this underlines that making an educated and well-researched choice, drawing on the experience of others is the only way to proceed when making a choice that affects the next few years of your life. Few people would purchase a house without some sort of survey to establish that it is suitably robust and well constructed.

In fact, the greatest danger in house-buying can be in buying new-build houses, where the assumption is made that all is perfect and well-constructed when in reality it may not be. Furthermore, high maintenance bills and fuel costs are a real turn-off to house buyers, so why not to buyers of printers?

Epson Stylus
Photo R240

As we move up the three categories, we find printers that are specifically photo-designated to one degree or another.

Canon PIXMA iP1600

Epson Stylus C46

Hewlett-Packard’s DeskJet 5440 Photo Printer is faster and uses the latest Vivera inks whereas the DeskJet 3940 uses previous generation inks. It will also accept a tri-colour photo cartridge, if desired, for 6-colour printing. Higher up the scale, we find Photosmart printers that utilise Hewlett-Packard’s new Scalable Print Technology in 6-colour configuration, which provides faster printing, individual ink tanks and sophisticated ink recovery technologies – see TCPglobal Issue #0523 - "Brand new inkjet printer technology from Hewlett-Packard - SPT" for an in-depth description of the technology.

Lexmark P915

Lexmark’s P915 is a 6-ink printer with optional black cartridge, and with a PictBridge port, while the Z617 is a traditional 4-ink printer. There is no Lexmark printer in the middle ground – it is all or nothing! Several devices in Lexmark’s range have been ignored for the purposes of this comparison, partly because there is no yield information available and partly because, with just one tri-colour cartridge sitting in the machine on its own, the device should be considered to be only a low-level photo printer and nothing else. It should NOT be used for general purpose printing because all black text and graphics have to be printed using composite black (mixed from Cyan, Magenta and Yellow inks), which, as stated previously in TCPglobal, is extremely expensive and unsatisfactory.

Dell is not included here for two reasons – firstly, because there are no yield figures available for the Colour Printer 720 and, secondly, because this printer is the only remaining inkjet printer in the line-up.

Once the 720 is taken from the market, it is highly unlikely that Dell will replace it. I would expect single-function inkjet printers to be dropped from the product range altogether, with Dell focusing on compact dye-sublimation photo printers or AiO products instead.

It should be noted that all comparisons made here are based on 4-ink general purpose printing, derived from the de facto industry standard of 5% coverage per colour, rather than 6-ink photo printing. Where the device is capable of 6-ink printing, only the four primary colours have been included.

There is always a tendency for the market leader to set the overall trend in the market. In this instance it is Hewlett-Packard. The accompanying table shows that Hewlett-Packard sets the Cost Per Page for its printers on a sliding scale according to how much the user pays for the device itself and the expected usage.

In other words, because the user pays only £42 for the DeskJet 3940, Hewlett-Packard needs to recover the profit margin through high pricing on the consumables. This model only accepts the No.21 and No.22 cartridges, both of which hold a very small amount of ink – only 5ml.

Long Term Cost per Page

Hewlett-Packard
DeskJet 5440

Compare this with the DeskJet 5440 Photo Printer, in hardware terms a very similar machine, but costing £51 to buy, and we see a considerable reduction in the CPP. This is because Hewlett-Packard expects users to print more pages on this printer, including lucrative, ink guzzling photographs, and therefore buy more ink during the life of the printer. So, even though the cartridges used by the machine (No.336 and No.343) are low capacity (5ml and 7ml respectively), the higher purchase price and higher usage expectations justify lower unit pricing on the cartridges.

By choosing a printer that accepts the No.339 and No.344 cartridges (21ml and 14ml respectively), such as the DeskJet 5740 costing only £6 more at £57, the user could reduce the overall CPP still further. The nominal CPP for mono would fall to just 2.23 pence and for colour to just 6.96 pence. The overall CPP would then fall to 4.23 pence – a 39% reduction in long-term running costs for a £6 higher initial outlay!!

This should be a ‘no-brainer’ for buyers but so many just do not have the information easily to hand, or do not understand the implications of their decisions, and so make a horrendous mistake that they will eventually pay dearly for.

However, taking the progression a further, the latest additions to the Hewlett-Packard range utilise its new Scalable Printing Technology (SPT), with individual ink tanks and a permanent print head.

Hewlett-Packard
Photosmart 8250

An excellent mid-point within the Hewlett-Packard range is the DeskJet 5740 mentioned above, with its low purchase price and ability to operate with the high capacity cartridges.

