2 ways to save on back-to-school printing costs

The Epson EcoTank ET-4550 model.

For years, the inkjet industry has been making its profits through their business model of cheap printers and incredibly expensive ink cartridges that must be replaced often.

Now there are two new products on the market that could significantly change the model (and the cost) for home printing. The biggest problem with the inkjet category is that, despite offering decent print quality and very good feature sets at low hardware prices, the replacement cartridges cost a fortune and don’t contain much in the way of ink.

A single, supposedly “high yield” black ink cartridge for our now-discontinued Lexmark printer, for example, costs $37, and promises to give you “up to” 510 pages. I can tell you from experience, it does not. And that’s just for black ink.

You’ll need the three other colour ink cartridges at a cost of $26 each. The math so far: $115 for a highly theoretical 510 pages, or, 22 cents per page.

Of course, this represents a utopian scenario in which you’re able to extract every last drop of ink from these cartridges and waste none of it. But as anyone who goes a week or two between print jobs will tell you, a dried-out printhead needs an ink-consuming cleaning cycle before it will do a decent job printing again.

Here are two options that involve paying more for the printer but having the system run more smoothly.

1. Tanks For The Ink: What if we could do away with the whole cartridge system? Wouldn’t that solve a lot of headaches? Epson thinks it will and has introduced a new line of inkjet printers that use refillable, external ink tanks that provide the printhead with its own continuous IV feed of ink, instead of using cartridges.

It’s called the Epson EcoTank and there are 4 models to choose from. The replacement ink is, relatively speaking, dirt cheap. The printer itself, on the other hand, isn’t. The base model ET-2500 starts at $459 and the range-topping ET-4550 goes for $599.

But before you scoff at these prices, let’s take a look at printing costs. Right out of the box, the ET-2500 comes with enough ink to print 4,000 black pages and 6,500 colour pages.

Which means that before you’ve invested a penny in replacement ink, your per page cost is 11 cents (black) and 7 cents (colour). Once you’ve exceeded this original supply (something that Epson estimates will take the average home user about 2 years), the numbers are even more impressive.

The ink replacement price is $15.49 per bottle, or $62 per set of bottles, which drives the per page cost down to a miserly 1 cent for black and less than cent for colour. Writing for Yahoo! Tech, David Pogue put an Epson EcoTank printer to the test to see if these numbers were anywhere close to reality and was pleasantly surprised.

2. Laser Solution: The other way to beat the exorbitant prices of inkjet cartridges is to go with the only other competing printing technology: Laser printing. Now I know what you’re thinking… didn’t most of us abandon the idea of laser printing in favour of inkjets long ago and for a number of good reasons?

Specifically, the price of the machines, the price of the toner, and the lack of non-printing features such as scanning, copying and faxing. All good points.

But it’s time to take a second look at laser printers because most of these objections are slowly going away. Take for example, the Samsung Xpress C460FW-- a colour (yes, colour!) laser printer that is also an All-in-One (AIO) copier, fax and a sheet-fed scanner.

Normally $399 (still $50 less than the Epson ET-2500), you can watch for sales. It's a good price for any laser printer, never mind one that has all of the functions of the Samsung. It has a few drawbacks like a tiny, non-expandable paper tray and the need for double-sided printing to be done manually, but for a home printer, these are minor quibbles.

But let’s talk consumables--how do the pricey toner costs compare to inkjets? The Samsung ships with starter toner cartridges (it uses 1 black and 3 colour) that have a 500-page colour capacity, and slightly more for black. Out of the box, that means you’re getting an 80 cents per page cost if you buy at regular price, and 40 cents per page if you buy it on sale.

For refills, the economics are only a little better. A new, Samsung-branded toner cartridge costs $68 (3rd party products cost less, but are riskier) on Amazon.ca and has a 1,000 page capacity. So at $272 for all four cartridges you get a 27-cent per page cost. Kinda sounding like a lot, especially compared to the Epson, isn’t it? No question, it is.

However, consider this: Toner is very different from ink. As a dry, powdery substance, it can sit unused in its cartridge for far longer than ink without drying out or requiring an ink-thirsty cleaning process. This means that if your printing habits are like ours, i.e.: no printing for weeks or months, followed by a two-day frenzy of printing, followed by another long span of printless activity, a laser printer could cost far less than a traditional inkjet. My back-of-the-napkin calculations suggest that we spent at least $300 on ink over a three-year period and printed less than a full ream (500 pages). Yup - about 60 cents per page. So if you’re currently giving inkjet costs a failing grade this back-to-school season, it’s time to start shopping around. You might not find a product that can print you money, but they’ll likely save you some along the way.