Issue #0817/1 – Special offers come and go but, as long as Hewlett-Packard does not change its Business Inkjet (Officejet Pro) strategy, there will be no less expensive way to print colour office documents. Current special offers place the Officejet L7480 at less than half price, an opportunity to save up to 42% on office colour printing when compared to a standard inkjet AiO or 60% compared to the least expensive colour laser AiO.
Hewlett-Packard is currently offering its three function Officejet Pro L7480 at some very special prices. In the UK, the machine is available through Dabs (dabs4work) at just £64 excluding tax.
At another store (Misco), the same machine is priced at a phenomenal £59.99! Although this is certain to be a fixed term special offer, there is no definitive indication that this is not actually a permanent price. However, as the web site contains errors (for instance: placing a picture of the Officejet Pro K5400 single function printer along with an even lower price than £59.99, but labelled as ‘Officejet Pro L7480’), we are inclined to assume that it really is a special offer – just badly promoted.
Hardware Purchase Price - UK Reseller Comparison
What we find is that the price of supplies from dabs is on the high side, meaning that higher-volume users buying exclusively from dabs will not achieve any benefit from the low hardware purchase price. Indeed, at the highest print volume shown in the chart below, buying exclusively from dabs would mean that the customer actually pays the highest price of all for printing over a three-year period.
In fact, any exclusive dabs customer printing 1,000 pages per month or more will end up paying at least as much as if the device and supplies were bought elsewhere at normal street price.
Misco customers, on the other hand, can expect to achieve a cost saving as high as 27% for low-volume users, falling to 9% for the highest-volume users, against average street pricing. A saving of £100 over three years might not seem to be very significant to users printing 2,000 pages each month (total, 72,000 pages over three years) but a saving of £73 over three years seems much more significant for users printing just 250 pages per month – and most of it is an up-front saving.
Total Cost of Printing - UK Reseller Comparison
Of course, 2,000 pages per month is a high print volume (just under 100 pages per day) but we have deliberately taken a wide range for the chart (lower end representing about 12 pages per day, to illustrate how a low purchase price can be totally negated by supplies that are less than competitive.
Besides that point, the Officejet Pro L7480 is a reasonably heavy duty inkjet printer, rated for 7,500 pages per month. This means that a recommended monthly volume would probably be quoted as around 750 to 1,500 pages per month, a level at which the black and yellow print head would only just need changing towards the end of the three-year period of ownership (most users should never have to change the Cyan/Magenta print head).
Where a special offer like this becomes even more valuable to the owners in the office environment however, is in making a decision whether to buy an Officejet Pro AiO, a standard inkjet AiO or a colour laser AiO.
If we select a standard inkjet AiO at about the same price level as the Officejet Pro L7480 for comparison, the best value currently comes from Canon in the shape of the PIXMA MP520, with best pricing at about £65.
To help complete the picture, we should also select a ‘Holy Grail’ colour laser device. Here the cheapest device currently available, the CM1015 MFP from Hewlett-Packard, has a hardware purchase that is nearly three times the cost of the Officejet Pro L7480 on special offer!
Going one step further – because 2,000 pages per month is a high print volume, we have included the horrendously ugly Dell 3115cn simply because it is cheaper to run at this page volume than other A4 colour laser MFPs.
This allows us to compare the Total Cost of Printing between working an inkjet printer very hard at the upper levels, running a cheap colour laser device hard (HP Colour LaserJet CM1015MFP – max duty cycle unspecified) and running a low-cost colour laser device that can easily cope with the volume (Dell 3115cn – max duty cycle 60,000 pages per month).
Hardware Purchase Price - UK Reseller Comparison
We would expect laser devices to be more expensive to buy than either inkjet device but, with many people trying to convince us that colour laser is cheaper than colour inkjet in the long-term, we have to ask the question ‘Is this true’? (For further analysis, see article “#0810/1 and #0803/1”)
Most noteworthy on the chart below is that the three lines representing Cost Per Page for each of the inkjet and low-end laser devices never really converge at all. In fact, the Officejet Pro L7480 actually diverges and gains ground over the PiXMA MP520 at higher page volumes, while maintaining a constant position again the laser device (CM1015MFP).
Total Cost of Printing
But, it is with regard to the colour laser devices specifically that the real points of interest lie.
Where the claim that laser is cheaper than inkjet really gets blown out of the water is that the cost of running a laser device is NEVER as low as running a sensible inkjet device. Here we see that even the Dell 3115cn just fails to touch the line belonging to the PIXMA MP520 at 1,750 pages per month and never manages to cross it. And yet, using the 3115cn rapidly undercuts the CM1015 at just 750 pages per month.
This leaves the Officejet Pro L7480 in an unassailable position as the most economical colour office printing multifunction device in existence – as long as it can handle the volume! But, if higher print volumes were required, wouldn’t it still be cheaper to run multiple Officejets than a single laser?
HINT – yes, it would!! No less than 15 Officejet Pro L7480 business inkjet AiOs could be bought and run at these prices before the Total Cost of Printing over three years would rise above the cost of buying and running the Dell 3115cn at 2,000 pages per month for the same three years. This equates to a monthly page volume per Officejet of only 125 pages per month and would result in only one set of colour ink cartridges (and two black cartridges) needing to be bought per machine during the period.
In point of fact, to be most economical, purchasing just two Officejet Pro L7480s, each printing 1,000 pages per month, would minimise the cash outlay on the printing of 72,000 pages over three years – with a cost saving of nearly 48% over running the Dell 3115cn.
If even 1,000 pages per month is considered high for an inkjet device, the purchase of three of these (667 pages per month per machine) would not decrease the ultimate economy very much at all (total cost saving reduces to just under 46%).
What we end up with here is that the Officejet Pro L7480, at these prices from Misco, offers the most incredible economy of colour printing for the small office that we are ever likely to see short of experiencing a printing industry revolution.
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