Canon PIXMA iP4200

This situation is reflected with each of the other manufacturers of inkjet printers but with a different threshold at which the CPP drops. For instance, Canon maintains a high CPP with its PIXMA iP6210D, close the level of the iP1600, with a big drop down to the CPP of the iP4200.

Epson Stylus D68

This is rather uncharacteristic of Lexmark and is almost entirely down to the fact that this printer accepts the high capacity No.16 and No.26 ink cartridges with page yields far in excess (2.7 times bigger for the black and twice the yield for the colour) of the cartridges used by Hewlett-Packard at this level of printer.

Lexmark Z617

Just to make the point of how much money a user would save over three years by making a sensible choice, the purchase price of each machine has been inserted on the chart for each model involved, together with total spend over the three years. This represents the cost of printing a total of 9,000 pages in three years, 2,700 of which are in colour and 6,300 in black only – all at 5% page coverage per colour – AND INCLUDES PURCHASE COST.

A couple of years ago, we saw the situation where budget inkjet printers had such a low purchase price that replacement cartridges cost almost as much as, or even more than, the machine itself.

Lexmark was, and still is, the primary culprit here. At the end of 2003 the Z601 printer cost £30 while a set of cartridges cost £42.23, a massive 41% more than the printer itself. Even the moderate use cartridges shipped with the machine cost £27.60 but yielded only half the number of pages. Now, the situation is slightly improved. The cheapest Lexmark inkjet printer in December 2005, the Z517, still costs £30 and actually uses the same cartridges as the Z601 at a current cost of £38.25 – 27.5% higher than the printer itself.

Hewlett-Packard has never actually been in this position but could see the danger looming. When questioned about the subject two years ago, there was no specific strategy available on how this situation could be avoided and I was told that it would be tackled as and when it occurred.

In actuality, two years on, we see that Hewlett-Packard has avoided the situation occurring at all by creating a new breed of cartridge instead of increasing the price of hardware or reducing the price of ink. The new cartridges (No.21 and No.22 in particular), as described above, have very low ink capacity so that the price of a set of cartridges can be set at a point lower than the printer itself.

Hewlett-Packard
DeskJet 3940

Of course, what we haven’t included here is the specific cost of printing photographs. Remember that this would push the overall cost of buying up considerably!

If we were to assume that the equivalent of 10 x 27-exposure films are printed per year, a total of 810 photographs would be printed in three years. It is possible to print three 6 x 4 (10 x 15) photographs can be fitted to an A4 or Letter size page, so the total number of A4 pages printed would be 270. As total ink coverage when printing photographs could easily be as high as 60 percent of each colour (just three colours), this would make a total ink coverage of 180 percent per page.

In this scenario (using the published 5% coverage figures to calculate the cost of 60% coverage), one of these low-end printers would consume more than 24 colour cartridges at a cost of £245. Using the same calculation on the top-end printer from the same manufacturer, the additional cost of ink to print 810 photographs (again in 3-ink not 6-ink) would be only £161 – a 34% saving.

Please understand that the figures used here are purely illustrative. There is a whole selection of other factors that come into play when calculating the real Total Cost of Printing and this illustration is intended to make a point rather than be a precise analysis. The main factor that would change these costs, apart from a simple change in the number of pages printed, is the constitution of the pages printed. In brief – no user ever prints at exactly 5 percent cover, especially a balanced 5 percent of each colour, and no two photographs are ever a balanced 60% per colour (total 180%); most consumer ink jet printers use tri-colour ink cartridges that hold all three colours within one unit; when the first colour of the three runs out, the cartridge is useless – even with ink still inside the other two chambers that is being wasted; if the balance of pages is moved towards photographs, then ink usage will increase and if the balance moves towards memos and brief notes, then the ink usage will dramatically decrease.

Note that for these printers, the mixed mono/colour CPP over three years shown in the accompanying table is calculated on the basis of 250 pages per month using maximum capacity ink cartridges and takes into account any standard, or starter, cartridges shipped with the printer and includes the purchase price.

Needless to say, every printer is different and mono lasers are different from colour ink jets and colour lasers. The emphasis must be on buying the right printer for the job and researching the details and costs as thoroughly as possible before making the purchase. Manufacturers are keen simply to sell printers so that they can then sell consumables.

Two enduring quotes that I like to repeat summarise this principle more than adequately:

So, this Christmas, remember that anyone purchasing the printers in the first group (budget, entry level printers) might be buying the lowest cost printer available but is certainly headed for a life sentence for either themselves or their chosen loved-one!

~End~

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under Supplies, Hardware, Pricing, Comparisons, Issues, Financials, Total Cost of Printing. 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.